Lessons in Emergence (and Love) for Strategists and Change-makers
A review of Adrienne Maree Brown’s book “Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds”
“Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds” is a systems-101-manual-meets-self-help-guide by Adrienne Maree Brown, a social justice facilitator, entrepreneur and doula living in Detroit. Brown describes emergent strategy as “the adaptive and relational leadership model found in the work of Black science fiction writer Octavia Butler”, and uses this model to draw out stories, practices, and tools for steering ourselves and the communities we’re connected to.
I read this book because I wanted to understand how someone whose work in communities like the one I currently live amongst in Pittsburgh — racially divided and re-emerging from economic collapse — was using systems theory and sci-fi to move through the world. I also wanted to understand how design-thinking-like practices might already show up in the kinds of ‘wicked’ problem-solving contexts that designers are paying increasing attention to.
The first third of the book focuses on “elements” of Emergent Strategy — fractals, iteration, adaptation, and so on. Brown begins each subsection referencing prose or poetry to illustrate each element through metaphorical invocations of nature. I was disappointed to find myself tripping over obvious logical holes in some of her assertions — the explanations felt overlapping and imprecise. In her explanation of fractal patterns, comparing fingerprints to galaxies, I wanted her to draw a more explicit link than ‘they look similar’, or at least, to help me understand why precision isn’t important.
When Brown ties the elements to her own life, the connections felt similarly tenuous and magical. At one point she offers a possible defense of globalism as “honor(ing) our nomadic tendency, our natural migration patterns”, as if somehow, natural selection has folded moral truth into the infinite DNA recombinations that code for human behaviour, acting as an absolute barometer for what is right or good. As she leaned more and more on romanticizing what (I believe to be) the wholly unorchestrated mechanisms by which every person, plant or ant has come to be, I started to wonder if I’m just a cold-hearted child of science.
Despite the systems content, Brown’s voice has the same colloquial feeling as a coffee chat with an old mate about their latest life-musing, and I felt like the lack of a formal or authoritative tone might be undermining her message. You’ll even spot a “lol”, or read an entire paragraph devoid of capitalization, which first reads as eccentric and amateurish. At this point I noticed my impatience emerging — should I just read her blog instead?
The final third of the book not only offers the reader practical tools for facilitating emergence (for example, collective agenda creation for community organising), but also, “spells and practices” that includes a brief nod to tarot, an explanation of somatic/embodied practice, and an exploration of the “visionary fiction” found in Octavia Butler’s afrofuturist stories. It was in this exploration that Brown’s words begun to justify what had, up till this point, felt a little too woo-woo:
“Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing our imagination is a symptom of trauma. Reclaiming the right to dream the future, strengthening the muscle to imagine together as Black people, is a revolutionary decolonizing activity.”
My white-lady enlightenment-and-colonization coloured glasses flew off my metaphorical face, and the author’s intentions snapped into focus. Brown is not interested in using systems concepts to over-strategize every collective move that we make toward justice or human flourishing or whatever it is we’re grasping for. Instead she subverts the usual business-y conceptualization of ‘strategy’ and asks us to use systems concepts as a fuzzy compass — inspiration even — to feel our way into emergent resilience and adaptation.
I realised that when explaining systems, a lack of granularity and defined edges come with the territory. Systems are, after all, inherently interconnected and overlapping. Sure, Brown could be more precise, but getting out of her embodied experience and into the intellectual weeds is neither what she recommends, nor what she herself sets out to do (as she signals in the introduction when she writes, “My style is more “Ooh ah wow how??” than “Empirical data proves that…”).
Brown doesn’t neatly package up her idea in a consumable format to fly off the airport bookshop shelves into the hands of suit-and-ties the way that capitalism would want her to. Instead, she weaves together her core idea with those of others, the philosophy underpinning it, and a set of practical tools that seed it for whoever it resonates with.
Her style reflects the futures she seems to be hustling toward — accessible, generous, experimental, transparent, branching, and embedded in her context as a black queer woman from Detroit.
With this in mind, her words start to make sense as a content-rich node in a wiki, rather than a glossy piece of top-ten bestselling “thought leadership”.
But what will the systems and business bros think? I wonder. Even if they pick up the book based on its title and cover, I’m not sure they’ll finish it. Brown’s writing lacks the kind of polish that people in power tend to take seriously, and I wish she had run a comb through it a couple more times to better bridge the gap between analytical credibility and powerful, vulnerable storytelling, in order to reach an audience beyond lefty women like me.
As I compare Brown’s “emergent strategy” to what I have read about design thinking, I notice that they certainly overlap, and also, that each is useful in different places for different reasons. However, emergent strategy seems more plural, expansive, and far-sighted than the flavours of design thinking that its most vocal proponents peddle, and regardless, there’s something even juicier in emergent strategy that doesn’t always show up in design. A common theme in Brown’s writing is an emphasis on relationships as powerful conduits for meaningful change. From a systems view, the importance of relationships is obvious, but Brown concludes by going a step further: “It is possible that this whole book is about love”, she writes.
I agree — relationships are powerful — and it’s what flows through them that changes the world. As design pays more attention to complex systems, it makes sense that the conversation and tools around it become more plural, decentralized, embodied, and context-specific. It’s also important to not just attend to the structures of our methods and designs — but also to the values, beliefs, and dreams that flow through how and what we design. Values aren’t baked into our nature; they are nurtured by how we show up, and how we choose to reconfigure the world we have at hand.
