The Dynamics of Emergence

How do small, repeated actions lead to emergent change in a large, complex system?

Photo by Philipp Trubchenko on Unsplash

adrienne maree brown struck a chord when she popularized the concept of emergent strategy, giving greater visibility to a set of perspectives and practices held in common across complexity science, indigenous governance, and Black feminist and abolitionist organizing. brown’s concept of emergence includes the notion that our individual actions, no matter how small, can meaningfully shape change in a large, complex system.

But how does emergence actually work? Through what dynamics do repeated, small-scale interactions result in systemic change? And how can we cultivate the conditions for emergence in our social movement strategies?

In this essay, we explore these questions through a multi-dimensional theory of power as an emergent property of coordination. In particular, we discuss a form of emergent collective power that can shift the very architecture of participation in a system, bringing possibilities that were previously improbable, even unthinkable, into the zone of immediate viability.

This form of emergent systemic change cannot be engineered. It is a spontaneous ignition that cascades through a system when resonance among attuned actors reaches a tipping point of emergent amplification.

And this is the rub. If we really believe adrienne maree brown, and take seriously the idea that emergent strategy can be more than a buzzword, then we must be willing to imagine beyond the firmly entrenched mental models of strategy as being about precise analysis, brilliant design, and faithful execution. To seek emergence is to enter a realm in which the logic of control no longer holds.

The Problem with Conventional Strategies

Most models of strategy in the nonprofit and philanthropic world, whether explicit or implicit, are built on assumptions inherited from industrial management, colonial governance, and militarized logistics. They treat strategy as a plan to be executed, a series of controlled inputs meant to produce predictable outcomes. In this view, power is something held and used. It flows downward. It is organized through roles, mandates, and systems of accountability that aim to reduce uncertainty.

This framing is not neutral. It may be effective in some contexts, but it is deeply ill-suited to the complex, relational, and emergent nature of social change. Real transformation rarely follows a straight line. It emerges through nonlinear interactions between people, between stories, and between moments of rupture and renewal. Yet most organizational and movement strategies are designed to minimize those unpredictable elements, treating them as risks rather than sources of coherence.

As a result, even radical efforts can end up reproducing the very dynamics they oppose.

Beyond Power Over

Strategy is about coordination, and in today’s society, exercising Power Over other people and the natural world is the primary means of coordination.

But what if we reframed the logic of power? What if we opened our hearts and minds to other models of coordination?

Lying beyond Power Over are Power Within, the internal coherence and self-determination that allows a person to act with volitional clarity; Power With, which arises in the relational fields among attuned actors; and Power To, describing various facets of individual or group capacity to act. These forms of power are unlocked when we adopt more collective forms of coordination.

But Power Within, Power With, and Power To don’t fully explain the mechanics of how small interactions lead to meaningful change in the overall system. For this, we need Power Through.

Power Through

There are moments when harmony, understood not as sameness but as aligned diversity, holds immense potential. In these moments, coordination fields become charged, direction is clear, and participants sense themselves as part of a coherent social body. This harmony is not passive. It holds a charge, like a storm building in the atmosphere.

Power Through emerges when that charge finds a conductive path. The catalyst may be external, like a political rupture, a cultural flashpoint, or a material crisis. Or it may be internal, like a symbolic shift, a ritual, or a collective recognition that the time is now. The result is not a disruption of harmony, but a flowering from within it. Like the fruiting of mycelium or the crack of lightning, it signals a phase transition.

Power Through is not just collective action. It is a field phenomenon that describes when resonance conditions are met, and a circulating signal reorganizes the system. It reshapes meanings, relations, and pathways of interaction. Like a chemical catalyst, it doesn’t force change through effort, but alters the very route by which transformation occurs.

This shift does not originate from a single source. It emerges through dense relational fields, signal amplification, and shared thresholds of readiness. Power Through cannot be wielded, but is, instead, expressed as a system-wide shift toward new coherence.

Across disciplines, this dynamic is echoed: in systems thinking as emergence (Meadows, 2008), in network theory as coherence (Barabási, 2016), and in somatic psychology as the embodied flow of relational signals (Porges, 2011). Coordination, at its heart, is not about control. It is about resonance.

Power Through in Action

Emergent systemic change is not caused, but conducted. What appears sudden is often the expression of deep, slow, hidden preparation. Beneath the surface of every stagnant system lies a charged field of unexpressed potential, waiting not for permission, but for alignment.

Adaptive repatterning requires a kind of epistemic humility, a willingness to allow coherence to emerge rather than forcing it through predetermined scripts (Snowden, 2002).

Ultimately, Power Through is not something to be wielded; it is something to be witnessed, invited, and held open. It asks us not to dominate the current, but to become sensitive to its flow, to attune ourselves to the field, to hold space for emergence, and to know when to let go.

This isn’t just theory. It’s playing out around the world, where people are releasing themselves from the dominant ethos of control.

Case Study 1: Be Water Movement (Hong Kong, 2019–2020)

Core Trait: Sustained Power Through via Emergent Amplification

The “Be Water” movement, sparked by resistance to an extradition bill with mainland China, quickly evolved into a decentralized, adaptive protest ecology. Rather than centralized demands or leaders, the movement operated as a fluid swarm. Using the metaphor of water, in the sense of being formless, adaptive, and irrepressible, protestors coordinated in ways that could shift instantly in response to police movements, political shifts, or public sentiment. Their coherence was not dependent on hierarchy, but on a shared semiotic substrate: hand signals, memeforms, encrypted channels, and a culturally resonant mythos of resistance.

The movement used feedback-rich infrastructure (Telegram, LIHKG forums, crowd-sourced maps) to adjust in real-time. These tools allowed for rapid sensing and response without top-down command. Key tactics such as the “blossom everywhere” strategy (localized micro-protests) showed how distributed coherence amplified action. Protesters provided one another with aid, information, and moral support. Even artistic expressions like graffiti, Lennon Walls, and anthem chants functioned as coordination threads, binding individuals into a larger resonant pattern.

Power Through Qualities:

• High volitional clarity among participants

• Adaptive feedback loops, reprogrammability

• Internalized coordination protocols

• Resilience to co-optation or leadership capture

• Emergence of new protest archetypes, not mere repetition

The result was not only mass mobilization, but novel capability. The protestors operated as a dynamic coordination organism, able to confuse and evade authoritarian suppression longer than most would have predicted. Although ultimately suppressed by overwhelming state force, the movement produced lasting changes in global consciousness, protest culture, and digital resistance strategy.

Case Study 2: The Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), United States

Core Trait: Emergent Amplification Through Civic Infrastructure and Local Alignment

The Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) is a U.S.-based non-profit that supports communities in directly deciding how public funds are spent. Originating in Porto Alegre, Brazil, participatory budgeting has since been adapted globally, but PBP’s work stands out for how it cultivates Power Through not via spectacle, protest, or rupture, but through slow, resonant civic scaffolding.

PBP doesn’t impose solutions from above. Instead, it facilitates environments where communities can self-organize, deliberate, and allocate public money toward their collective priorities. Their model trains local government partners, supports community facilitators, and provides open-source digital tools that reduce gatekeeping. Over time, this approach shifts the role of government from a top-down provider to a coordinating partner in public will.

What makes PBP a Power Through case is its multi-scalar resonance. The organization catalyzes small-scale deliberation circles, such as school districts, city neighborhoods, and housing boards, but these pockets feed into larger learning ecosystems, shared protocols, and infrastructural trust. Participants internalize new political rhythms, build relational capacity, and gain coordination literacy. As this learning deepens, so does the community’s capacity to act as a collective agent, even outside the participatory budgeting process itself.

Unlike many nonprofits that deliver services or advocate on behalf of constituents, PBP amplifies latent collective capacity. It helps communities become something they were not before: a decision-making organism, capable of sensing, deliberating, and acting in shared interest. Over time, this has led to tangible shifts in how cities like New York, Chicago, and Seattle approach public engagement by engaging in grassroots coherence, reaching a threshold of institutional legitimacy.

