Emergent Strategy Principles

Be like water.

In the study and practice of emergent strategy, there are core principles that have emerged and that guide me in learning and using this idea and method in the world.

Lineages of Change Tarot Deck

A tool for imagining, conjuring, and building multiple possible worlds.

The Lineages of Change Tarot flows from the wisdom of Black changemakers throughout history, including Octavia E. Butler, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Lucille Clifton, James Baldwin, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and more. The deck features stunning artwork from a team of award-winning Black and Brown ‍artists whose work reaches back and forth through time to form a visionary, creative lens through which people can see the state of things right now. The Lineages of Change Tarot also invites you to incorporate plant medicine into your practice—each card comes with an illustrated herb pairing and instructions on how to use the herb.

Podcast: How to Survive the End of the World

A podcast that delves into the practices we need as a community, to move through endings and to come out whole on the other side.

“How to Survive the End of the World” is a podcast hosted by Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown, two sisters who share many identities, as writers, activists, facilitators, and inheritors of multiracial diasporic lineages, as well as a particular interest in the question of survival. The podcast delves into the practices we need as a community, to move through endings and to come out whole on the other side, whatever that might be. “How to Survive the End of the World” is produced by Zak Rosen.

‍Tool for Loving Corrections: A key to unlock the possibility of loving correction in a relationship.

A simplified guide to have the hard conversations with your loved ones– partners, friends, family, colleagues, and comrades.

Pleasure Activism Principles: How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? 

Pleasure Activism is a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work.

ES Facilitation Training: How to practice Emergent Strategy within and throughout your collaborative work.

When Emergent Strategy was published, readers wanted a way to practice Emergent Strategy in real time with each other. The Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute (ESII) offered a number of learning opportunities including 5-day facilitation trainings that taught people how to bring emergent strategy into every aspect of facilitation and mediation work. The training is a workshopped version of the book Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation. 

Mini Toolkit for Care & Connection in Crisis Response

• Part 1/3: Bringing Our Ancestors into Action With Us
• Part 2/3: Comrade Commitment
• Part 3/3: Washing It Off

If you are organizing on the frontlines of crisis – whether responding to ICE raids, other state violence, climate catastrophe, displacement, or other intersecting frontlines – we hold you in great care, solidarity, and gratitude.

Kitchen Table Mediation: How to move through difference and conflict with care and connection.

adrienne recorded this session for a community group navigating tension and conflict as stress increased due to difficult organizing conditions (which are more common than not!). This group was generous enough to grant permission to share this training.

Holding Change Assessments: A process to help you assess your group’s culture, functionality, emergent strategy capacity, purpose, and the presence of power dynamics.

Developed in partnership with expert researcher Zuri Tai, these tools can help people understand where they are related to a set of skills or conditions. Included is a facilitation self-assessment, a co-facilitation assessment, facilitation intake questions, and a mediation assessment.

The Sweet Spot: Once you identify the vision, you want to choose the vehicle.

The Sweet Spot is a visual representation of a concept described in Emergent Strategy’s Tools for Emergent Facilitation. Identifying what your group can do well, is passionate about, and is needed– that’s the sweet spot. That’s your mission.

Emergent Strategy Ideation Institution's Immersion Guide: How to host and facilitate an adaptive gathering that empowers participants to guide and deepen their work. 

When Emergent Strategy was published, readers wanted a way to practice Emergent Strategy in real time with each other. adrienne created the Immersion as a way to play and practice with Emergent Strategy, and held Immersions all over the United States in 2018-2019. This guide, developed by People in Education in collaboration with the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, is a resource for hosting Immersions, defined as gatherings at which participants experiment with the principles, elements, and practices of Emergent Strategy. The purpose of an Immersion is to make the elements of Emergent Strategy tangible by bringing them into communities, organizations and movements, addressing real and timely issues. The guide walks you through every aspect of the gathering including how to prepare, assembling your team, and the necessary considerations before, during, and after. 

Octavia Butler Strategic Reader: Edited by adrienne maree brown & Alexis Pauline Gumbs

This reader emerged out of the Octavia Butler Symposium at the Allied Media Conference in 2010. The symposium happened in 3 parts - a) an initial presentation by host/editor adrienne maree brown, b) a fishbowl conversation where everyone in the group participated in addressing meta-questions about Octavia's work, and c) several small group conversations on particular series.

Collective Visionary Fiction Writing Worksheet: Developed for Octavia’s Brood by Morgan Phillips & Walidah Imarisha

This worksheet will help you to build a world within which to write your visionary fiction story. We define visionary fiction as fiction that has an explicit intention for visioning beyond the current world, challenging mainstream power dynamics and ideals. We believe all social justice organizing - imagining a better, more just world and working to create it– is an act of visionary fiction. We want to encourage the exploration of the inner workings of characters and communities seeking change, seeking justice, outside accepted current rules of reality. We see visionary fiction as a form that can include sci-fi, speculative fiction, fantasy, magic realism, myth, horror and more. It exposes current injustice and/or presents an alternative reality/future.