00:01:36.760Someone to lean on and someone to trust
00:01:41.400Who needs your assistance and finds your disguise
00:01:45.460Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young.
00:01:59.420Today we are speaking with Adrienne Marie Brown.
00:02:03.260Adrienne is the author of Emergent Strategy, Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, and co-editor
00:02:09.700of Octavia's Brood, Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements.
00:02:15.100Her upcoming book is Pleasure Activism, The Politics of Feeling Good.
00:02:20.320She facilitates social justice and Black liberation through the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute
00:02:26.200It is on the teaching body of Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity and Generative Somatics.
00:02:33.320She and her sister co-host How to Survive the End of the World podcast,0.81
00:02:37.920and she writes the Pleasure Dome column for Bitch Magazine.0.56
00:02:42.160Hello, Adrienne. Thank you so much for coming on.
00:02:45.860Hello, Ayanna. Thank you so much for having me.
00:02:49.480Well, I'm so excited to welcome you to For the Wild podcast today.
00:02:54.300And I have to say that shortly after this interview was scheduled, we realized that many of us on the For the Wild team were already reading Emergent Strategy.
00:03:05.060So on behalf of all of us, your work is truly a gift to this time.
00:03:14.780Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Tell everyone I said hi.
00:03:18.440I will. And okay. Well, I'd love to begin by talking about the concept of emergence itself.
00:03:29.220Okay. And I'll just read the definition you share in Emergence Strategy from Nick
00:03:33.560Obolensky of Complex Adaptive Leadership. Quote, emergence is the way complex systems
00:03:40.260and pattern arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions, end quote.
00:03:45.440and for me tapping into emergence is really enlivening and once I'd done so I began to see
00:03:53.180it everywhere and I just love how it describes patterns both biological and social and scales
00:04:00.320up from molecules self-organizing into cells all the way to the earth's climate or our societal
00:04:07.960structures it seems that awakening into emergence is essentially awakening to our ability as
00:04:15.360individuals and earthly communities to shape the direction of change through small actions
00:04:21.360so I want to open this conversation by asking you to speak about emergence
00:04:26.440in any way you feel called to in this moment I first came across the ideas of emergence without
00:04:35.320realizing that's what I was coming across but first seeing it as like oh this is a way that
00:04:40.680change can happen in the writings of Octavia Butler who was a black science fiction writer
00:04:46.300who wrote 12 novels and a collection of short stories and her protagonists basically had these
00:04:54.300very different ways of leading than what I had been taught to do or taught to look for or pay
00:04:59.480attention to. They were rarely bombastic, charming, linear, top-down leaders. They were much more
00:05:07.300often highly adaptive, highly interconnected, and interdependent to the point of symbiosis.
00:05:15.160Leaders who were focused on relationship and focused on integrity inside of relationship
00:05:20.120and focused on constantly creating more possibilities. So I got tuned into this and
00:05:27.220started paying attention to it and getting excited because I, I was feeling the limitations of the
00:05:32.420kind of organizing that I was being invited into and trained into. And I, you know, it was really
00:05:38.040good stuff. And I could feel like this is really good stuff if we just want to stop something bad
00:05:44.140from happening, but I'm not sure that this will ever get us to a place where we can turn towards
00:05:49.740what it is we really long for and start to generate it and practice it in our lives. And so something
00:05:56.180about that understanding how ecosystems work and how the rest of our natural world works it's like
00:06:02.080oh if we make the right small moves and lots of us make these right small moves and and get involved
00:06:09.620in these smaller practices we actually can shift the the future and we're not going to be able to
00:06:16.360actually get to a large-scale critical mass unless we begin with small actions before we hopped on
00:06:23.680the call, I was talking with my tax representative. And I want to share this because it feels
00:06:29.980relative. You know, for years, I was a war tax resistor, like, for maybe 12 years of my life.