Power Through Qualities:

• Internalization of participatory protocols across multiple communities

• Minimal central control, maximal facilitation of emergent agency

• Infrastructure that increases feedback fluency and volitional clarity

• Relational trust that compounds over time

• Durable reconfiguration of local governance without seizure of authority

This case is less about explosive transformation and more about cultivated emergence. It exemplifies how Power Through can unfold in quiet, structural ways, especially when organizations orient not toward control or representation, but toward resonance scaffolding and amplification of community threads.

Case Study 3: Black Lives Matter Uprisings (Global, 2020)

Core Trait: Distributed Outcry Redirected into Institutional Channels

Following the murder of George Floyd, protests exploded across the United States and the globe. What began as spontaneous, decentralized uprisings fueled by deep collective grief and rage quickly became one of the most visible mobilizations in modern history. Mutual aid networks, jail support groups, and local organizing cells activated in city after city, often without direct leadership. Street actions were sustained by memeform circulation (“I Can’t Breathe,” “Defund the Police”), digital witnessing (livestreams, TikToks, viral images), and real-time location coordination via group chats and encrypted tools.

At first, this resembled Power Through. The movement sparked cultural rupture, shifted public discourse overnight, and prompted genuine fear among power-holding institutions. For a brief window, coordination was emergent, leaderless, and infused with genuine volitional clarity and mutual support.

This mobilization resulted in a range of meaningful changes, large and small. After earlier blacklisting player Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee during the national anthem, the National Football League conceded it should have listened, and established a $250 million social justice initiative. The Minneapolis Public Schools board terminated its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department. The state of New York repealed a law that prevented public access to police misconduct records. Princeton University removed Woodrow Wilson’s name from two of its schools due to his racist thinking and policies (Benjamin, 2022).

However, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprisings also exemplify the vulnerability of Power Through to institutional capture, as energy began to be metabolized by pre-existing institutional structures. Media outlets shifted the narrative toward police reform, Democratic party figures redirected outrage into electoral politics, and large nonprofits emerged as official spokespersons of the “movement.”

Power Through Interrupted:

• High emotional energy, but volatile coherence

• Memetic resonance, but insufficient narrative sovereignty

• Feedback and mutual aid were present but outpaced by institutional capture

• Lacked infrastructural resistance to narrative hijacking

• Emergence gave way to absorption

Without mechanisms for sustaining narrative sovereignty or resisting institutional absorption, many local organizers found their momentum rechanneled into symbolic victories. Funds were raised, attention paid, but the deeper architectural changes demanded by many abolitionist organizers were often defanged or sidelined.

The Lessons

Power Through is not a singular phenomenon. It manifests in different ways depending on the domain of coordination. In movement contexts, Power Through often emerges through rupture, collective improvisation, and the rapid propagation of alignment across unpredictable terrain. In institutional contexts, by contrast, it takes on a slower, often quieter form that is built through patient cultivation of feedback loops, shared tools, and internalized protocols that shift the capacity of collectives over time.

The Be Water movement exemplifies tactical fluidity. It revealed how Power Through can emerge from memetic saturation, decentralized responsiveness, and a shared ethic of non-hierarchical adaptation. Here, coherence was forged in motion, and power was generated through swarm-like morphology. The conditions for amplification came not from pre-existing infrastructure, but from improvised, emergent alignment among bodies, ideas, and technologies under threat.

In contrast, the Participatory Budgeting Project demonstrates infrastructural coherence. Rather than igniting collective energy through crisis, it builds collective capacity by embedding resonant coordination structures into the civic substrate. Its model doesn’t depend on mass mobilization or aesthetic spectacle. Instead, it provides scaffolding for communities to internalize decision-making rhythms, increasing their capacity to act as deliberative agents. The feedback architecture is formalized but non-coercive, inviting Power Through to emerge incrementally, by expanding what people can do together in mundane, yet transformative, civic processes.

