Emergent Strategy

Details

Author: adrienne maree brown, with the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute and the broader Detroit organizing tradition (developed 2010-2017, named in print 2017)
Category: Frameworks
Published: 2017
Source: Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute
Source URL: https://esii.org
Access: public

Description

A framework for organizing and community-building built on six elements (fractal, adaptive, interdependent, nonlinear, resilient, generative) and nine principles, developed by adrienne maree brown.

Annotation

Emergent Strategy is a framework for movement organizing, facilitation, and community building, named in print by adrienne maree brown in her 2017 book *Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds* (AK Press). The framework rests on a simple central claim: the patterns we practice at the scale of one conversation, one meeting, one community of fifteen people are the same patterns that show up at the scale of a city, a movement, a country. Small change shapes large change, and the relationship is not metaphorical but operational.

The framework holds six elements (fractal, intentional adaptation, interdependence and decentralization, nonlinear and iterative, resilience and transformative justice, creating more possibilities) and nine principles (small is good small is all, change is constant, there is always enough time for the right work, find the conversation only these people can have, never a failure always a lesson, trust the people, move at the speed of trust, less prep more presence, what you pay attention to grows). The elements are the structural patterns the framework describes. The principles are the operational refrains a group can practice with.

As a framework for groups, Emergent Strategy is doing something different from a procedural method like Sociocracy or Holacracy. It does not give you a meeting format, a decision-making protocol, or a constitution. It gives you a posture, a set of orienting questions, and a practice vocabulary. Groups that want to adopt the framework typically pair it with one or more procedural practices (consent decision-making, Circle, Forum, restorative justice) and use Emergent Strategy as the orientation underneath the procedure rather than as the procedure itself.

The framework has been used widely in US Black feminist organizing, healing-justice circles, climate-justice work, abolitionist organizing, mutual-aid networks, and a smaller number of intentional communities. The Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute (Detroit, founded 2014-2015) is the institutional home that trains facilitators in the framework and runs the Praxis Projects cohort for groups practicing the elements together. In the ToGather archive, [Feÿtopia](/community/Feÿtopia) is the community most clearly running on emergent-strategy patterns, even when the framework is not named explicitly: Poli describes communities as "spaces of emergence"; Jess names the community's curation as "kind of emergent."

The entry below documents the framework as a working practice: where it came from, how the six elements and nine principles actually work in groups, what to do as a community considering adoption, where the framework gets hard, and what to read next. The companion Library entry is the [book itself](/library/emergent-strategy-brown).

Full text

## What it is, and what it is for

Emergent Strategy is a framework for organizing, facilitation, and community building, articulated in print by adrienne maree brown in 2017 and held collectively by a wider Detroit-rooted movement-organizing tradition. The framework's central claim is that the patterns of large-scale social change are made of, and shaped by, the patterns of small-scale relationships. The unit of change is the small interaction. The work of changing how people relate at small scale is not preparatory to systemic change; it is the work itself, and the larger pattern is a reflection of the smaller one.

<figure style="margin:28px auto;text-align:center;">
<svg viewBox="0 0 700 480" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" style="max-width:700px;width:100%;height:auto;display:block;margin:0 auto;background:#fcfaf5;" font-family="Georgia, serif" role="img">
<title>The fractal claim at the heart of emergent strategy</title>
<desc>Small interactions produce patterns; patterns produce systems. The larger shape mirrors the smaller one.</desc>
<text x="350" y="28" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-family="Inter, system-ui, sans-serif" fill="#857e72" letter-spacing="3">ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN, 2017</text>
<text x="350" y="56" text-anchor="middle" font-size="16" font-style="italic" fill="#5b554c">The unit of change is the small interaction</text>
<circle cx="350" cy="270" r="180" fill="none" stroke="#e6dfd0" stroke-width="1" stroke-dasharray="3,4"/>
<circle cx="350" cy="270" r="115" fill="none" stroke="#b59770" stroke-width="1" stroke-dasharray="3,4"/>
<circle cx="350" cy="270" r="55" fill="none" stroke="#c97e4f" stroke-width="1.5"/>
<circle cx="350" cy="270" r="11" fill="#c97e4f"/>
<text x="350" y="232" text-anchor="middle" font-size="10" font-weight="600" fill="#c97e4f" letter-spacing="2">CORE</text>
<text x="350" y="305" text-anchor="middle" font-size="13" font-style="italic" fill="#5d4f3a">small interactions</text>
<text x="350" y="325" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" fill="#857e72">how two people speak,</text>
<text x="350" y="340" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" fill="#857e72">attend, repair</text>
<text x="350" y="170" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-weight="600" fill="#857e72" letter-spacing="2">MIDDLE</text>
<text x="350" y="195" text-anchor="middle" font-size="13" font-style="italic" fill="#5d4f3a">patterns</text>
<text x="555" y="270" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" fill="#857e72">how a group</text>
<text x="555" y="285" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" fill="#857e72">holds itself</text>
<text x="145" y="270" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" fill="#857e72">how a crew</text>
<text x="145" y="285" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" fill="#857e72">moves together</text>
<text x="350" y="395" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" font-weight="600" fill="#857e72" letter-spacing="2">OUTER</text>
<text x="350" y="418" text-anchor="middle" font-size="13" font-style="italic" fill="#5d4f3a">systems</text>
<text x="350" y="438" text-anchor="middle" font-size="11" fill="#857e72">what a movement does at scale</text>
<text x="40" y="100" font-size="11" font-weight="600" fill="#c97e4f">Six elements held as practice</text>
<text x="40" y="120" font-size="11" fill="#5b554c">Fractal · Adaptive · Interdependent</text>
<text x="40" y="136" font-size="11" fill="#5b554c">Non-linear · Resilient · More Possibilities</text>
<text x="660" y="100" text-anchor="end" font-size="11" font-weight="600" fill="#c97e4f">The claim</text>
<text x="660" y="120" text-anchor="end" font-size="11" fill="#5b554c">"What we practice at the</text>
<text x="660" y="136" text-anchor="end" font-size="11" fill="#5b554c">small scale sets the patterns</text>
<text x="660" y="152" text-anchor="end" font-size="11" fill="#5b554c">for the whole."</text>
</svg>
<figcaption style="text-align:center;font-style:italic;color:#857e72;font-size:13px;margin-top:10px;font-family:Georgia,serif;">The fractal claim. The patterns of large-scale change are made of the patterns of small-scale relationship. Work on the inside ring, and the outer rings reorganize themselves.</figcaption>
</figure>

The canonical short definition, in brown's own words: emergent strategy is "the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions," and a strategy for "building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions." The framework draws on three intellectual lineages running in parallel: complexity science (Margaret Wheatley, Stuart Kauffman, the broader emergence literature), Black feminist and abolitionist organizing (Grace Lee Boggs, Ella Baker, Mariame Kaba, Mia Mingus, brown's own Detroit-based facilitation practice), and speculative fiction (especially Octavia E. Butler's Parable novels, with their Earthseed verse "all that you touch you change, all that you change changes you, the only lasting truth is change").

The framework is built for groups already doing relational and political work: movement organizations, facilitator networks, healing-justice circles, mutual-aid groups, intentional communities, co-living projects, and the kind of small-scale political networks that operate by trust and direct relationship rather than by formal hierarchy. Likely fit: groups of three to a few hundred people whose work depends on aliveness, adaptation, and ongoing relationship across difference. Less likely fit: large institutional bureaucracies, transactional teams, contexts where decisions need to be made under tight time pressure with low trust, or groups that need a procedural rulebook rather than an orientation.

Emergent Strategy is the *orientation layer* underneath organizing, not a substitute for procedure. Groups that practice emergent strategy almost always also use a separate operational framework for the procedural layer: consent decision-making, [Sociocracy 3.0](/library/sociocracy-3-0), [Circle / Way of Council](/library/circle-way-of-council), restorative-justice circles, or another structured method. The framework gives you the posture and the questions. Another framework gives you the meeting format. Pairing matters.

> **From the field.** Across the [Feÿtopia](/community/Feÿtopia) interviews in the ToGather archive, two of the founders use emergent-strategy vocabulary directly without citing brown. Poli describes intentional communities as "spaces of emergence" whose practices he wants to see brought back into cities. Jess describes the community's curation as "something that was kind of emergent." Neither names the framework explicitly. The vocabulary is in the air in the kind of regenerative-community wave Feÿtopia sits inside, and the patterns Feÿtopia runs on ([doocracy](/library/doocracy) at the operating layer, ongoing visioning rather than fixed constitution, relationship-first rather than role-first) match brown's elements with some precision. Several other archive communities (Traditional Dream Factory, the broader regenerative-community wave) operate on similar patterns. The framework is a useful name for what these communities are already doing.

## Where it came from

The framework has a clear named author in adrienne maree brown and a less-named collective lineage in the Detroit-rooted Black feminist organizing tradition. Both matter.

brown's own development of the framework happened across roughly 2010 to 2017. She had been organizing for a decade by then: executive director of the Ruckus Society from 2006 to 2010, national coordinator for the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit, a central facilitator at the Allied Media Conference, a consultant with Detroit Summer at the Boggs Center. The intellectual conversation she was inside (with Grace Lee Boggs as her late mentor, with Charity Mahouna Hicks at the Detroit water-rights front, with Walidah Imarisha as co-editor of *Octavia's Brood* in 2015, with sister Autumn Brown on the *How to Survive the End of the World* podcast) was already working with the questions the framework names. brown's contribution was to synthesize the conversation into a teachable, portable form.