00:06:37.100And it really felt to me like the kind of small action I'm talking about, like, if I resist this,
00:06:43.220if I refuse to participate in anything that will lead to war, then that'll change the world,
00:06:48.540right and it makes a fine point for me between what is individual action versus what are small
00:06:55.540communal actions and I feel like emergence really focuses on the small communal actions like it's
00:07:00.580not just what can I as an individual do although you do look at yourself as the front line for
00:07:05.920change but because I was acting very individually in my war tax resistance now years later the IRS
00:07:12.820has caught up with me and I don't have community necessarily around me to be like oh we've got you
00:07:17.380will protect you. Here's what we're going to do. And so I'm like, oh, if I was to do this strategy
00:07:22.100again, I would do it very differently. Having learned what I've learned about emergence in
00:07:26.340that time, it's like, what are the ways that communities of people can come together and
00:07:31.820start small divestment processes that actually help to liberate resources from governments that
00:07:37.580are making decisions we don't agree with? And then how do we build that? Because ideally,
00:07:41.420we would be in a place like in this political moment, where we could say we're not going to pay
00:07:46.320into a system that is being led by someone we deeply disagree with who every single day
00:07:51.280is making decisions that dishonor our humanity, right? We're not at that place yet in terms of
00:07:57.960having been practicing at a small scale in order to scale it up. So a big part of emergence also
00:08:04.240that I'll say is the idea of fractals, that fractals exist all throughout the natural
00:08:10.520world. And it's the idea that there's systems that operate from the smallest scale to the largest
00:08:16.760scale. And we have to pay attention to what's happening at the smallest scale, because that's
00:08:22.040what gets replicated and replicated all the way up to the largest scale. I think for social justice
00:08:27.480movements, we have to always be paying attention to what we're practicing at the smallest scale,
00:08:31.820not just what we tell other people to practice or think should be practiced or in some amazing
00:08:37.920future we will practice but like what are we practicing every single day and how is that
00:08:43.060generating futures that align or don't align with what we actually say we want how did you land upon
00:08:51.780juxtaposing emergence with strategy i think it was in a way like a blend with my community
00:08:59.380that i had been working as a facilitator and i'd also had some jobs within movement so i was
00:09:07.320for a while the executive director of a group called the Ruckus Society and had done other
00:09:13.240work before that and then got to be co-director there and then I've been on different boards and
00:09:18.240so I was just in these different spaces and alliances both my own organizational spaces
00:09:24.340and then larger national and international alliances of work and the thing I kept hearing
00:09:30.980all the time was strategy strategy strategy this person is strategic this group is strategic
00:09:36.780and I started to really wonder what people meant by that I grew up in a military household I had
00:09:44.660grown up around this terminology also like what is strategic and you know when I looked it up
00:09:49.440just out of curiosity it was like it just means a plan of action towards a goal I had this like
00:09:53.900kind of aha moment of like oh we're using this word as if it means something different or more
00:10:00.460than it means if we actually want to speak about people being strategic and work that strategic in
00:10:06.540ways that actually align with what we want, then we should articulate what we mean by strategic.
00:10:12.580So then I thought, why don't we call this emergent strategy, strategies that focus on
00:10:18.360the relational and that focus on small scale. I'm still learning what all is possible with
00:10:23.700emergent strategy, honestly. You know, when I approached the book, I was really thinking
00:10:28.880as strategies for facilitation, strategies for bringing people together, for holding and creating
00:10:34.600space with each other, for guiding ourselves in organizational processes and through organizational
00:10:40.760processes that are liberatory. So I was like, okay, these are plans of actions that will get
00:10:45.880us towards a goal of liberation in ways that align with the cooperative aspects of the natural world.
00:10:53.120And one of the things I always try to emphasize is the natural world will support any worldview.
00:10:58.460You know, there's also the top down alpha creatures in nature, right?
00:11:03.200I don't want to misrepresent nature or take anything away from the beautiful complexity
00:11:08.480of nature and be like, everyone's just hunky dory ants getting along.