The BLM uprisings, finally, sit in a liminal space. Beginning with the kinetic intensity of movement-based Power Through, the entire movement ultimately encountered the friction of institutional logics that reabsorbed its force. Its partial capture by nonprofit gatekeepers, political campaigns, and media simplifications reflects how vulnerable Power Through is when not protected by strong narrative sovereignty or resistant infrastructure. In many places, what began as a powerful alignment dissolved into symbolic gestures and fragmented intentions.

BLM was not a simple failure, nor was it a clean success. It ignited movement-level Power Through, generated reforms, catalyzed learning, and seeded communities of practice. These changes mattered and continue to matter. At the same time, the movement encountered institutional capture that redirected energy toward symbolic performance and narrow policy contests. Our lens distinguishes transformation from reform. Transformation alters the system’s coordinating conditions. Reform improves outcomes while leaving those conditions mostly intact. By that measure, BLM tended the field and achieved reforms, while the architecture of Power Over persisted. Naming this is not dismissal. It is a diagnosis of why durable transformation requires strong narrative sovereignty and resistant infrastructure so that Power Through can resist absorption.

In Power Through terms, Be Water succeeded by keeping resonance tied to practice rather than identity. Its memeforms were tactical, instructive, and hard to commodify. Its decentralization was not just rhetorical but operational, embodied in every protest action. Its participants internalized principles that allowed coherence to emerge repeatedly, even under repression. BLM, by contrast, saw its resonance tied to identity symbols that could be commodified and institutionalized. Once those symbols were captured, the underlying field coherence fractured.

The key lesson is that Power Through is always vulnerable to refreezing. Whether through philanthropy, media, or state repression, emergent resonance can be redirected back into control. Be Water demonstrates that resisting capture requires tactical metaphors that guide behavior, not just symbols that carry emotion. It requires practices that are hard to commodify and a disciplined refusal to centralize even when recognition or resources tempt. BLM shows us what happens when a movement’s resonance is captured by existing institutions before it has time to solidify resilient field conditions.

What these three cases reveal is that Power Through is not defined by scale or visibility, but by how coordination amplifies latent potential into new forms of collective agency. Movements may surge and dissipate. Institutions may cultivate resonance slowly. But both, when aligned with feedback, volitional clarity, and distributed coherence, can become conduits for transformation that exceeds any individual actor’s intention.

Power Through and the 2024 Trump Victory: Beyond the Grand Plan

We would be remiss in not looking at Power Through at a much broader scale. Beyond movements and organizations, beyond even the limited time of an uprising. In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2024 return to the White House, a familiar narrative has circulated through liberal and progressive media spheres. It frames the moment as the culmination of a grand authoritarian plan, executed over decades by right-wing operatives who have played the long game while progressives chased fleeting wins. There is some truth in this story. After all, American conservatives have built a vast infrastructure of ideological production since the mid-twentieth century. From the American Enterprise Institute in 1943, to the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and the Koch-funded Cato Institute in 1977, the right has seeded a dense network of think tanks, policy shops, media platforms, and legal advocacy groups committed to shifting the American political landscape (Mayer, 2016; Teles, 2008).

The Powell Memo, drafted in 1971 for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by then-corporate lawyer (and future Supreme Court Justice) Lewis Powell, explicitly called for business elites to wage a long-term ideological war against labor, regulation, and the rising counterculture. Its logic became the scaffolding for conservative counterinsurgency: coordinate donors, influence universities, shape judicial appointments, and saturate the media environment with market-centric, hierarchy-reinforcing narratives. This project was not marginal. It was strategic. Over time, it provided the semantic and emotional infrastructure that would allow the far right to mutate into a full-blown authoritarian populism. But this is only part of the picture.

