On Fractals, Power & Embodying New Worlds
My AuDHD brain tends to read books in dialogue with each other. This week it keeps circling back to the concept of fractals — one of the change strategies I deeply resonated with when I first read adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy: “what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale.”
The spiral started with the Eastern Evaluation Research Society conference I attended last Thursday/Friday, which opened with a plenary by Emily Gates and Min Ma on “Fractal Patterns: Zooming In and Out to Find Our Way as Evaluators.” And a wave of connections followed…
💡 In their presentation Gates and Ma referenced Emergent Strategy, which nudged me to revisit brown’s book. In the chapter on fractals, she shares Grace Lee Bogg’s quote: “Transform yourself to transform the world.” And adds:
“This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet.”
Our day-to-day is a fertile place for learning and doing differently, for practicing more just and liberatory ways of showing up — with ourselves, each other, our communities, our organizations. Ping.
💡 Off my brain went to this passage from Cyndi Suarez’s book The Power Manual:
“Power is, first of all, relational. [...] Power is not about the rule of law, institutions, society, or the state. These are simply the dead forms, or artifacts, that result from past power-laden interactions, or confrontations.”
This makes me think of how the way that we interact with/confront the people in our day-to-day lives reverberates (to use brown’s word) to shape society at large. In other words, how we relate to and handle our power at a “small” scale accretes into the broader institutions and systems we then collectively have to live within. Ping.
💡 Back to the new book I started reading last week: Adam Kahane’s Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems, specifically the chapter on collaborating with unlike others:
“Almost everyone who talks about transforming systems talks about collaborating with unlike others. But one of the reasons such collaboration is harder to implement than to talk about is that it requires working skillfully with power, which many people find difficult, distasteful, or even dangerous.”
Yes! Power is complex. In The Little Book of Power, Liz Scarfe talks about power at its most basic as being about “having choice and control” (personally, I’d love to swap out “control” for “autonomy” in this definition). Yet power also exists in different forms, draws from different “bases” (see French & Raven’s Bases of Power), and operates differently depending on its level of visibility and the spaces and social/political contexts in which it’s wielded (see John Gaventa’s Finding the Spaces for Change: A Power Analysis). It takes time and practice to recognize this complexity in action, to skillfully work with power (our own and others’), and to not just default to the all too prevalent dominant/dominating paradigm of power. Ping.
💡 On to Trust Kids! Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy, an anthology edited by carla joy bergman. In their essay “Anarchy Begins At Home,” Idzie Desmarais reflects on the need to de-couple the idea of “power as responsibility” from the practice of control/management (echoing Paulo Freire’s rejection of the “banking” model of education in Pedagogy of the Oppressed):
“In the years I have spent writing about more respectful and liberatory ways of relating to children, I have often encountered those who liken not seeking to control kids with neglect, as if adults recognizing that children are people must necessitate a lack of involvement. I imagine this is because most adults are accustomed to relating to young people entirely through a lens of control and management, and when they envision taking that away, they think there would be nothing left. Yet the recognition that children deserve trust and respect does not mean adults abdicate all responsibility toward them: instead, it means they recognize that their responsibility, with the incredible position of power they hold, is to nourish, care for, support, facilitate, and trust the young people in their lives. Easier said than done, but it is something that should be the goal of all people, of all ages, when existing in caring relationships with each other.”
And we come full circle, with a concrete example of exactly what brown highlighted in the Emergent Strategy chapter on fractals: how our day-to-day relationships are a “front line” for practicing power, learning/unlearning, and experimenting with ways to embody a more liberatory world. Ping.
All of the above brings me back to a question I often find myself sitting with…
What shifts when our relationship to power shifts?
We know what happens when the predominant relationship to power is one of scarcity, control, and “power over.” We’re living it.
But what new ways of being, relationships, institutions, and systems become possible when more and more of us begin to relate to power as liberatory? (Cyndi Suarez writes about liberatory power in depth too, I can’t recommend her book enough.) Power as a practice that affirms the dignity of each person’s “power within,” that centers the “power to” act in each of us, and emphasizes building “power with” through collaboration, relationship, and solidarity. Imagine a world of this.