00:27:37.400thinking about the intuition and instinct and it links to this chapter for me in your book
00:27:57.740called magic and spells i just want to say how greatly i appreciate the way you embody
00:28:03.800magic and spirit in your writing i just love how you sprinkle poetry and how you incorporate
00:28:12.040calling upon forces that live beyond the reductionist and socialized realms of our mind
00:28:18.280the spirit of the land just the miraculousness of our own bodies and really valuing these other
00:28:25.820ways of knowing and the spiritual powers that we all harbor it just feels like a watershed of
00:28:32.020guidance that our movements are yearning for. I've been so surprised at how people are interacting
00:28:38.360with it. Like I have to just say, you know, because of all the things you just said,
00:28:42.960when I was working on it, I was like, no one is going to read this book. You know, a small number,
00:28:50.540you know, I was like some friends will read this book, but because it feels like such a personal
00:28:55.320awakening process around whatever you want to call that sense of connectedness, because
00:29:01.960I think people call it a lot of different things and assign a lot of different narratives and story
00:29:06.860to it. But for me, I'm just like, oh, I am a miraculous being. Like I can't recreate myself.
00:29:13.640That which animates me is mysterious to me. And thus it's precious to me. You know, it's like,
00:29:20.240oh, I can't figure it out and just mass produce it. I think that we see a lot of people who spend
00:29:25.240their entire lives trying to figure that out. I think artificial intelligence in a lot of ways
00:29:29.640is that kind of thrust of like how do we figure out what life actually is and can we make it
00:29:34.600and it's like we can do a lot of things but this so far we have not figured out and that humbles
00:29:40.620me so much that I'm like I get to be alive without understanding why without understanding exactly
00:29:47.980where I'm going I get to spend my whole life wondering about that and shaping that and being
00:29:53.780in a relationship with that and I'm a Virgo I spent the first part of my life like I know
00:29:58.400everything you know I know I know I know and then this part of my life so far has just been so much
00:30:04.160of like I don't know and that's the amazing part I get to find out I still get to learn there's so
00:30:10.280much ahead of me I'll never know all of it so yeah it feels like the book is me being like I don't
00:30:15.140know like in so many ways and being like I don't know but I have noticed this or I have seen this
00:30:21.080I really went away from doing something that was very like scientifically like grounded like it's
00:30:26.520not like every single thing I say and I'm like and here is my proof of that you know it's like
00:30:30.900if you're alive you have also seen these things so that's been very cool people responding to it
00:30:37.440like I've had a lot of people reach out to me and be like yes I also notice these things and feel
00:30:43.000these things and long for these things and the book in some ways is just a permission book like
00:30:50.220it's a book that says yeah great you know that's that's true you're not alone I also feel that
00:30:56.680and I've been getting that back from the world of so many people being like Elsa Adrian you're
00:31:00.700not alone we also feel that and that is a nourishment in and of itself when my mind
00:31:07.240entertains the more magical aspects of this work I think about what you write on radical imagination
00:31:15.720and Afrofuturism. And I'd love if you could describe those both and why they are essential
00:31:22.140as we imagine liberation together. One of the ideas that was sort of introduced to me by a
00:31:29.900thinker in Boston named Terry Marshall was this idea that we're actually in an imagination battle
00:31:34.680and that we're living inside of someone else's imagination for what this world would look like,
00:31:40.940how it would work, how power would work inside of it, how we would be in relationship to resources.
00:31:47.560And this imagination battle has been happening a long time. There's other worldviews and other
00:31:51.320ways of approaching it. Some have been dominant at different points and now have been pushed down.
00:31:58.440So we're in this space and it's like, oh, if there's an imagination that created these
00:32:02.640conservative, inhumane conditions, then we need to have a radical imagination
00:32:08.880that moves us through and out of them we have to be able to see something beyond this moment
00:32:15.760and something about seeing it gives us something to orient towards and I also think an aspect of
00:32:22.320radical imagination is collective imagination that it's not just going off and coming up with
00:32:27.600your own brilliant little idea and then pitching it to people selling it to people but rather like
00:32:33.900when you feel the seedling of an idea, turning to other people as like other seeds, as water,
00:32:40.700as sun, as air, like how can we nourish this kernel together and other kernels and how can
00:32:47.280we create an ecosystem of ideas? So radical imagination falls there. And I was really lucky
00:32:53.200to get to work with Walida E. Marisha on the book Octavia's Brood, which came out before
00:32:58.520Emergent Strategy. It's an anthology of social justice writers who basically created short
00:33:07.120stories to address some of these issues. She also, Walida, came up with this phrasing of
00:33:13.160visionary fiction, of like, how do we actually write fiction that de-centers the white, straight
00:33:19.920male narrative and re-centers something that is much more global and realistic, right? It's like,
00:33:26.720what's the world we live in? Who lives in it? How do we center ourselves in our stories?