The diagnosis underneath the framework. In the 2010s, US-left movement spaces were facing recurring patterns of burnout, conflict, fragmentation, and call-out culture. Movements would build, scale fast, and then fracture. Coalitions would form, win a campaign, and then collapse under their own internal contradictions. brown's framing of this pattern: the movements were moving faster than the relationships could sustain. Critical mass was outpacing critical connection. The movement was getting bigger and shallower at the same time. The fractal principle (small is good, small is all) is a direct response to that pattern. The argument is that the relational work at small scale is not optional; it is the thing the movement is actually made of.

The Octavia Butler thread is essential to how brown arrived at the framework. brown read the Parable novels (*Parable of the Sower*, 1993; *Parable of the Talents*, 1998) repeatedly, taught them, used them in workshops. Butler's protagonist Lauren Olamina invents Earthseed, a faith built on the principle "all that you touch you change. all that you change changes you. the only lasting truth is change. god is change." brown carries that verse into the framework as a foundational orientation. Change is not an event; change is a condition. The work of organizing is the work of relating intentionally to change rather than denying it or fighting it.

The complexity-science thread came through Margaret Wheatley's *Leadership and the New Science* (1992), which brown cites as a primary influence. Wheatley had been arguing since the early 1990s that organizations are better understood as living systems than as machines, and that emergence (the way patterns arise out of local interactions without central design) is the operative principle. brown brings Wheatley's argument into a politically grounded frame that Wheatley's corporate-consulting context did not fully reach.

The framework appeared in print as a book in 2017 (*Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds*, AK Press). The Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute was founded shortly after, in Detroit, as the institutional home for facilitator training, mediation, coaching, and the praxis cohort. The series of books that followed (*Pleasure Activism* 2019, *We Will Not Cancel Us* 2020, *Holding Change* 2021, *Loving Corrections* 2024) extends the framework into pleasure, accountability, facilitation, and the long work of repair. brown lives in Durham, North Carolina now; ESII is still based in Detroit.

## How the framework actually runs in a group

The framework holds together as a working practice through three integrated layers: the six elements (what the framework describes), the nine principles (how a group practices), and the operational forms (what a group does on a Tuesday afternoon). The procedural detail below comes from brown's 2017 book, *Holding Change* (2021), the ESII training curriculum as documented on esii.org, and the small body of published case studies in which groups have used the framework with attribution.

### The six elements as practice areas

**Fractal.** How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The practice: examine your group's internal patterns (how you handle disagreement, who speaks, who cleans up, who gets credit) and ask where the same patterns show up in your external work. The fractal principle predicts that the answer is always yes. The work is to change the small pattern, knowing the large will follow.

**Intentional Adaptation.** Change is constant; the question is whether your group's response to change is reactive or intentional. The practice: build a regular rhythm where the group steps back from the work to ask "what is actually happening, what is changing, what does the work need to become." Movements and communities that miss this rhythm tend to keep doing what worked last year long after the conditions have shifted.

**Interdependence and Decentralization.** No single member is the bottleneck; the group depends on many people holding many roles and many resources. The practice: distribute knowledge, distribute relationships, distribute money, distribute facilitation. The opposite of decentralization is not chaos; it is fragility. A group with one indispensable founder is fragile in a way the framework treats as a structural problem, not a temporary phase.

**Nonlinear and Iterative.** Change does not happen on a straight line. Setbacks are not failures; cycles are how the work moves. The practice: build iteration into your group's planning rhythm. Run a pilot, learn, redesign, run again. Allow for spirals (the same problem returning at a higher altitude) rather than expecting progress to be monotonic.

**Resilience and Transformative Justice.** Harm is not an exception; harm is part of what groups have to be able to hold. The practice: build the relational fabric and the operational practices ([restorative-justice circles](/library/restorative-and-transformative-justice), accountability pods, mediation) that let your group respond to harm without collapsing or expelling. The framework's posture is that a group that cannot hold harm is not actually resilient.

**Creating More Possibilities.** The work is not only to defend what is; the work is to imagine and practice what is becoming. The practice: build space for visionary fiction, speculative imagination, prototype experiments. Run a visioning weekend. Read Octavia Butler together. The element pushes against the political fatalism that movements often slip into.

### The nine principles as operational refrains

The nine principles are short enough to memorize and portable enough to travel into a meeting. A group practicing emergent strategy will often have them written on a wall in the meeting room or read aloud at the start of a session.