The “Grand Plan” narrative, though rooted in historical documentation, tends to obscure just how chaotic, inconsistent, and opportunistic the conservative movement has often been. The Republican Party has repeatedly fractured. Think tanks have fought over ideological purity. Movement evangelicals, fiscal conservatives, libertarians, and white nationalists have not always aligned. What ultimately emerged was not the result of flawless execution, but of cumulative coherence. The resonance came not from a singular blueprint, but from years of overlapping action, aligned affect, and reinforcement across culture, policy, and media. What we are witnessing is not the final chapter of a linear plan. It is a Power Through moment—a tipping point of field saturation in which alignment across disparate layers produces system-level transformation.

This framing does something crucial. It allows us to see that the rise of American authoritarianism was not simply engineered from the right. It was enabled by systemic coordination failures on the center-left. While Republicans were building ideological coherence, Democrats were hollowing out their working-class base. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1990s, the Democratic Party embraced neoliberalism, deregulated finance, signed punitive crime bills, advanced free trade policies that decimated domestic labor, and cultivated elite technocracy in place of grassroots democratic accountability (Frank, 2016; Stiglitz, 2012). Clinton-era triangulation may have been tactically effective, but it severed the party from the economic reality of millions. Obama’s presidency, though symbolically powerful, preserved the structure of corporate governance and doubled down on drone warfare, mass surveillance, and financial impunity. And by the time Biden took office, much of the party’s base was either demobilized, disillusioned, or drowning in precarity.

In Power Through terms, this is a case of secondary consequence saturation. Democrats did not directly engineer the rise of fascism, but their patterned behaviors of abandoning labor, legitimizing austerity, and suppressing protest movements created the conditions that made the MAGA movement feel credible and necessary to large swaths of the population. Liberal failure to address core housing, healthcare, debt, and ecological collapse needs, opened space for reactionaries to saturate the field with affective resonance. This was not a contest of plans. It was a contest of patterns.

Grievance, in particular, proved to be a potent tool of field alignment. Right-wing strategists, amplified by Fox News and talk radio ecosystems, harnessed white fear, Christian nationalism, and economic displacement into a common emotional register. MAGA did not emerge as a tactical innovation. It emerged as an affective consolidation. It provided identity, belonging, and coherence. This is the work of Power Through; affective alignment cascading through media, myth, and movement until a tipping point is reached.

Meanwhile, liberal organizations often reinforced fragmentation. Purity tests, internal discipline rituals, and policy abstraction left many unable to build shared direction. Where the right offered emotional coherence and repetition, the left offered dissonance and proceduralism. This contrast helps explain why the conservative field coalesced into political power, while progressive energy often dissipated.

A Power Through analysis gives us a more complete account of the 2024 outcome than the Grand Plan thesis alone. It shows us how decades of strategic saturation, no matter how uneven, combined with liberal complicity and structural abandonment, to produce a moment where authoritarianism could resonate at scale. It reveals how field dynamics are shaped by accumulation, not just intention. And it warns us that unless those seeking a new way of achieving positive and lasting change begin cultivating their own field through cultural saturation, affective coherence, and narrative infrastructure, they will remain trapped in a cycle of reactive opposition.

Power Through is not a force exclusive to justice. It is a resonance dynamic. It is always available, always active, and always responsive to what is practiced and repeated. The right understood this. The left must now learn it too.

Emergent Movement Strategy

Power Through cannot be imposed or commanded. It cannot be owned. But it can be cultivated.

What if, instead of habitually tightening our grip on planning and execution in this moment of upheaval, we learned to cultivate and trust in emergence instead? What if we treated strategy for systems change not as something to design and enact, but as something to tend?

We may surprise ourselves with the power we conduct when the conditions are ripe.

Investing in the conditions for emergent systems change involves strengthening relational infrastructure, cultivating resonance through narrative, and learning to embrace a governance of becoming.

Strengthening Relational Infrastructure

In a healthy forest ecosystem, fungal mycelia connects the roots of individual trees into a network that communicates, shares resources, and responds to internal and external stimuli. Similarly, relational infrastructure within social movements transforms a collection of otherwise independent actors into a mutually responsive system in which the state or behavior of each node affects the state or behavior of others.

