Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

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Brown is not at all afraid of hierarchy. Levels of expertise vary and there is nothing wrong in this vision with experts being experts. But it’s a passing thing. This work isn’t about creating stars or experts but facilitating positive evolution. So the old post-modern fear of hierarchy is not useful for this, but also, authoritarian structures are not useful either.

A seasoned and engaging executive coach and facilitator, Ros’s expertise spans strategic planning, leadership development, organisational culture, change management, emotional intelligence and employee engagement. Find out more about Ros here. It is imperative to regenerate our curiosity, our genuine interest in different opinions, and in people we don't know yet--can we see them as part of ourselves, and maintain curiosity, especially when we want to constrict and critique?" (115) Emergent Strategy uses resilient biological systems to inspire strategies for social justice groups. The book is organized in an almost folkloric fashion, peppered with stories and innuendoes and reflections and other ideas how to grow healthy justice movements. I am reluctant to offer too heavy a critique against work that has such honest motivations and many good ideas. You have the right to create boundaries that generate more possibilities for you. Those boundaries may be short term or permanent." (141) Typically, change management should be implemented whenever an organisation plans to implement a change that will interrupt or alter day-to-day operations. Some examples of this include the following:With patience and practice, even complex behaviors can be mastered using the shaping technique. What Is Shaping Psychology? In emergent strategy, relationships are everything (p. 28). Brown builds from her mentor Grace Lee Boggs’ teaching to focus movements on critical connections rather than critical mass. The underlying perspective here is that the relationships between “things” are as real as the things themselves. I’m also reading John Dewey, whose work on aesthetics is so closely tied to that of the pragmatist mystic William James. It his short programmatic piece on pragmatism, James articulated just this. Long long ago. When I first read James’s Radical Empiricism, I thought he might have gotten his metaphysics from the theory of the skandas, or from his reading of the Upanishads, though it’s been 15 years since I read that so I’m no longer sure where I got that idea. In any case, there is a line of mystical knowledge here, and the knowledge is that the connections between things are as real as the things themselves. This idea is incredibly grounding and nurtures effective action in the world. It nurtures the perspective that relationship is everything. Many change initiatives may require extensive training, especially in the case of implementing new technologies, tools, procedures, etc. This can be incredibly daunting to employees, who may not feel as if they have sufficient knowledge around a new task or the appropriate abilities to perform a new responsibility with success. Organisations can reassure their teams by providing significant training where needed. Leaders may find that more than one training session may be needed, but giving employees ample amount of time to adapt can ease the change process and help keep up morale.

Bring your team along and align on what it means to have a thriving work culture and transform your workplace into a hub of creativity, collaboration, and getting stuff done! One of the behavioral techniques used to shape children’s acceptable behavior is differential reinforcement of successive approximations. Are you interested in how you can support teams whose task and skill profiles are changing to become fit for the future? Through shaping, children can learn new skills and positive behavior incrementally, often with their primary caregiver serving as the initial model. I did find a number of quotes that I liked, my favourite being: "When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient."Compelling futures have to have more justice, yes; and right relationship to planet, yes; but also must allow for our growth and innovation. I want an interdependence of lots of kinds of people with lots of belief systems, and continued evolution." (57) A change to an employee’s tools and tasks. There’s comfort in familiarity, and even if the tools an employee daily uses are out-of-date or not as efficient as they could be, changing them can be incredibly disruptive, as the employee now has to acquire expertise for an entirely new resource. The same applies to changes to an employee’s work content, such as adaptations to the tasks they regularly perform, their work cadence, or even their working calendar.