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Emergent Strategy

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Emergent Strategy

By: adrienne maree brown
Narrated by: adrienne maree brown
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Summary

In the tradition of Octavia Butler, radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help to shape the futures we want.

Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.

©2017 adrienne maree brown (P)2021 AK Press Future Studies Gender Studies Politics & Government Social Sciences
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Highly recommend for anyone looking to find direction, purpose and understanding of interpersonal relationshipping. Be it with oneself, family, or with wider community. adrienne marie brown has a beautiful voice, easy on the ear ☺️😌 and the pace is perfect. I just finished and I'm about to go straight back and start again. Oh and did i mention it's also a pretty good guide to not being a d!ck.

Revolutionary, exciting and as ancient as fractals.

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This book is just not for me and to be honest I gave up on it half way through. There were a number of issues, among them frequent inclusion of foot notes and the use of quotes from people I have never heard of that I found distracted from the narrative. In addition, my training is in science and I found the reliance on metaphors and quotes from people required a high level of trust that I was reluctant to give. There are limitations to all metaphors, but in this case, many of them seem to me to be cherry-picking rather than an aid to communication. As an example, murmuration (flocking of birds as per the cover) is used as a metaphor for collaboration. While it is true that flocking requires birds to observe the location of their neighbors in the flock, Adrienne oversells its relevance to human collaboration given that the flock has, at some level, agreed that flocking is something they all want to do. The issues are a pity as there are some interesting ideas such as the idea that the structure and processes used in small scale activism will come to be reflected in large scale policy or institutional reform through fractals. It would be interesting to see this idea explored more rigorously given the challenges associated with achieving large scale reform. The other idea, critical to the title, is that if the various components of the system do certain things that this will lead to emergent outcomes. The challenge here is that emergent properties are often difficult to predict and so it is not clear how groups would achieve a desired objective if it was actually an emergent property. The answer seems to be that there are some principles that should be followed, or maybe I should have finished the second half of the book.

strategy or principles

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.