omniharmonicEmergent Strategy
Emergent strategy is a framework for social change developed by adrienne maree brown, drawing on biomimicry and complexity science to propose that effective organizing mirrors the adaptive, relational patterns of living systems. Rather than rigid top-down strategic plans, emergent strategy emphasizes small-scale experiments, fractality (the idea that what we practice at the small scale sets the pattern for the whole system), adaptation, interdependence, and moving at the speed of trust.
The framework challenges the dominant model of social change as a war to be won through superior strategy, resource accumulation, and hierarchical command. Instead, brown proposes that movements are ecosystems: they grow through relationship, adapt through feedback, and sustain themselves through diversity rather than uniformity. Key principles include “small is good, small is all” (the large-scale change you want is built from small-scale interactions), “there is a conversation in the room that only the people in the room can have,” and “trust the people.”
Emergent strategy connects to living-systems as its primary source of metaphor and insight — if ecosystems self-organize through distributed intelligence, social movements can too. It relates to collective-intelligence through its emphasis on the wisdom embedded in relationships rather than concentrated in leaders. It shares terrain with metamodernism in its capacity to hold complexity, paradox, and uncertainty as features rather than bugs. And it complements participatory-democracy by providing the cultural and relational practices that make formal democratic structures actually function — because democracy without trust, listening, and adaptive capacity is merely procedure.