emergent strategy

My life has been unfurling as a series of connections, a web I’m feeling my way through. Last summer my book club read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and a week later I picked up adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, not at first realizing I was following the thread forward. I’ve been in a lifelong conversation with art history, marketing, narrative, persuasion. That is, I’ve been in the practice of shaping the world through visual, social, and cultural activity and objects. My experience co-founding a textile organization here in Los Angeles, where I write this, was a deeply felt exercise in applying a form of emergent strategy. I didn’t have these words for it at the time, but the experience and the outcome was the same: working with intention to co-create the world we want to bring into being.

If we seek community, fellowship, inspiration, and a more inclusive society, we have a collective capacity to create these worlds. From the jacket copy of brown’s book, “This book invites us to feel, map, assess, and lean from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.”

• Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live.

• We must become the systems we need (p. 113)

• We evolve in relationships of mutual transformation (p. 193)