00:33:31.860And how do we talk about how change really happens, which is bottom up, generally not top
00:33:36.760down, which is, you know, that grassroots structure. So in all of that, we're in conversation
00:33:42.980with Afrofuturism, which is in the most basic sense, this concept that black people will exist
00:33:48.920in the future, right? There's a lot, a lot of conversation and controversy and other folks who,
00:33:54.560you know folks who choose to say black speculative fiction you know there's a lot that can happen
00:33:59.320within like terminology and genre but in the broadest sense of it right this idea of black
00:34:05.460people in the future it's simple and so radical it's so radical when we look at like the world0.98
00:34:11.760we live in now where you can kill black people with no punishment no um not even punishment but1.00
00:34:20.140like no containment, like society doesn't contain the harm against Black people, that Black people0.99
00:34:26.100are expected to, even though we're being shot on a regular basis and being brutalized on a regular
00:34:31.840basis, we're expected to walk as if we are normal and untraumatized and everything's fine. And we're
00:34:38.620expected not to resist. We're definitely expected never to take direct actions, to say to people,
00:34:43.040this is not okay. Would you pay attention to this? Then if we do that, we're considered, again,
00:34:48.420impolite right so this idea that we counter all that and say you know we're not we're going to
00:34:53.560be impolite now we're going to create disruptions now we're going to make people pay attention now0.99
00:34:57.460we're going to stop the cycles now because we're going to fight for uh black people to exist in0.63
00:35:02.300the future so for me afro that's where afrofuturism is exciting when you give people a concept of
00:35:07.320themselves in the future it gives us something that we want to act on behalf of right now and
00:35:12.720And I think that, to me, is why Afrofuturism, Black speculative fiction, science fiction, visionary fiction are all really important tools for generating futures.
00:35:24.020And I don't know if you've read the Combahee River Collective, but this idea that they put in there, they forwarded intersectional feminism, and this idea that if you look at a society in which Black women are free, that everyone else would necessarily have to be free because of the intersecting conditions that Black women live in.
00:35:41.300liberating Black people is not just for Black people. It's a statement on what is humanity
00:35:47.440up to? What are we capable of? Where do we want to be heading? That we should be heading a direction
00:35:53.540where the least of us are in the safest place and are made to feel precious and made to feel
00:35:59.260like we can live abundant lives. Because if we can do it, then every other being on the planet
00:36:03.940it can do it. I'm just so struck by this thought that imagination has been colonized and how when
00:36:14.580you're speaking about radical imagination and visionary fiction and Afrofuturism, reclaiming
00:36:22.020that imagination is liberating and necessary for, like you said, all species. Yes, everything that
00:36:29.960lives it takes us down to this uh place that is beyond so beyond reductionist thinking or
00:36:41.980how so many of us have been conditioned to believe how the world functions another thing that really
00:36:48.960has me wonderfully shaken is non-linearity and how i think it's important to talk about
00:36:58.500the non-linearity of our needs as individuals and communities and the non-linearity of what
00:37:03.580we consider progress or success, it seems like, yes, we need clear visions and strong values,
00:37:10.080of course, but we may also need to be more accepting of the messiness of transformative
00:37:15.900processes and the oscillations of our movements. And this is something you so beautifully detail
00:37:22.500and emergent strategy? There's a lot of really incredible experiments happening right now where
00:37:29.260people are making long-term commitments to learn together. So rather than the commitment being
00:37:35.680like, we are going to build a massive institution, which, you know, what goes into that is like a
00:37:42.440huge amount of compromise and a huge amount of like contorting in order to find out what
00:37:48.700philanthropy will fund and then trying to make what you're trying to do fit into that and like
00:37:54.220it's a whole game so there's a lot of folks who are like we we want to get off the wheel
00:37:58.720of that game we want to figure out other ways to create change and so what I see are a lot of
00:38:03.220people who are like it's not that we're going to stop having organizations but we're going to start
00:38:06.940building relationships with each other that are outside of those organizations beyond those
00:38:11.440organizations and in those relational spaces we're going to make commitments to learn and
00:38:16.260experiment together to sit and that experimentation approach right is like we understand that we don't
