The Principles of Emergent Strategy, Adapted for Healing Artists and Wild-Hearted Entrepreneurs
There's a book I keep coming back to, year after year, every time I need to remember how change actually works.
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown.
If you haven't read it, it's a love letter to the wisdom of living systems—how fungi networks communicate, how starlings murmur in the sky, how fractals repeat patterns at every scale. And woven through all of it is a question: What can the natural world teach us about building movements, organizations, and futures that actually sustain life?
adrienne maree brown offers nine principles drawn from emergence, from biomimicry, from paying attention to how nature organizes itself. And while she's writing primarily about social justice movements and collective organizing, I've found these principles to be equally essential for those of us building online businesses—especially if we're trying to build in a way that doesn't replicate the extraction we're trying to move away from.
Because here's what I've noticed: The same culture that's burning out activists is burning out entrepreneurs.
The pressure to scale quickly. The obsession with growth at all costs. The performance, the hustle, the constant visibility. The sense that if you're not doing more, reaching more, being more, you're failing.
And for wild-hearted practitioners—healers, ceremonialists, guides, creatives—who came to this work because we have medicine to offer, not because we want to be marketing machines, this culture is unsustainable.
We need a different way.
Not just a different marketing strategy, but a different logic. A different set of principles to build from. Principles rooted in how living systems actually work—how they grow, adapt, sustain themselves, and create conditions for flourishing.
This is what adrienne maree brown offers. And this is what I want to explore with you over the next nine weeks.
The Nine Principles of Emergent Strategy
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 resilience by building relationships)
Less prep, more presence.
What you pay attention to grows.
Over the next nine weeks, I'll be writing one post per principle, exploring what each one means in adrienne maree brown's framework and then translating it into worldbuilding language—showing you what it looks like to build an online business rooted in these principles rather than in extraction.
Why This Matters for Worldbuilding
If you've been following along with this work, you know that worldbuilding is not just about "branding" or "marketing." It's about creating coherent worlds and digital ecosystems that people want to inhabit, that reflect your medicine, that operate on principles of care and sustainability rather than extraction and depletion.
But how you build matters as much as what you build.
You can have a beautiful vision and still burn yourself out trying to force it into being. You can have deep medicine and still get lost in the noise of instant-ramen-barbie-business-coach culture. You can want to build differently and still find yourself replicating the same extractive patterns you're trying to escape.
This is where Emergent Strategy settles in…
These nine principles offer a different logic for building. They remind us that:
Small, tended carefully, is more powerful than big and scattered
Adaptation matters more than rigid planning
Relationships are the foundation of everything
Presence is more valuable than perfection
What we give our attention to is what flourishes
These aren't just nice ideas. They're how living systems work. And when we build our businesses as living systems—as worlds we tend rather than machines we optimize—we create something sustainable, resilient, and alive.
What to Expect
Each week, I'll share one principle. We'll explore what it means, what it looks like in extractive marketing culture (the pattern we're moving away from), and how to practice it in your worldbuilding (the pattern we're moving toward).
Some weeks will challenge you. Some will offer relief. All of them will ask you to slow down, pay attention, and tend the small with extraordinary care.
And at the end of nine weeks, my hope is that you'll have a clearer sense of how to build your business in a way that honors your medicine, your nervous system, and the living systems we're all part of.
