Trust Each Step

nonlinear and iterative: element four of Emergent Strategy

Welcome to week five of our exploration of Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, a book about how we make sustainable, transformative change.

Here’s an introduction to the series, and here’s element one: fractals, element two: intentional adaptation, and element three: interdependence.

Soundtrack for this installment:

Element four of Emergent Strategy is nonlinear and iterative:

nonlinear: not denoting, involving, or arranged in a straight line

iterative: involving repetition

In this chapter, brown argues that the work of true change meanders. It’s not efficient, sterile, or predictable. There’s trial and error involved. “Our successes can be measured in more than one way,” she writes, quoting Sierra Pickett. “How did we learn from our hiccups, errors, mistakes, f*ckups, drama, and difficulty that goes into an action…? How can future generations learn from and build on what we do, our work and intentions now?” (Emergent Strategy p. 105)

Or to put it in terms of Emergent Strategy principles: “Never a failure, always a lesson—help people find the lesson. What you pay attention to grows. Move at the speed of trust.” (Holding Change p. 16)

The principle of yes-and, which is the basis of improv, is completely nonlinear. The idea is to receive what is offered and build on it in some way, which involves risk and discovery. When I do workshops, I’ll often put people into pairs for conversation. I have them start with a simple suggestion of something the pair might do together (let’s go play a game of wiffle ball), then take turns yes-anding each other. “Yes! And, let’s invite Beyonce to join us.” The energy in the room grows more playful and raucous as this journey of nonlinear iteration takes people in all kinds of unexpected directions. People have ended up on the moon by the end!

When we debrief the activity afterward, the group often sees that while each individual move made sense, the pair could never have predicted at the beginning where they would arrive in the end. That’s what non-linear iteration means.

Photo by Bogomil Mihaylov on Unsplash

We know on some level that life works this way; it’s a series of happy accidents (there’s another musical interlude for you). Thankfully we’re starting to see movement building in a similar way. I can’t remember the last time I was affiliated with an organization that completed, say, a ten-year strategic plan, or even a three-year one. Most organizations I know are focusing on values as their North Star, rather than long-term goals that may or may not be achievable due to external factors we can’t control.

As Annie Dillard reminds us, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” The change is happening right now, around us and within us. The question is how to be purposeful, intentional, and wise in those small, habitual moves.

I will sometimes advise or coach people who want to write books. The sad truth is that good writing doesn’t happen if we insist on efficiency. Yes, some of what I write begins as a newsletter post, or even a sermon, before it becomes content for a book. That’s part of the iterative process. But there’s also a whole lot of “wasted” time that turns out not to be wasteful because you can’t get from one point to another without meandering through a lot of unexpected points in between. The book I just finished writing went through seven rounds of drafting, and you may recall that the final round involved cutting a lot of material. The book will be stronger as a result. (I hope!)

A theme in this series (and brown’s work) is that change takes its sweet time. As I said in my sermon a couple weeks ago, quoting Rebecca Solnit, it’s always too soon to give up and go home. And it’s always too soon to calculate the effect.

And also! Nonlinearity means being open to the possibility that change will happen slowly and then all at once. Consider marriage equality. In the 2004 general election, it was a decisive wedge issue—according to analysts, proposed state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage increased the turnout of socially conservative voters in as many as eleven states. And yet by 2015, barely a decade later, marriage equality was the law of the land.

It takes courage to believe change is possible when it seems impossible—courage to stay in the fight, to do the thing regardless of outcome, and to believe that sometimes things can go from bleak to transformed very quickly. We’ve experienced this in our own family. Years ago, during one of our kids’ mental health challenges, our child enrolled in an outpatient program for school anxiety that lasted for several weeks. A lot of things hadn’t worked before this, but in this program, we saw dramatic improvement.

Two weeks before graduation from the program, our kid had a dangerous dip in mood and ended up hospitalized for several days.

We found out later a bad reaction to a new medication was partially to blame. Still, we were devastated, convinced we were back at square one. But the social worker cautioned us against this thinking, introducing us to the concept of the extinction burst. When someone is working on getting well, she said, whether it’s battling a depression or recovering from an addiction, they will sometimes get better and better and then out of nowhere, the illness or addiction will fight back with everything it has.

But the good news in the extinction burst is that it’s a sign that you’re almost done with this particular fight. If you can hold firm but be flexible—non-linearly, iterating as you go—the end just might be in sight.

Well friends, we’re in a collective time of trial. A better, more vibrant world is ours if we embrace and work for it, as our culture grows more diverse and varied than it’s ever been. But the old world won’t go easily. Voices bent on straight white male dominance now assert themselves, determined to return us to a pre-approved past in which hierarchies kept people in their proper place. This is the extinction burst of a world that is passing away.

Knowing something’s an extinction burst doesn’t mean it’s not a dangerous moment. It is. And societal ones can take generations to resolve. But with courage, we’ll prevail, seeing the current challenge not as a sign of weakness, but a marker of increased health—not the way things must always be, but the death rattle of a defunct way of life.

So steady on… one step at a time.

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Your Turn

• Where are you experiencing the need for some yes-and right now?

• Looking back, where have you seen non-linear change at work in your life—a transformation that took its sweet time, a series of detours that landed you where you were meant to be, etc.?

• Are there small repetitive habits you can cultivate that might point you toward the world as you’d like it to be?

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What I’m Up To

I’m preaching this Sunday at 10:15 a.m. live or via livestream at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Herndon, VA.

The Art of Onward returns next week with a bit of spiritual sustenance for supporting subscribers. I hope you’ll join us.