Leveraging emergence and building communities: From moments to movements

Leveraging emergence, building communities: From moments to movements.

My signature block includes the African proverb “If you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I first saw that quote paraphrased in a rare Christmas card from my late father. He wrote, “if you must go, go together.”

When I first read the card, I didn’t fully understand the meaning and for several weeks I thought it was my dad simply saying that while I was living in Ottawa, and he was in Toronto with the rest of my family that he wanted me to know that they were always thinking about me. That was my first thought. My second thought was that since my dad wrote in a cursive handwriting that often was difficult to decipher that maybe he wrote the message too quickly and meant to say something else. Eventually I would ask him about the card, and he told me it was an African proverb about the importance of community and collective strength as we pursue our life goals.

Fast forward to today, and those wise words about “going together” has been a mantra guiding my work toward dismantling systemic racism and decentring narratives that exclude those with less proximity to the dominant, majority narrative of whiteness. Whether it be cofounding Black employee networks, being an active member of the anti-racism allyship network or leading the secretariat of the Black Executives Network, I continue to advocate for building communities and leveraging solidarity to bring about transformative change.

The American Philosopher, Joy James wrote in the text In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities, “to be a revolutionary lover in a zone of hatred and war is a mutation, and I think you cannot mutate as an individual. You can only mutate as a collective, and what… some people call quantum entanglement.”

?Quantum Entanglement? When two particles, such as a pair of photons or electrons, become entangled, they remain connected even when separated by vast distances. Entanglement arises from the connection between particles. This is what scientists term as an emergent property. You see, when things are connected to each other there remains a bond even when those two things are apart even far apart. Connectivity is essential as many of us doing anti-racism work are part of a small group of determined folks within our organizations. Often, we work alone or work with very little resources despite having to deliver on highly complex and challenging files. Being able to share our experiences and leverage each other’s strengths is way to overcome the challenges we individually face.

In her book Emergent Strategy adrienne maree brown writes “emergent strategy is a way for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions is to me— the potential scale of transformation that could come from movements intentionally practicing this adaptive, relational way of being, on our own and with others.” She continues, “Emergent strategy is a way that all of us can begin to see the world in life-code—awakening us to the sacred systems of life all around us. Many of us have been and are becoming students of these systems of life, wondering if in fact we can unlock some crucial understanding about our own humanity if we pay closer attention to this place we are from, the bodies we are in.”

Pay closer attention. Find your kinfolk. Look for patterns.

Observe the fractals - the never-ending complex patterns that are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. When we do this, we begin to work collectively and as adrienne maree brown describes it “in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.”

I see my work and the work of those who I trust and co-conspire with as working towards a community. An anti-racist and anti-oppression community where respect, equity, justice, inclusion and love are the guiding principles. The work towards achieving this community is not easy; we will have different ideas on how to move forward. Some will call for accelerating the pace for bold and transformative changes. Others might caution moving too fast fearing the unknown that comes with radical changes. And there will be others who might wish for neither bold nor slow change but rather something in the middle.

Regardless there will be conflicts, but we must not fear conflict. For what we are struggling against – the centring of whiteness - is far worse than the conflicts we might have as we work towards positive change. Working as fractals and employing emergent strategy we can arrive at a juncture in space and in time where we commit to a beloved community, a concept that has comes from the teachings of MLK Jr., that struggles for liberation must be infused and guided by love and justice. George Brosi and bell hooks ?describe the beloved community as “a concept that has come out of struggles for liberation in an attempt to express how the process of liberation can be infused with love. This concept assumes a group effort to change social institutions and an effort to make the means of that struggle consistent with the ends. The beloved community defines the relationships among those working for change and also the desired result of these efforts. In other words, those of us working for institutional change endeavour to become a beloved community among ourselves as we are striving for all of society to exemplify the beloved community.”

As a leader, how might you build collaborative communities? Do you aspire for a beloved community? Does your leadership style enable you to find patterns and replicate positive actions that others are doing? Are you adaptive to change and being intentional about being guided by love?

Many of us are doing important work. Many of us are having magical moments with small wins. But many of us are beginning to burn out. We have bruises from constantly fighting back against an oppressive system. We need time to heal (I know I needed to take time away earlier this year) and we need time to keep strategize how to move forward. The small moments of victory and the tiny wins will be fleeting if we do not find ways to harness all of our collective magic and go from moments to movements. I have already begun to imagine a new future and I’m curious about the movements that will get us there. What about you? ?

P.S. Today’s quote comes from adrienne maree brown:

?“If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through eyes of love. We would see that there’s no such thing as a blank canvas, an empty land or a new idea—but everywhere there is complex, ancient, fertile ground full of potential.”