<div style="display:flex;flex-direction:column;gap:18px;margin:28px 0;">
<div style="display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start;background:#f3ede1;border-left:4px solid #c97e4f;border-radius:6px;padding:20px 24px;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:42px;font-weight:400;color:#c97e4f;line-height:1;min-width:54px;text-align:center;">1</div>
<div style="flex:1;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;color:#2b2620;margin-bottom:8px;line-height:1.35;">Small is good, small is all. The large is a reflection of the small.</div>
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;color:#5b554c;line-height:1.55;">Pulls attention back to the relational substrate when the group is drifting into abstraction.</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start;background:#f3ede1;border-left:4px solid #c97e4f;border-radius:6px;padding:20px 24px;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:42px;font-weight:400;color:#c97e4f;line-height:1;min-width:54px;text-align:center;">2</div>
<div style="flex:1;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;color:#2b2620;margin-bottom:8px;line-height:1.35;">Change is constant. Be like water.</div>
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;color:#5b554c;line-height:1.55;">Lowers the cost of changing the plan; raises the cost of clinging to a plan past its expiration.</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start;background:#f3ede1;border-left:4px solid #c97e4f;border-radius:6px;padding:20px 24px;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:42px;font-weight:400;color:#c97e4f;line-height:1;min-width:54px;text-align:center;">3</div>
<div style="flex:1;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;color:#2b2620;margin-bottom:8px;line-height:1.35;">There is always enough time for the right work.</div>
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;color:#5b554c;line-height:1.55;">Pushes back on manufactured urgency; protects the work that actually needs doing.</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start;background:#f3ede1;border-left:4px solid #c97e4f;border-radius:6px;padding:20px 24px;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:42px;font-weight:400;color:#c97e4f;line-height:1;min-width:54px;text-align:center;">4</div>
<div style="flex:1;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;color:#2b2620;margin-bottom:8px;line-height:1.35;">There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.</div>
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;color:#5b554c;line-height:1.55;">Reframes facilitation as finding the live thread, not running the agenda.</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start;background:#f3ede1;border-left:4px solid #c97e4f;border-radius:6px;padding:20px 24px;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:42px;font-weight:400;color:#c97e4f;line-height:1;min-width:54px;text-align:center;">5</div>
<div style="flex:1;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;color:#2b2620;margin-bottom:8px;line-height:1.35;">Never a failure, always a lesson.</div>
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;color:#5b554c;line-height:1.55;">Lowers the cost of trying things that turn out wrong; raises the value of post-mortems.</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start;background:#f3ede1;border-left:4px solid #c97e4f;border-radius:6px;padding:20px 24px;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:42px;font-weight:400;color:#c97e4f;line-height:1;min-width:54px;text-align:center;">6</div>
<div style="flex:1;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;color:#2b2620;margin-bottom:8px;line-height:1.35;">Trust the people. If you trust the people, they become trustworthy.</div>
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;color:#5b554c;line-height:1.55;">Sets the default posture toward members; trust as starting condition rather than earned status.</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start;background:#f3ede1;border-left:4px solid #c97e4f;border-radius:6px;padding:20px 24px;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:42px;font-weight:400;color:#c97e4f;line-height:1;min-width:54px;text-align:center;">7</div>
<div style="flex:1;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;color:#2b2620;margin-bottom:8px;line-height:1.35;">Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections, not critical mass.</div>
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;color:#5b554c;line-height:1.55;">Slows expansion until relationships can sustain it. The most-quoted principle.</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start;background:#f3ede1;border-left:4px solid #c97e4f;border-radius:6px;padding:20px 24px;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:42px;font-weight:400;color:#c97e4f;line-height:1;min-width:54px;text-align:center;">8</div>
<div style="flex:1;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;color:#2b2620;margin-bottom:8px;line-height:1.35;">Less prep, more presence.</div>
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;color:#5b554c;line-height:1.55;">Pushes against over-engineered facilitation; trusts the room to bring what is needed.</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start;background:#f3ede1;border-left:4px solid #c97e4f;border-radius:6px;padding:20px 24px;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:42px;font-weight:400;color:#c97e4f;line-height:1;min-width:54px;text-align:center;">9</div>
<div style="flex:1;">
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;color:#2b2620;margin-bottom:8px;line-height:1.35;">What you pay attention to grows.</div>
<div style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;color:#5b554c;line-height:1.55;">Reframes strategy as the choice of where to direct attention; what is named gets larger.</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

### The operational forms

In practice, a group running on emergent strategy uses some combination of the following operational forms. None are unique to the framework; brown adapts and recombines forms from a wider organizing toolkit.

**Opening circle.** Start meetings with a brief check-in. Each person names where they are landing. Sets the relational fabric before the work.

**Strategic conversations rather than strategic plans.** Replace the annual strategic plan with regular strategic conversations. Plans become provisional; orientation becomes ongoing.

**Pod structure for accountability.** Small accountability groups (typically three to seven people, drawn from Mia Mingus's pod-mapping work in transformative justice). The pod is the unit of harm-response and mutual support.

**Visioning practice.** Periodic visioning weekends or sessions where the group writes, draws, or speaks toward what it is becoming. Speculative imagination as group practice, not as decoration.

