adrienne maree brown outlines the principles of emergent strategy, drawing from the Earthseed verses in Octavia Butler’s Parables series, as well as other sources as diverse as Bruce Lee, Lao Tzu, and Rihanna:

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.

There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.

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.

brown, Emergent Strategy, page 41

That brown draws these principles from so many different sources pretty much guarantees that they aren’t revolutionary; but I find myself returning back to the collection often, and thinking about what it means to commit not to any one of them, but to them all.

We read fiction because it’s fun to read, of course; but enjoying it doesn’t obviate the need to understand how it works, and to recognize which stories do harm, and which might light a path to something better:

Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice. We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. All organizing is science fiction. If you are shaping the future, you are a futurist. And visionary fiction is a way to practice the future in our minds, alone and together.

Visionary fiction is neither utopian nor dystopian, indeed it is like real life: Hard, realistic…Hopeful as a strategy. Visionary fiction disrupts the hero narrative concept that one person (often one white male, often Matt Damon) alone has the skills to save the world. Cultivate fiction that explores change as a collective, bottom-up process. Fiction that centers those who are currently marginalized—not to be nice, but because those who survive on the margins tend to be the most experientially innovative—practicing survival-based efficiency, doing the most with the least, an important skill area on a planet whose resources are under assault by less marginalized people. Visionary fiction is constantly applying lessons from our past to our future(s).

brown, Emergent Strategy, page 197

It’s notable here how brown calls out why fiction should center the marginalized: “not to be nice,” she says, or not because it’s the right thing to do, to correct a long held imbalance (which is, on it’s own, a very good reason), and not because it’s more interesting and breaks up the boredom of endless Matt Damons (which I would also posit is a perfectly good reason). But because doing so maximizes the opportunities for survival, by drawing from the experiences of people who by definition have to be more creative and resourceful with the few resources they have.

Not all good fiction meets brown’s criteria; but often the best fiction does, and we would be wise to consider what kinds of fiction we draw from (consciously or otherwise) when thinking about the future we want to live in.

One of the principles I come back to over and over is adrienne maree brown’s invitation to move at the speed of trust. That is, whenever attempting any effort with other people, prioritize building trust and respect for each other over and above any other goal. The trust forms the foundation from which the work can grow.

In Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz gets at another angle of this principle: that often when we argue over how to engage with one another, our expressed desire to be right—to “win” the argument—is really a thinly veiled need to be cared for:

Our attachment to our own sense of rightness runs deep, and our capacity to protect it from assault is cunning and fierce. It is hard, excruciatingly hard, to let go of the conviction that our own ideas, attitudes, and ways of living are the best ones. And yet, ironically, it’s mainly relinquishing this attachment that is difficult and uncomfortable—not, generally speaking, what happens afterward. This provides a crucial clue about the origins of our desire to be right. It isn’t that we care so fiercely about the substance of our claims. It is that we care about feeling affirmed, respected, and loved.

The conflation of these things—wanting to be right with wanting to be valued—helps explain why disagreements within intimate relationships can feel not just like betrayal, but like rejection. That’s one reason why silly squabbles over the dishes sometimes blow up into epic battles about whether our partner listens to us, understands us, and cares for us. The moral here is obvious: we can learn to live with disagreement and error as long as we feel esteemed and loved.

Schulz, Being Wrong, page 271

I’d expand on that last bit, and argue it also helps explain why small work squabbles—whether over project management tools, or desk assignments, or the taxonomy of Slack channels—have a similar tendency to bloom into battles over whether we have sufficient autonomy, respect, and power. This is not to say that our experience of intimacy at work is anything like our experience of intimacy at home. (Although, as I’ve argued in the past, I can and do think love can show up at work.) It is to say that our relationships at work are not somehow diminished simply by arising from work. We demand trust and respect at home, in the streets, and in our workplaces—and rightly so.

To flip this around, if we want to build cultures where productive disagreement can happen—whether it’s about the dishes, or the ideal code architecture, or which lines of business to invest in—we have to first establish and nurture that trust and respect. Otherwise we’ll be too busy being right to get around to learning something new.