This is important because, where relational infrastructure is present, there can be resonance. Resonance across an ecosystem grows when signals are received, amplified, and recirculated in ways that reinforce their structure across the network. And, when the conditions are right, resonance can ignite into emergent amplification, producing a convergence of attention, emotion, or action that shifts the disposition of the system as a whole.

This emergent coordination happens without central direction, and it produces systemic transformation that centralized, hierarchical coordination infrastructure could never hope to engineer.

Attuned Relationship

Relational infrastructure enables resonance when participants become attuned to one another. Attunement is a real-time orientation arising when participants fluidly sense and respond to emotional, symbolic, behavioral, or informational signals from one another.

Cohort programming, networks, convenings, coalitions, and tables help to put system actors into attuned relationship with one another. Organizing and civic engagement infrastructure, when based on empowerment and self-determination as opposed to extraction, can similarly nurture individuals into engaged participants within a resonant network.

These aren’t mailing lists, donor bases, or other centralized, one-way relationships. They aren’t mechanisms for implementing top-down coordination. Rather, they put sovereign actors into responsive relationship with one another. Not to direct or control, but to cultivate a distributed, situated, relational, and collective intelligence.

Frames vs. Fences

Futurist Eva Tomas Casado explains the difference between fences and frames in designing for emergence: Whereas a fence limits, a frame holds space. It provides a scaffolding of possibility, creating the conditions under which something new can take shape.

Some frames for emergence are tangible: Values-based social networks; spaces for collective imagination; protocols for working through disagreement, repair, and healing. These frames do not prescribe, they invite. They don’t constrain, they reinforce. They enable not broadcast and direction, but relationship and exchange.

Other frames are intangible: Shared values; compatible mental models; aligned intent; a sense of togetherness; spaciousness; love and joy. Intangible frames help us dream together. They give us hope and restore our energy. They help us access our Power Within and Power With one another.

If our hope is to cultivate emergent systemic change, then networks, coalitions, civic engagement infrastructure, and other relationship and coordination infrastructure must invest in both tangible and intangible scaffolding for emergence, even over satisfying desires for near-term, centralized direction and control.

Interlocking oppression, intersecting solutions

Social movements seek to solve the problem of interlocking systems of oppression, in which every problem can be considered a symptom of another problem. Yet movement responses have grown to be siloed, technocratic and, at times, adversarial. We are sometimes unable to hold the validity of other perspectives alongside our own, applying purity tests and othering those who could be our allies. The result is a collection of point interventions and siloed efforts that fail mightily in dismantling the many intersecting layers of oppression we face.

Emergent coordination with the power to transform systems requires a pluralism of perspectives and capacities within the network. Not homogeneity, but attuned diversity and togetherness in difference.

Issue-specific spaces, role-specific cohorts, think tanks, and other structures of focus and specialization have their value: they enable depth. But their thinking and work must remain in active, ongoing relationship with the broader system.

For relational infrastructure to enable intersecting solutions, it should first and foremost help us hold one another as full humans in this work. It should build belonging within diversity. It should help us resist the urge to call one another out when conflict arises, and instead constructively call in. It should build campfires big enough for all of us, or as the Zapatista movement puts it, build un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos—a world where many worlds fit.

Building Resonance Through Narrative

The moment of ignition in emergent change is marked by a surge of new behaviors, logics, and alignments that were not previously accessible within a coordination system. It occurs when resonance among actors reaches a threshold of intensity that releases the system’s latent tension and energy.

Resonance grows when behavioral, emotional, or informational signals within a system activate unrealized desires and unresolved tensions within participants. These signals pulse and reverberate through a network via a substrate of shared meaning—the narratives that give shape to ideas, logics, mental models, and possibilities. Over time, they prime the field for release, awaiting the moment when conditions align and give rise to a cascade of emergent transformation.