**Mediation as default rather than exception.** When conflict appears, mediation is the assumed first move rather than escalation or exit. ESII trains mediators in the framework explicitly.

**Embedded reflection.** Short pause-and-notice moments inside meetings. "What is happening in the room right now." Often facilitated by a person other than the meeting's primary facilitator.

**Closing circle.** End meetings with a closing round. What landed, what needs follow-up, what each person is taking out of the room.

### A real moment

From Poli's interview at Feÿtopia in the ToGather archive. Poli is describing what intentional communities offer that cities have lost: "some of the practices that happen in communities like this, in intentional communities that allow for spaces of emergence, I have already seen some of this being replicated in spaces in cities." Poli is using the framework's vocabulary directly. The communities he is talking about are not running structured emergent-strategy programs. They are running on patterns that the framework names. The fractal claim (small communities rehearsing what larger urban spaces might become) is in the air at Feÿtopia even when no one cites brown.

## What it is and what it is not

Five disambiguation points. Each one names something the framework is regularly confused with, and clarifies the difference.

**An orientation, not a procedure.** Emergent Strategy gives you a way of holding the work and a vocabulary for noticing patterns. It does not give you a meeting format, a voting rule, or a constitution. Groups expecting a procedural rulebook will be confused by the book and by the framework. The framework explicitly assumes that groups will pair it with an operational practice for the procedural layer.

**A practice tradition, not a methodology.** The framework is not a packaged method that you implement once and then have. It is a practice that a group does over time. Practitioners describe spending years deepening their relationship with the elements rather than weeks "rolling out" emergent strategy. Groups looking for a quick procedural fix are often disappointed.

**Rooted in a specific political lineage.** The framework comes from US-left Black feminist organizing. The political content is constitutive, not decorative. When the framework travels outside that lineage (into corporate retreats, into UN sustainable-development trainings, into European intentional-community spaces) it can lose its political content quickly. "Move at the speed of trust" becomes a productivity slogan. The fractal principle becomes a leadership metaphor. Practitioners outside the original lineage carry an additional responsibility to keep the political content live.

**Compatible with structure, not opposed to it.** Some readers come to the framework thinking emergent strategy means "no structure." That reading is wrong. brown is explicit that emergent organizations have structures; the structures are designed for emergence rather than for command. The framework pairs naturally with [Sociocracy 3.0](/library/sociocracy-3-0) (consent decision-making), [Circle / Way of Council](/library/circle-way-of-council) (facilitation), and [restorative-justice circles](/library/restorative-and-transformative-justice) (accountability). The risk in confusing emergent strategy with structurelessness is the risk Jo Freeman named in [The Tyranny of Structurelessness](/library/tyranny-of-structurelessness) (1970): informal structure that is opaque and unaccountable.

**About change, not about stability.** Emergent strategy is a framework for groups that are changing or want to change. It is not built to maintain steady-state operations. Groups whose primary work is stable execution at scale (running a hospital, maintaining infrastructure, delivering a regulated service on schedule) will find the framework's orientation a poor fit for daily operations, even if useful for periodic strategic reflection.

## Communities and movements practicing it

Five communities, organizations, and movements running on the framework, plus archive parallels.

### Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute (ESII), Detroit, Michigan (founded ~2014-2015)

The institutional home of the framework. ESII trains facilitators, runs mediation cohorts, hosts the Praxis Projects cohort (six months, groups applying the framework with coaching support), and stewards the framework's ongoing development. Staff and rotating facilitator cohort. brown is the writer-in-residence. ESII is where someone who wants to study the framework with the people who developed it actually goes.

### The Movement for Black Lives network (United States, distributed, 2014-present)

The internal facilitation practices, conflict-resolution culture, and accountability protocols of much of the Movement for Black Lives sit inside brown's framework. brown facilitated multiple gatherings; her work shaped internal practices. The connection is most legible in the post-2020 wave of accountability conversations inside the movement, where *We Will Not Cancel Us* (brown's 2020 book) became one of the primary working texts.

### Mia Mingus's Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (Oakland, California, founded ~2010)

The pod-mapping work and the transformative-justice curriculum sit in close conversation with emergent strategy. Mingus's frame on accountability ("transformative justice is the work of moving at the speed of trust with the people who have harmed and been harmed") makes the connection explicit. See the [Restorative and Transformative Justice](/library/restorative-and-transformative-justice) Library entry for the full account.

### Mutual Aid Disaster Relief and the broader pandemic-era mutual-aid wave (2020-present)

The 2020-2022 mutual-aid wave in the United States was the largest practical deployment of emergent-strategy patterns at scale. Decentralized, relational, adaptive, nonlinear. Mariame Kaba's *We Do This 'Til We Free Us* (2021) and Dean Spade's *Mutual Aid* (2020) are the two primary texts; both engage brown's framework directly.

### The Turing Way (open-source data-science community, distributed)

An unusual cross-application. The Turing Way is an open-source community-built handbook for reproducible data science. The community adopted "emergent strategy" as its formal operating model in 2022 and published a foreword explaining the choice. The application crosses brown's framework out of US-left movement organizing into a technical-community context. The result is one of the cleaner test cases for whether the framework travels.

> **From the field.** In the ToGather archive, the closest practical match to emergent-strategy patterns is [Feÿtopia](/community/Feÿtopia). Poli and Jess use the vocabulary directly; the community runs on [doocracy](/library/doocracy) at the operational layer with emergent-strategy patterns underneath; the 2026 visioning session is a year-ten reckoning of the kind brown's framework anticipates. Beyond Feÿtopia, [Traditional Dream Factory](/community/traditional-dream-factory) operates on adaptive DAO-style governance that maps onto the framework's elements. The five Tamera interviews ([Sabine Lichtenfels](/community/tamera), Bori, Joshua Gottenko, Uri Ayalon, Aida Shibli) describe a community whose foundational principle ("as inside, so outside") is the fractal principle by another name, even though Tamera's intellectual lineage runs through Dieter Duhm and the German Bauhütte tradition rather than through brown. The framework is a useful name for patterns the archive has been documenting since long before brown gave them this name.

## How to begin practicing this in your own group

Six numbered steps for a group considering bringing emergent strategy into its practice.

**1. Start by reading the principles together.** Get a copy of the book. Read the nine principles aloud in a meeting. Pick the principle that names something true about your group's current condition. Sit with it for a week. The book rewards slow reading and the principles work best as a shared vocabulary the whole group is holding.

**2. Run a fractal diagnostic.** Pick one tension in your group's external work (a campaign losing energy, a coalition stalled, a project not landing). Ask: where does this same pattern show up inside our own group? brown's fractal principle predicts the answer is yes. The diagnostic is uncomfortable; it is also where the framework starts to do real work. A group that cannot sit with what the fractal shows is not ready for the rest of the framework.

**3. Train at least one facilitator or mediator.** Attend an ESII training, read *Holding Change* (2021) carefully, or apprentice with a facilitator who already practices the framework. The orientation is portable; the facilitation craft is not. Groups that adopt the framework without anyone trained in its facilitation tend to produce inspirational meetings that do not change behavior.

**4. Pair with an operational practice.** Pick at least one procedural framework to pair emergent strategy with. The natural pairings: [Sociocracy 3.0](/library/sociocracy-3-0) for decision-making, [Circle / Way of Council](/library/circle-way-of-council) for facilitation, [Restorative and Transformative Justice](/library/restorative-and-transformative-justice) for accountability, or some combination. Run both for at least six months. The orientation without procedure produces a vibe. The procedure without orientation produces a meeting format. Both together produce a practice.

**5. Build the relational fabric before the campaign.** Slow down. Most groups want to start running the framework's elements during a fast-moving campaign. The framework's first principle ("small is good, small is all") suggests starting somewhere else: build the trust, the conflict-handling capacity, the pod structure, the regular reflection rhythm before you scale anything externally. Move at the speed of trust applies to your own group first.

**6. Plan for the year-three reckoning.** Most communities and organizations practicing emergent strategy run into a year-three or year-five moment when the inspirational early period gives way to the harder operational questions. Who facilitates when the original facilitators burn out? How does the framework hold across founder transitions? What happens when the trust posture meets a member who is doing real harm? brown engages this question directly in *We Will Not Cancel Us* (2020). Plan for the reckoning before it arrives. The plan is part of what makes the framework durable past the early enthusiasm.

## Living examples and entry points for community builders

Where the framework is alive in 2026, and how to engage as a community builder beginning practice.

### Living examples

**Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute (ESII)** ([esii.org](https://esii.org)). Detroit. The training, mediation, coaching, and Praxis Projects programs. The single most direct access point.

**Allied Media Conference (AMC)** ([alliedmedia.org](https://alliedmedia.org)). Detroit, annually. Many of brown's chapters first appeared as AMC talks. The conference itself is a working example of emergent-strategy facilitation at the scale of several hundred people.

**Highlander Research and Education Center** ([highlandercenter.org](https://highlandercenter.org)). New Market, Tennessee. The oldest US movement training center (founded 1932). Hosts emergent-strategy workshops, sells the books, integrates the framework into broader Southern-organizing curriculum.

**Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC)** ([batjc.wordpress.com](https://batjc.wordpress.com)). Mia Mingus's pod-mapping curriculum and TJ training. The accountability application of the framework, integrated with the restorative-justice tradition. See the [Restorative and Transformative Justice](/library/restorative-and-transformative-justice) Library entry.

**The Turing Way** ([book.the-turing-way.org](https://book.the-turing-way.org)). The open-source data-science community whose adopted operating model is emergent strategy. The clearest test case of the framework outside the US-left organizing context.

