Will I love Emergent Strategy?

I adore this book because it offers such practical, grounded strategies for navigating and facilitating change, drawing deep inspiration from the natural world.

Its insights feel both wise and usable, and they speak to a worldview and way of being that are profoundly dear to my heart.

It’s a touchstone for me—so much so that it permanently lives on my office bookshelf.

I come back to this book whenever I start to lose faith in the pace of progress to remind me it is always nonlinear.

adrienne maree brown sees complexity not as a problem to fix but as something to move with. Her words are generous and grounded, like a good conversation with someone who really sees you.

I love how she connects big ideas to small, daily acts—how she makes transformation feel both personal and collective. Reading it makes me braver about experimenting, about getting it wrong, and about trying again.

Adrienne Maree Brown is one of the few witches and culture-shifters who have inspired my own journey as a Tarot artist and healer. She carries a legacy of Black queer thought, inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our relationship to change and survival. Brown’s wisdom and poise, paired with humor and rage, made me intimidated at first, as I was all rage when I began work on Next World Tarot.

Eventually, I found myself deeply inspired and enamored by Adrienne Maree Brown’s voice and presence. I love Emergent Strategy as both a radical self-help oracle and a call out on… show more.

If there’s one universal truth, it’s that change is constant. Business owners who refuse to accept this truth are going to struggle to grow their businesses. At first glance, Emergent Strategy doesn’t seem like a business book at all. But it has opened my mind to see change in my business in a whole new light.

As much as I would love to get to a place where revenue flows like time passes, I am better off recognizing that there will be ebbs and flows and reflecting on how I can shape those ups and downs. adrienne maree brown reminded… show more.

I absolutely loved this book. It taught me how to follow the cues of nature to solve complex problems, a lesson I had never considered before. Inspired by Octavia Butler, it is a blend of radical self-help and practical guidance for shaping the future, both personally and collectively.

I found the emphasis on change and adaptability particularly powerful. Rather than resisting the world’s constant flux, it encouraged me to embrace it, map the patterns around me, and use them to influence outcomes. This approach felt deeply grounded in both science and spirituality, making it all the more impactful.

Emergent Strategy… show more.

Emergent Strategy draws lessons from both the natural world and science fiction (inspired by Octavia Butler’s work) to provide guidance and wisdom for organizing and movement work.

adrienne maree brown offers a smorgasbord of principles, concepts, quotes, and stories to support organizers and leaders to solve complex problems, instigate social change, and create lasting impact. This book is a great source of inspiration for managers and leaders feeling stuck in the face of great uncertainty.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds is a field guide to some of the more confusing and difficult elements of trying to heal ourselves and the world. It’s beautiful and inviting.

maree brown argues we have to reinvent how we work together and support each other in the process of change making. We can’t rush at unprecedentedly huge problems with the same old behaviours that got us here in the first place. 

Emergent Strategy draws on maree brown’s extensive experience in movement spaces to tease out lessons and practices, like the need to “move at the speed of trust.” Throughout… show more.

A mind-bending exploration of how strategy develops in the context of social change, Emergent Strategy bridges the insights of complex systems science with the spirit and ethical frameworks of radical social movements.

Deeply rooted in the social justice tradition, brown offers an expansive way of thinking about how change happens--in society and in ourselves. 

This book illustrates how to build transformational change and how change is not linear.

In fact, change is the process of trying things, pushing boundaries, and radically dreaming. It provides a framework to help people who are interested in creating a more racially just society and the world.

This book brings together the language and conceptual tools that are important for creating the world that we imagine.

This is an indispensable handbook for guiding change management, something everyone, but especially those doing philanthropic work, should be skilled in. Change is the only constant, and understanding how to guide that process intentionally, whether for yourself, your family, or your community, better equips you to map and influence sustainable actions. I have been deeply influenced by adrienne maree brown’s approach to the intersection of community building and self-care, and from her writing I was introduced to the work of Grace Lee Boggs and Octavia Butler, both feminist visionary guides of transformation and activism.