Imagining New Realities

“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.” – Ursula Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

We can’t build truly transformative narratives if we cannot even begin to imagine a world without prisons, without for-profit corporations, without borders and wars, and in which we meet human needs without overshooting planetary boundaries. For resonance to spark change that moves us toward such futures, we must first lay a foundation of new stories in society’s collective imagination.

This process requires symbolism and ideas that can be easily transmitted, recalled, and embedded in personal and collective meaning-making. “The most effective ideologies,” says transdisciplinary scholar Ruha Benjamin, “are those that need no police to enforce them, because we internalize and perpetuate them ourselves.” Just as the speed and intensity of a forest fire grows when it propagates through dense forest and abates when crossing open gaps, the density of our shared landscape of interpretation helps coherent future signals spread and amplify.

This cannot be a top-down process of narrative control. Public designer and researcher Simon Höher explains that “any narrative that can coordinate collective action must be open enough for others to claim and build upon. This openness is what makes collective meaning possible.” Instead of centralization, then, we need dedicated imagination infrastructure to support distributed, relational sense-making of ideas and ideologies.

Lighting Beacons

Some nodes in a network are beacons of the new world, bright lights emanating proof and possibility into the field, beckoning the system into new futures.

Communities building mutual aid networks, worker cooperatives, collective childcare models, and bioregional networks are beacons. Organizations learning how to manage not from control, but from care are beacons. Individuals rejecting their societal conditioning and embracing liberatory leadership are beacons.

Each of these network nodes make new narratives more compelling through substance and relevance, which they can do because they are already bringing the new world to life. They are putting values, ethos, and imagination into action, figuring out how to work differently—and proving it is possible to do so.

“This moment calls on us,” says attorney and organizer Andrea Ritchie, “to practice new ways of relating, new forms of governance, and new modes of being that enable the worlds we want to emerge instead of relying on top-down, law and policy-based strategies that are mired in the illusion that we can change systems and institutions doing exactly what they were created to do.” Beacon nodes, in other words, are required to prime the network for emergent repatterning.

Embracing a Governance of Becoming

We inhabit a liminal space in which the critical importance of emergent change requires us to release control, but in which we have inherited institutions and practices built on precisely the logic of control.

To navigate this liminal space, we need what Indy Johar has called a “governance of becoming.” It reframes the fundamental premise of human coordination from central direction and outcome delivery to purposeful exploration amidst relational resilience.

Governing for emergence shifts us, as Eva Tomas Casado has put it, “from ‘let’s build the answer’ to ‘let’s build a hypothesis and stay in relationship with what unfolds.’”

This frame reorients traditional dimensions of coordination in significant ways:

• Strategy transforms from solution and plan into a continuous journey of purposeful becoming, navigated in constant relationship with internal and external ecosystems.

• Leadership shifts from directing activities to holding participants with care on the journey.

• Management becomes not a tool of control but of stewardship of the conditions for generative exchange.

• Membership in a movement or organization (for example, in employment) becomes not about transaction and extraction, but about reciprocity and co-creation. It is based not on homogeneity and purity, but solidarity across difference.

Alignment Without Control

Under a governance of becoming, alignment is achieved not through command, control, and compliance, but through coherence. Coherence is not about exacting specification of roles, actions, and timelines, but about consenting togetherness in common or at least mutually compatible purpose. It is the ability to move in resilient relationship with one another on multiple, directionally aligned paths. It is the emergence of novel network capacities that differ from and exceed the aggregated capacities of a network’s parts.

Coherence can’t be imposed. We can only create the conditions for it to emerge from relational attunement, feedback loops, and shared frameworks of meaning among network participants.

Goals, in this paradigm, are not targets—not fixed, highly specified end-states that draw punishment if not actualized. Instead, goals serve as orientation points, understood to be “fuzzy,” provisional, and evolving.

Decisions shift form, too. Under command and control, leaders decide meaning and attempt to explain that meaning to followers. Under coherence, meaning is instead collectively conferred to a decision through ongoing, distributed, situated, and relational processes.