### Adjacent and inspired applications

**Mariame Kaba's *We Do This 'Til We Free Us*** ([haymarketbooks.org](https://www.haymarketbooks.org)). The abolitionist-organizing companion text. Reading Kaba alongside brown gives a much fuller picture of the political tradition the framework sits inside.

**Pleasure Activism cohorts and reading circles** ([adriennemareebrown.net](https://adriennemareebrown.net)). The 2019 book's reading-group movement. Local cohorts in many cities, often hosted through bookstores or queer community spaces.

**Mutual aid networks** (distributed). The 2020 pandemic mutual-aid wave is the largest at-scale application. Local mutual-aid groups still active in 2026 are useful field sites for seeing the framework run under real conditions.

**Visioning weekends and strategic-conversation retreats**. Many small communities and organizations now run periodic visioning retreats explicitly framed around brown's elements. The 2026 Feÿtopia visioning session is one example from the ToGather archive.

### Entry points

**Read the principles chapter once a week for nine weeks.** One principle per week. Notice where it is alive in your work and where it is being violated. After nine weeks you have a diagnostic of your group's current condition without having to read the whole book first.

**Attend an ESII training.** Two-day to five-day facilitation and mediation trainings, several times a year, mostly in Detroit but occasionally elsewhere. Sliding-scale pricing. The closest thing to learning the framework from inside the lineage.

**Read *Holding Change* (2021).** The fourth book in the series and the most explicitly practical for facilitators. If you cannot attend an ESII training, this is the closest substitute. The contributing chapters from Autumn Brown, Sage Crump, Malkia Devich-Cyril, Ejeris Dixon, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Prentis Hemphill, Micky ScottBey Jones, N'Tanya Lee, and Makani Themba are essential, not optional.

**Run a fractal-diagnostic conversation in your group.** Pick one external tension. Ask where it shows up internally. Hold the conversation for an hour. Notice what surfaces. The diagnostic is the framework's most accessible single practice; you do not need a trained facilitator to run it the first time.

**Read Octavia Butler's Parable novels.** *Parable of the Sower* (1993) and *Parable of the Talents* (1998). The novels that ground the framework's strategic imagination. Read them before re-reading brown; the framework lands differently after Butler.

### One caution

The framework is rooted in a specific political tradition. When intentional communities, co-living projects, or organizational consultants engage with the framework outside that tradition, the political content can strip away quickly. "Move at the speed of trust" becomes a workplace slogan; the fractal principle becomes a productivity metaphor; the resilience-and-transformative-justice element becomes individual wellness language. The honest engagement with the framework brings the lineage with it: read Grace Lee Boggs, Octavia Butler, Mariame Kaba, Mia Mingus, the Black feminist organizing tradition the framework comes from. The framework without its lineage is a vocabulary; the framework with its lineage is a practice. Communities that adopt the framework without the lineage are at risk of producing the kind of soft appropriation brown's later book *Loving Corrections* (2024) names.

## Where it gets hard

Five tensions documented in the practice. Each names a real cost.

**The trust posture and the harm question.** The principle "trust the people; if you trust the people, they become trustworthy" is one of the framework's most-quoted lines. It is also the principle that runs into the hardest edge cases. Groups practicing the framework regularly encounter members who do not become trustworthy when trusted. Sometimes the harm is serious. brown engages this directly in *We Will Not Cancel Us* (2020), and the engagement is honest about how the trust posture fails at the edges. The 2017 framework is weaker on this question than the 2020 follow-up. Groups practicing the framework need to read both books, not just the first one.

**The procedural gap.** The framework gives orientation but not procedure. Groups adopting it without pairing with a procedural practice (sociocracy, circle, restorative-justice protocols, or another operational framework) often produce meetings that feel meaningful in the moment but do not produce traction over time. The framework expects to be paired; groups that miss the pairing get a vibe without operational capacity. This is the most common failure mode in adoption.

**The cultural-context tax.** Practitioners outside US-left Black feminist organizing have an additional translation step. The framework's political content (abolitionism, Black feminism, anti-capitalist orientation) does not automatically map onto European intentional-community contexts, post-Soviet civil society, Indigenous-led organizing outside the US, or any context whose primary political traditions differ. Bringing the framework into a different context honestly requires keeping the lineage live, which costs reading time, conversation, and a refusal to take the framework's vocabulary as a free gift.

**The facilitator-burnout pattern.** Emergent-strategy facilitation is demanding. The facilitator is holding presence, sensing into the room, responding to what emerges, mediating tensions as they appear, often without the protection of a pre-set agenda. The framework names "less prep, more presence" as a principle, and the principle is right, and it is also exhausting. Facilitators inside ESII and inside the broader practice describe regular burnout cycles. The framework's resilience element applies to facilitators too; groups that lean on a small number of trained facilitators without protecting them from over-extraction are violating the framework's own elements.