00:38:23.860know the answer yet because if we knew the answer we would be free so since we humble ourselves we
00:38:29.700said we don't know the answer but we've looked at the data and we have a hypothesis for what we
00:38:34.520think could actually change these conditions and we're going to make um based on our hypothesis
00:38:39.280we're going to do this experiment together and when a group gets into that level of communication
00:38:45.700and commitment and humility, I think that's kind of the sweet spot from which a lot of incredible
00:38:52.720organizing and accountability can happen, right? Because then rather than just being like, well,
00:38:57.500we didn't do what we said we were going to do in our grant and now we suck. So sorry, you know,0.78
00:39:02.420instead it's like, oh, this didn't go the way we thought it would. It didn't produce the results
00:39:07.900we expected. It produced some other results that are actually really interesting and worth the time
00:39:14.320effort, or if we do some results that are not actually that interesting to us, we're not going
00:39:18.340to keep building this thing. We're not going to keep going down this path. We want to make some
00:39:21.980transitions or make some different moves in the next round of this experiment. I'm trying to get
00:39:27.640as many people as possible to move into that mode of being in organization with each other.
00:39:34.800Because I think that's a sweet spot. You really do need people who are like,
00:39:38.400I'm willing to make a long-term commitment to growing and changing and learning together.
00:39:44.320As opposed to, I'm going to make a long-term commitment to, you know, building this wall and keeping it for as long as possible. And that distinction feels important.
00:39:53.800that's such good advice to think about especially in organizing this
00:40:02.180non-profit industrial complex the ways in which people feel like and in ways not even feel like
00:40:10.640but are um in in a sense forced to contort so that they can get the funding or get the right
00:40:17.820grant or get the next step and how you said I forgot the exact words but it keeps people in
00:40:24.260this wheel and it's really the opposite of creativity in a lot of ways because people
00:40:31.340are forced to stay in this structure and how that really cuts off so much emergence and
00:40:40.280just presence in how we are growing and learning together and I love the idea of creating this
00:40:48.460parallel system outside of that where you're wanting to welcome more and more people into
00:40:54.540supporting each other and not in this other paradigm that actually keeps a lot of people
00:41:00.920separate and competitive and it's it's such an interesting topic for me right now especially
00:41:07.200building up this organization kind of being a fledgling in this world yeah stepping back and
00:41:12.860seeing how similar it is to corporate capitalism in the for-profit world and how similar even in
00:41:22.140philanthropy we can see these really destructive ways of organizing it's it's it's just kind of
00:41:30.980frustrating and sad and it makes me think about other topic you speak about in emergent strategy
00:41:38.140which is non-stop reaction you also spoke about responding to change and I feel like
00:41:44.740whether it's within organizing or just in general there's this way of living that is in
00:41:51.640this non-stop reaction and it tends to keep us responding to change with fear or resistance
00:42:00.080or blockage, like you were talking about this wall, I'd really like if you could help expand
00:42:05.940on this idea of nonstop reaction and how we can grow through that, especially when there's just
00:42:13.400so much systemic injustice and violence and division.
00:42:18.980I'm part of this group. I think you mentioned in the bio, but generative somatics and also
00:42:24.000Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity. And there's this practice there that's just centering.
00:42:28.900And recently, I was listening to a podcast, another podcast with Maya Angelou, and she talked about you have to have a place inside yourself that is inviolate, that no one can reach. The centering process for me helps me get there. It says like within your body, there's a center, there's a space that helps you to understand to actually feel how you're doing, where you are, what's happening in your body, what's happening in real time, how you feel about it, what might be impacting those feelings.
00:42:56.920And for me, that has been the core practice of these past few years that have helped me to move out of being reactionary and to move out of being frozen in terror and helped me to continue to be like, there's something to keep moving forward for.
00:43:13.360There's something to keep being excited and interested in.
00:43:16.000There's something to keep growing towards.
00:43:17.840And that when we learn to center together, when movements learn to center together, then
00:43:24.080something else becomes possible, that we are not just responding and reacting, which I