When I joined NYC Quakers, our buildings were neglected and the audit had 126 open items. We had a stretched skeleton team. And I wasn’t sure where to start.
Around this time, I came across adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. Brown is a facilitator and writer who’s worked with major social organizing movements including Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street; her framework draws on Octavia Butler’s Earthseed philosophy, which I fell in love with when I read Parable of the Sower.
Parable of the Sower is worth a read. Here’s just one of the gems:
All that you touch / You change. All that you change / Changes you. / God is Change.
The work you do changes you as you do it. You can’t stand outside it. Instead you work within it. Transforming and being transformed.
Brown’s title caught my eye because it referenced a concept from a business course on disruptive innovation I’d taken that outlined deliberate and emergent strategies. Deliberate strategy works when the landscape and outcomes are known. You’re running a marathon, you’ve run shorter races, you have a base of fitness. You grab an off-the-shelf training plan and execute. Emergent strategy is for when you’re discovering the landscape and holding outcomes loosely. You experiment. You set shorter interim goals and see what sticks.
When I arrived three years ago I knew our landmarked meeting houses had good bones but needed TLC after years of deferred maintenance. Instead of arriving with a vision, I did three things:
100 conversations in 100 days. I wanted to understand the landscape before trying to change it. What did people care about? What was working? What wasn’t? What excited people? What gave them pause?
Listen and make no major changes. This was harder than it sounds. There’s an expectation that leaders arrive with answers. I had hunches, but I held them loosely. Brown writes: “Move at the speed of trust.” That’s what those early months were — moving slowly enough to build trust before asking anyone to follow me somewhere new. This is especially true in Quaker contexts where “leadings” can and do come from everywhere.
Log and fix small things. A broken link, a missing door stopper, a sign that needed posting. Brown calls this “small is good, small is all” — the idea that large patterns reflect small ones. Nothing strategic, just things that made our places a little better and signaled that we were listening and acting on what we heard and saw.
Brown also writes about “critical connections over critical mass.” Those early months were about connection: not building consensus for a big move, but learning who the organization actually was.
The book’s core frame has stayed with me as we continue the work: when you’re transforming, you can’t execute a known playbook. You have to discover the path by walking it — and let it change you along the way.
Now we have a strong team in place to nurture our spaces and our community. We’re still listening, noticing, learning and doing. Our strategy is emerging.
If your organization knows what it is and where it’s going and how to get there, you probably don’t need this book. If it’s trying to figure that out, the frame might give you permission to experiment instead of pretending you have answers you don’t.
What’s a book that’s helped you in your role? What’s something that’s stayed with you?
