Read Date: April 2026
Summary
Community organizer, writer, and activist adrienne marie brown shares her principles for enacting change through the concept of emergent strategy.
Principles
- Small is good. Small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small).
- Change is constant. (Be like water).
- There is always enough time for the right work.
- Never a failure, always a lesson.
- Trust the people. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy).
- Move at the speed of trust.
- Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships.
- Less prep, more presence.
- What you pay attention to grows.
How I discovered it
Heard about it around 2020-2021 as it was widely read and recommended in my circles (Cosmos community)
Who should read it?
Any individual interested in change, group organizing and facilitation in whatever context (because change is fractal!) Great for small business owners too.
How it changed me
Behavior, ideas, perspectives, emotional shifts
- Thought about efficacy of Zohran’s campaign based on these principles (small is all!)
- Invigorated my gut choice to grow my business tenderly and tend to small group work
- Reflected on my facilitation during Cosmos Book Club, missing that space and giving credit to my younger self for practicing that skill. How can it be brought back, in another shape?
- A lot of nature examples overlapped with teachings from Secret Studies (while reading in March 2026)
- Liberation is fractal! Freedom is the rhythm of a shared heart!
- The concept of biomimicry was DING DING DING so true! Think of how ‘ecosystem’ is increasingly used in journaling practice, small business / how to think of time
- Co-evolution through friendship
- “relationships of mutual transformation”
- self-transformation
- curiosity
- vulnerable reflection
- pattern disruption (pressure to receive and to become more whole)
- presence
- intentionality
Quotes by Theme
Resonated
- facts, guilt, and shame are limited motivations for creating change, even though those are the primary forces we use in our organizing work.
- I am socialized to seek achievement alone, to try to have the best idea and forward it through the masses. But that leads to loneliness and, I suspect, extinction. If we are all trying to win, no one really ever wins.
- It is urgency thinking (urgent constant unsustainable growth) that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in doing deep, slow, intentional work.
- As we change and transform, we also have everything we need already right inside of us.
- Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice.
- We don’t practice to feel good, we practice to feel more.
- It takes 300 repetitions for muscle memory, 3000 for embodiment. I think about how I “don’t like drawing” but what it does is allow me to expand my vision, to hold more patience, to see how I can keep toeing the line between precision and playfulness.
Vision
- I am living a life I don’t regret. A life that will resonate with my ancestors, and with as many generations forward as I can imagine. I am attending to the crises of my time with my best self. I am of communities that are doing our collective best to honor our ancestors and all humans to come.
- I love knowing how incredible it feels to have a need met, to be loved and cared for, and also know how incredible it feels to meet an authentic need.
- I believe it is the freedom that we are longing for, which will never be given to us, which we have to create, the pulsing life force of the collective body we are birthing, the rhythm of a shared heart.
- Ubuntu - I am because we are
Fractal
- Existence is fractal—the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet.
- Ferns are a form of fractal. A fractal is an object or quantity that displays self similarity, which means it looks roughly the same at any scale.
- The patterns of the universe repeat at scale. There is a structural echo that suggests two things: one, that there are shapes and patterns fundamental to our universe, and two, that what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale.
- “Transform yourself to transform the world.” (Grace Lee Boggs) This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet.
Nature
- Emergence…is another way of speaking about the connective tissue of all that exists—the way, the Tao, the force, change, God/dess, life. Birds flocking, cells splitting, fungi whispering underground.
- Dandelions spread not only themselves but their community structure, manifesting their essential qualities (which include healing and detoxifying the human body) to proliferate and thrive in a new environment.
- The synchronized movement patterns of a starling flock is also known as a murmuration. Guided by simple rules, starling murmurations can react to their environment as a group without a central leader orchestrating their choices; in any instant, any part of the flock can transform the movement of the whole flock. Collective leadership/partnership. Adaptability.
- Tune in to the prevalence of spiral in the universe—the shape in the prints of our fingertips echoes into geological patterns, all the way to the shape of galaxies.
- Living in the woods is teaching me to notice more. Because I can see how everything’s survival is related to how it’s tuned into the space it occupies, its ability to notice, to be noticed.
Biomimicry
- Biomimicry is basically taking a design challenge and then finding an ecosystem that has already solved that challenge, and literally trying to emulate what you learn. There are three types of biomimicry—one is copying form and shape, another is copying a process, like photosynthesis in a leaf, and the third is mimicking at an ecosystem’s level, like building a nature-inspired city.” —Janine Benyus