Purposeful Exploration

Governing for emergence is not about mechanical execution of a master plan, but about purposeful navigation of the adjacent possible, a concept coined by theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher Stuart Kauffman to describe the successive frontiers of immediate possibilities we encounter as we move through time. Navigating the adjacent possible is about taking the next step, and the next, and the next, iteratively sensing, reorienting, acting, and learning, to both respond to and shape our unfolding reality.

While navigating the adjacent possible rejects certainty and linearity, it also rejects meandering without intent. It involves operating at multiple speeds, with a simultaneous orientation toward stability and agility across different regions and scales of the ecosystem. Some structures and work require a bias toward consistency and reliability, such as core infrastructure. Others may require a bias toward variety, rapid experimentation, and discovery, such as in the design of community-facing services and rapid-response programming.

Holding Tension Without Collapse

Moving together amidst difference and disagreement necessarily generates tension, conflict, and even harm. A governance of becoming requires the ability to engage these dynamics without fragmentation and without reverting to top-down mandate when differences arise.

Holding tension without collapse requires thoughtful design of how we work. It requires us to create brave spaces that, rather than entitling people to comfort, encourages them to turn towards each other to engage divergent ideas, acknowledge multiple truths, and repair harm. It requires loving accountability, rooted in interdependence and care, not coercion and punishment. In turn, this involves the important inner work, within ourselves and our organizations, of embodying ways of being that reflect the transformation we seek in the world.

Crossing the Threshold

“There is a subtle threshold we cross when we begin to trust that coordination can emerge without control. That shared intention does not require shared instruction. That meaning can proliferate in conversation, in gesture, in silence built not through consensus or structure, but through resonance…

And then, sometimes, without warning, it blooms. Not as a single event. Not as revolution-as-spectacle. But in waves. Resonant, uneven, overlapping. One node finds coherence, and another follows—not by imitation, but by attunement. Not because someone organized it, but because the conditions have ripened.”

– Pieter de Beer and Lea Bonheim in Co-Creation Requires Open Ended Trust

Power Through is not the only path to systemic change, nor the only way that emergence can present. But it is a form of power that has often been fundamentally misunderstood, and it can open an entire realm of possibility for systemic change if we open ourselves to it.

In this moment of urgency, threat, and anxiety, will we have the courage to trust in emergence? Will we maintain a devotion to the work of tending the field, even when we cannot know when that field will fruit and what fruit it will bear?

What Power Through offers us is not a blueprint, but a soil practice. It teaches us that change is not always about control, not always about design. Sometimes it is about becoming the kind of field through which coherence can travel. Sometimes it is about tending threads we may never see woven into final form. This is not a passive stance. It is an active, devoted cultivation of conditions where the unexpected becomes possible.

We are not called to wait. We are called to saturate. To offer stories, gestures, infrastructures, and relationships that pulse with the values we refuse to let die. To resist the panic of prediction and plant what resonates now. Because Power Through is not the power of later—it is the power of pattern, already in motion, already at work through us and around us. It does not ask us to engineer the future. It asks us to midwife it.

References

Barabási, A.-L. (2016). Network science. Cambridge University Press.

Beer, T. (2021). The adaptive strategy framework: Navigating strategy in complexity. Center for Evaluation Innovation.

Benjamin, R. (2022). Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want. Princeton University Press.

brown, a.m. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01

Frank, T. (2016). Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? Metropolitan Books.

Gorbis, M. (2018). The future of strategy: Sensing and navigating in a complex world. Institute for the Future.

Le, V. (2022). We need to talk about power dynamics in funding. Nonprofit AF.

https://nonprofitaf.com

Mayer, J. (2016). Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday.

Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W.W. Norton & Company.

Siegel, D. J. (2020). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Silvestri, N. (2019). The soil and the harvest: Reframing metrics in social impact work. Soil and Shadow.

Stiglitz, J. E. (2012). The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. W. W. Norton & Company.

Teles, S. (2008). The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law. Princeton University Press.

Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.