I feel trapped in the present.
At least, that’s the conclusion I reached while thinking about the future over the last few days. The present seems to stretch on and on, a state of relentless activity without progress toward a different reality I might call the future.
On a day-to-day basis, I enjoy most of that relentless activity—my ‘day job’ kind of work, the research and writing I do, the field hockey games I attend, the workouts I push through… I’d go so far as to say that I’m enthusiastic about (most) it. I feel creative and skillful.
But I don’t feel like I’m making a future in the way I once did.
Maybe it’s just me—but I don’t think so. From my vantage point, I see many of us waiting and hoping for something to break loose: a new platform, a new feature, a new tactic, a new vision, a new leader…
Our digital, commercial, and mental spaces seem stagnant. Our enthusiasm for what could be seems to have waned. Is anybody excited about this [gestures wildly] anymore?
With all that in mind and for all who share these feelings, I decided to revisit an old favorite this week: Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown.
Emergent Strategy was published in 2017. I read it in 2020—the year many of us reconsidered our relationships with the future. And it’s a book I can always rely on to reveal something new, to reactivate something that’s gone dormant.
adrienne maree brown is an activist, organizer, facilitator, scholar, and speculative fiction writer—among other titles and identities. Much of her work is an ongoing interpretation and activation of Octavia Butler’s philosophy of change. Butler, who passed away in 2006, was a prolific and often prophetic speculative fiction writer.
The subtitle of Emergent Strategy is ‘Shaping Change, Changing Worlds,’ and it’s a nod to Butler’s works, The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents. In those novels, Butler explores the universal and constant nature of change. In fact, in the religion she envisions, ‘God is change.’
Approaching ‘God is change’ in the same way one approaches ‘God is love,’ the profound this-worldliness1 of God (or The Universe, or Truth, or whatever Guiding Principle you look to) becomes apparent. Change occurs when we act—or don’t act. We create and shape change as it creates and shapes us.
It’s an acutely participatory philosophy of life; belief is active rather than passive.
“Emergent strategy,” writes Brown, “is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.”
In this way, Emergent Strategy is a future-focused text. But it’s not the sort of anxiety-ridden, catastrophizing future focus we try to avoid. Instead, it’s a future focus that demands careful attention to the evidence all around us in the present. To practice emergent strategy is to practice noticing. To practice noticing is to practice shaping change.
And that leads me to the first idea.
1. Plans open to change are the only plans that work.
If you make a plan that fails as soon as the conditions on the ground change, you haven’t really made a plan. If your plan only works in the present environment, it doesn’t work.
Plans are necessarily works in progress. Every task or project completed teaches us something new—and learning is change.
Let me say that again: learning is change.
brown writes:
Many of us respond to change with fear, or see it as a crisis. Some of us anticipate change with an almost titillating sense of stress. We spend precious time thinking about what has changed that we didn’t choose or can’t control, and/or thinking ahead to future stress.
Since learning is change, many people unintentionally avoid learning.
We avoid new information and new perspectives that will void our hypotheses.
How do you make a plan that is open to change? That isn’t stifled by the inevitable arrival of the unknown?
brown encourages a shift from strategic planning to strategic intentions. Instead of driving toward a singular vision, the vision and the strategy for arriving at it is a question rather than an answer. When we set a strategic intention, we shape how we answer that question.
In my own book, I call these commitments. A commitment allows you to meet any question or challenge with a guiding principle. You apply the commitment (e.g., question normal, choose ease, work the system, make room for margin, etc.) to break free from the fear and urgency that change can inspire. It prompts you to look at the situation in a new light and intentionally adapt.
At least for those of us in the US, the next few months are bound to be uneasy. What could you commit to—what intention could you set—to guide how you meet the inevitable changes on the horizon? How could you prepare to learn from a future you can’t predict?
2. We can’t predict the future, but we can practice it.
Feeling trapped in the present comes with feeling disconnected from the future. I think I lost my connection to the future in 2020, though it might very well have happened earlier. I stopped envisioning what could be different with time because I was trying to stay sane and solvent in the here and now.
I became mired in the urgency and reactivity of compounding crises—external and internal, political and personal. I realize now that I lost faith in the future, lost faith in change.
We have to believe in the future in order to shape change. brown encourages us to ‘practice futures.’ Not predict futures. Not even plan for futures. Practice futures—plural.
The present isn’t a data point that tells us something about what’s coming tomorrow. The present is an opportunity to make tomorrow real, to practice acting and making decisions based on the futures we might want to create. There is no survey result, no headline, no insightful analysis that can predict the future if we decide to create something different.
While this pertains to major culture-shifting change, it also applies to how we operate on the smallest level. This is why I remain critical of much of the software that shapes our day-to-day work.
Consider the most popular project management and productivity tools—apps like ClickUp and Asana. When you log in, do they ask you about the future you want to create that day? Do they prompt you to consider what you want to learn or how you want to shape change? Do they ask you to consider whether your list of tasks will help you practice your commitments or values? Whether that list of tasks is even relevant to that day’s purpose?
It’s true—of course—that our responsibilities and to-dos matter. But it’s also true that those tasks can muddy the water. When we’re not intentional about choosing our tasks, our tasks choose the future for us.
These tools probably won’t ever ask us to reconsider the tasks that are due, so it’s up to ask to pose the questions.
3. “How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale.”
What emerges results from complex systems, relationships, and entangled movements. This is true whether we track emergence from small to large or from large to small. What emerges in the macro will also emerge in the micro—and vice versa.
We tend to emphasize our shared futures when working from a leftist or collectivist perspective. We resist the individualism of more conservative or capitalistic systems of action. We reject the Cult of Me and Mine.
This positioning is critical to shaping change in a more equitable and sustainable direction. But this positioning can also make it difficult to practice emergence at a personal level. And when we’re not practicing at a personal level, we’re not really practicing at a community or collective level.
brown writes:
I regularly check in with my vision for our collective future and make adjustments on how I am living, what I am practice, to be aligned with that future, to make it more possible.
How we treat ourselves can limit the futures we can be part of. Can burnout lead to a more just society? Can insomnia devise equitable solutions? Can rigid rule-setting and negative self-talk create more loving relationships? Can asceticism or self-harm produce abundance?
Of course not.
That’s not to condemn any of us for working or living in those ways. Doing otherwise often feels impossible.
But again, if we practice at a small scale—including how we treat ourselves—what we want to see at a large scale, we open up possibilities instead of closing them off.
To circle back to where I started, if I feel trapped in the present, I can stop waiting for something to change and start practicing the freedom of the future. You’re welcome to join me.
Check out other 3 Ideas installments:
I borrow this term from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings on the importance of realizing one’s faith in the here and now.
