Emerging Strategies Immersion Intensive 3 was Excellent
Emerging Strategies Immersion Intensive 3 was Excellent
By: Justin Laing | November 8, 2018 | Emergent Strategy, What Are We Working On
The third three-day Emergent Strategies Immersion Intensive, #ESII3, led by adrienne maree brown and held two weeks ago in Detroit, was the best professional development I’ve had in a long time. It was transformative for me. Maybe this was because it seemed to not at all be concerned with, or redefined, the professional as so deeply personal and yet this also gives me just the slightest alarm that capital is moving even more deeply into my life. Still, I loved it and am so grateful for what adrienne is doing.
What I especially appreciated was the way the design of the facilitation embodied the principles of Emergent Strategy. I will focus on two of those principles, fractals, which is embodied in Grace Lee Boggs’ quote “transform yourself to transform the world” and “interdependence and decentralization” which, for me, is lot about adrienne’s interest in a biomimicry or the way our lives imitate or reflect nature. As I alluded to in the last post, I want to keep remembering that the millenia old Orisha system seems to have fully explained this idea and be careful about English being used to create a non-discovery discovery. But, I digress. Early in our time together we were asked to form groups of 2 then 4 and in these groups to name topics that we really wanted to discuss and to place them on post its. We then posted all of these post-its on the wall and from there they were grouped and separated by categories defined by the participants. Here, in the course of less than 30 minutes, we had developed the core of an agenda that would last us 3 days. (Shout out to Open Space Technology and the Technology of Participation, both of which this exercise put me in the mind of.) This was interdependence and decentralization in action as a group of 60+ ppl designed the content of an agenda in under an hour. Of course this was done inside a container that probably took much longer to create, but still, really impressive.
We were then invited to select which one of the 6 Emergent Strategies principles about which we could best teach others. I chose “Fractals”. The direction was for the larger group of 60+ to self organize according to participants’ facility with one of the principles of ES into smaller pods that then stayed together for the duration of the learning experience. We then had the task of creating a 30 minute learning experience for others on our principle, which, again was interdependence and decentralization in action since the quality of our learning would be defined by the group and the decision on what we would learn would be decided by all 60+. This is what democracy looks like, for better or worse. I will be returning to ES and the intersections I see with Lukumi and Ifa and adrienne is super clear to point out that she did not create the elements upon which ES relies, but rather has organized a nomenclature. For me, what it I see as brilliant and inspiring is that i see her taking her spiritual practice and worldview, practicing it and adapting it to the nonprofit sector as a model. I find it very inspirational. And, again, the capital intersections of my life I want to keep watching.
I am here in Detroit again this week for the Facing Race Conference with a contingent 
sponsored by The Geraldine Dodge Foundation and we are applying this approach I learned at #ESII3. The group has not oriented itself to Emerging Strategies and so we have not grouped ourselves according to its principles, but we are using the pod approach as a way to make the 3500 person conference smaller. In my pursuit of better understanding ES, I’ve begun reading Octavia Butler’s The Parable of Talents, which is a great inspiration for the ES method, and its interesting to see how the opening of the books is focused on a small group depending on itself for survival in a pretty dystopian future of 2032. Pretty sure this is not a coincidence.
Happy conference to us all. How big will our questions here get?
Also, I continue to hate my wordpress blog. Please ignore all the text changes. Gotdammit. I’ll call my posting practicing not pursuing the perfectionism of white supremacy culture as framed by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun. |-:
