What If We *Could* Change the World?

principles of Emergent Strategy

Soundtrack for this installment:

Back when I was pregnant with my first child, I spent a few days at a retreat center in rural Georgia run by Dominican sisters. I got to talking to one of them about the practice of centering prayer, which is a deep, silent time of listening and contemplation. Practitioners recommend twenty minutes, twice a day. It’s serious stuff.

The sister told me about a global movement underway to teach and practice centering prayer, with the conviction that as more and more people engaged in it, it would have an indelible effect on humanity. She said it quite bluntly. “We believe this kind of prayer can change the world.”

At the time, just a couple months before giving birth, I desperately wanted her words to be true, to believe that millions and millions of people at prayer, listening daily for holy wisdom, could change things—that a warring people would cease their fighting, that generosity could prevail in a world that’s often stingy and small. But I was also skeptical. It was a real I believe… help my unbelief moment.

That first child turned 22 last month, and I’m still living in that space of faith and doubt.

I approach the ideas in adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, our Lenten focus here at the Blue Room, with the same ambivalence as I did that early chat with the Dominican nun. The ideas we meet in this book are simple, deep, humane, and revolutionary. Even so, I look at our broken world, in which toughness passes for strength, hierarchies feel inevitable and preordained, and power claims the mantle and mandate from God. And I think that the billionaires who’ve long held outsized power in our democracy must look at approaches like Emergent Strategy or contemplative prayer and think, “How adorable.”

But here’s the thing. Remember that quote attributed to Gandhi, in which he was asked his opinion of Western civilization and he said, “I think it would be a good idea.”

Do these alternative ways of being not change things, because only a bunch of naive rubes would believe they actually could?

Or is it because they haven’t really, truly been tried?

Parable of the Sower by John Jude Palencar. adrienne maree brown’s work is strongly influenced by Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.

So, this is the focus for Lent. This is our act of devotion, the “fast” I invite us all to consider in this season: to “give up” belief in the dysfunctional ways of the world in order to make space in our imaginations for the idea that the world could be different. Better.

And to embrace that we are a part of that work. We are the work.

OK, enough of the throat-clearing.

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What even is emergent strategy? Let’s take the words in turn.

First, emergence:

Emergence is “the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” That’s a quote from Nick Obolensky, which grounds adrienne maree brown’s work, but in her own words, “In the framework of emergence, the whole is the mirror of the parts… the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet.”

Three quick elaborations on emergence:

1. Brown talks in this conversation with Krista Tippett (recommended) about working as an activist during a presidential season:

So we’re doing all this organizing, and it clicked for me… we are trying to just change the top layer of this very layered cake, this very layered process, this system of governance.

[But] it’s layer on top of layer on top of layer. And if none of us are practicing democracy anywhere, it’s not going to just suddenly work at the top layer…So I started asking people, because I was touring a book we had written. And I started asking people, Do you practice democracy — anywhere in your life? [laughs] Not even politically, but just in your household? Who makes the decisions about the budget? …There was almost nobody who was practicing it on their block or in their community or in their organizations or other places. Everyone’s kind of dodging the actual work of democracy, small-d democracy.

2. Years ago I attended a parenting workshop in which the leader asked us to write down our goals and hopes for our children as they grew up. What would we like to see for them at age twenty-one? It was a heartwarming experience to imagine our children on the verge of being launched. My list was filled with lofty goals—that they would understand their strengths and limitations, that they would have a spirit of service toward others, and so forth. Then the workshop leader said, “This list is for YOU. The way we cultivate these values in our children is to cultivate them first in ourselves.”

The world is not as it should be, because you and I are not as we should be. Of course we will never shift perfectly into a new way being, nor can we do it all by ourselves. For believers, we know God as our strength and our compass. But this isn’t work that’s done on some other level, by some other group of people. This is our work.

3. Next week is the five-year anniversary of covid lockdowns. It was a sad, scary, uncertain time, especially the time before we understood how to protect ourselves, and certainly before vaccines. And for health care workers, people in the service industry, teachers, and residents of communities like Seattle and NYC, it was brutal. It was also, oddly, a time of spiritual clarity and desperate creativity. It was an invitation to take care of one another and let extraneous stuff go. A time when we took control of what we could control in some really beautiful ways. We tended to the people right around us. We sought wholeness and joy where we could find it. I wonder what “complex systems and patterns arose out of [that] multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”

Next comes strategy:

Strategy is simply a plan of action toward a goal. Which means to me that we don’t just think about this stuff, we try to live it out.

Here are the principles of Emergent Strategy, directly from the book. I invite you to read them out loud and see what stirs or shifts. See where you lean in, or recoil.

• Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.)

• Change is constant. (Be like water.)

• There is always enough time for the right work.

• There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.

• Never a failure, always a lesson.

• Trust the people. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy.)

• Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass — build the resilience by building the relationships.

• Less prep, more presence.

• What you pay attention to grows.

With that, the table is set. Next week we’ll get into the elements of Emergent Strategy.

Two final things before signing off. Brown’s work is infused with a sense of joy: “I have come to believe that facts, guilt, and shame are limited motivations for creating change, even though those are the primary forces we [currently] use in our organizing work. [MaryAnn adds: and a lot of our religious terminology.] I suspect that to really transform our society, we will need to make justice one of the most pleasurable experiences we can have.” World-changing can’t be a chore, in other words.

Finally, back to that retreat center. One of the Dominican sisters had been trained as a massage therapist, a service they offered to guests. Because I was pregnant, and she wasn’t certified in pregnancy massage, I opted for Reiki instead, which is a Japanese technique and involves letting the hands hover above the body in order to align the body’s energy. I didn’t have many expectations for this practice but figured if nothing else, 45 minutes lying on my side in a warm dark room with soft music playing would be relaxing.

Friends, it was wild. That baby moved nonstop, in a way I’d never experienced before. Strong full-body extensions. Constant somersaults. Almost as if she felt the world about to turn.

We can still be skeptical, even as we press forward.

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Your Turn

• What does emergence meant to you?

• Which principles of emergent strategy in the bulleted list above resonate with you? Did any invoke a strong negative reaction? (My favorite these days is “There is always enough time for the right work.”)

• How might you “practice democracy” this week?

• Where is your faith, where is your doubt, with the idea that the world can change for the better?

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Link Love

Speaking of that five-year covid milestone. I wrote a “looking back, looking forward” post two years ago.

Year Three: A Curriculum:

Year Three.

Steady on.