**The fractal limit.** The fractal principle ("small is good, small is all; the large is a reflection of the small") is powerful as a diagnostic and weaker as a strategy. Some problems are structural in ways that the small scale does not actually contain. Climate change is not a fractal of how your housemates do dishes, even if the patterns rhyme. Some commentators (including in the Mobilizing Ideas review series) have argued the fractal claim does too much rhetorical work and not enough analytic work. The framework's defenders read the fractal as orientation rather than as causal claim; the critics read it as undercooked political theory. Both readings have merit. Practitioners using the framework should hold the fractal as suggestive rather than as proof.

## More resources

### Canonical primary sources

- [Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds](https://adriennemareebrown.net/book/emergent-strategy/). adrienne maree brown. AK Press, 2017. The foundational book. See the companion Library entry: [Emergent Strategy (the book)](/library/emergent-strategy-brown).
- [Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation](https://adriennemareebrown.net/book/holding-change-2/). adrienne maree brown. AK Press, 2021. The most explicitly operational book in the series. Essential for facilitators.
- [We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice](https://adriennemareebrown.net/book/we-will-not-cancel-us/). adrienne maree brown. AK Press, 2020. The accountability and harm-response companion. Read alongside the 2017 framework.
- [Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute (esii.org)](https://esii.org). The institutional home. Programs, training schedules, Praxis Projects cohort.
- [adriennemareebrown.net](https://adriennemareebrown.net). brown's site. Free essays, podcast episodes, current writing.

### Trainings and residencies

- [ESII Facilitation Training](https://esii.org/work/). Multi-day trainings in facilitation, with rotating cohorts. Detroit and occasionally elsewhere. Sliding-scale pricing.
- [ESII Mediation Training](https://esii.org/work/). Companion mediation training. Same format.
- [ESII Praxis Projects Cohort](https://esii.org/work/). Six months. Groups apply the framework with coaching support.
- [Allied Media Conference](https://alliedmedia.org). Annual gathering, Detroit. Many emergent-strategy practitioners are AMC alumni.
- [Highlander Research and Education Center](https://highlandercenter.org). New Market, Tennessee. Hosts emergent-strategy workshops alongside its broader curriculum.

### Theoretical lineage

- *Living for Change* and *The Next American Revolution*. Grace Lee Boggs. The intellectual taproot brown writes from.
- *Parable of the Sower* (1993) and *Parable of the Talents* (1998). Octavia E. Butler. The strategic imagination that grounds the framework.
- *Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements*. adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, editors. AK Press, 2015. The visionary-fiction anthology that pre-dates the framework.
- *Leadership and the New Science*. Margaret Wheatley. 1992. The complexity-science source brown cites directly.
- *We Do This 'Til We Free Us*. Mariame Kaba. Haymarket Books, 2021. The abolitionist-organizing companion.
- *Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next)*. Dean Spade. Verso, 2020. The mutual-aid theory companion.
- *Sister Outsider*. Audre Lorde. 1984. The Black feminist taproot.

### Companion frameworks

- [Emergent Strategy (the book)](/library/emergent-strategy-brown). The Books-variant Library entry on the 2017 source text.
- [Restorative and Transformative Justice](/library/restorative-and-transformative-justice). The accountability framework that pairs naturally with brown's resilience element.
- [Sociocracy 3.0](/library/sociocracy-3-0). The procedural sister-practice for decision-making and meeting design.
- [Circle / The Way of Council](/library/circle-way-of-council). The facilitation practice that pairs naturally.
- [Doocracy](/library/doocracy). The operational pattern most archive emergent-strategy communities run on at the daily layer.
- [Theory U](/library/theory-u-scharmer). The sister framework on sensing into change, from a different intellectual lineage.
- [Reinventing Organizations](/library/reinventing-organizations-laloux). The sister organizational-development frame, from a corporate-consulting lineage.
- [Liberating Structures](/library/liberating-structures). The facilitation-methods companion. Many emergent-strategy facilitators use LS methods inside emergent-strategy-oriented meetings.

### From the ToGather archive

- [Poli (Feÿtopia)](/community/Feÿtopia). Names "spaces of emergence" directly. Wants the practices replicated in cities.
- [Jess (Feÿtopia)](/community/Feÿtopia). Names the community's curation as "kind of emergent." A working description of emergent rather than designed coordination.
- The five [Tamera](/community/tamera) interviews. Sabine Lichtenfels, Bori, Joshua Gottenko, Uri Ayalon, Aida Shibli. The "as inside, so outside" tradition is fractal-principle thinking from a different lineage.
- The [Restorative and Transformative Justice](/library/restorative-and-transformative-justice) Library entry, which cites brown's *We Will Not Cancel Us* (2020) as a primary source.