Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Before she was an NYT bestselling author, adrienne was known for her work as a facilitator, mediator, and teacher. She still travels the country helping organizations, especially Black organizations, clarify their goals, articulate their values, and negotiate conflicts. This work is based on her theory of Emergent Strategy and often takes the shape of multi-day workshops called "Emergent Strategy Immersions." In adrienne's verson, facilitation and mediation aren't simply tools for organizations, they are life skills that we all must practice, and through which the goals and values of organizations will align with those of the individuals within them. This is to say that this is not just a book for nonprofits. Her core audience has been requesting a book on applying Emergent Strategy to facilitation and mediation work for a long time. This book will serve as a textbook for the many workshops adrienne gives each year and a primer for everyone else. The book is a deeper dive into practicing Emergent Strategy in real time, drawing from the lessons of her facilitation work, and a year and a half of experiments with immersing people into emergent strategy community through her Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute. The book will be intriguingly structured, with the introduction (or Heart) in the middle and the front and back halves of the book devoted to Facilitation and Mediation respectively. Beyond that, it borders on a choose-your-own-adventure book in that the lessons are brief and to the point, highly practical, and you can move through the book in a number of ways to meet your needs. Adrienne's approach is rooted in a Black feminist worldview. These days, the world is hungry to hear more about that worldview and to take leadership and learn best practices from it.

Genres: Nonfiction, Social Justice, Leadership, Activism, Politics, Psychology, Theory

198 pages, Paperback

First published April 22, 2021

About the author

adrienne maree brown is the author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She is the cohost of the How to Survive the End of the World and Octavia’s Parables podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit.

Reviews

[Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a couples and family therapist - this book obviously wasn't aimed at me but I found some parts to be very helpful in my work. It also sparked many interesting conversations about what *wasn't* translatable or applicable to talk therapy and why.

For such a small book, it took me quite a while to get through! I often found myself only getting through one sentence then staring off into space thinking about what it could mean for me (in a good way!).

[Tibby]

A slim volume that packs a lot. The book is divided into two halves, one that offers more personal style essays from a variety of Black women who have done facilitation and mediation work in movement spaces for years. They don't offer advice per se, but do add context to the work and address specific aspects that they have dealt with. For me, I surprised myself and liked this part the best and found it most useful.

The second half is more specific to facilitation and mediation and offers more concrete skills, questions, and advice for doing those things under a variety of circumstance. This is why I bought the book, to help in a specific community situation that called for facilitation. There is a chart toward the front, several actually, that can help point you in the right direction in this second half. It was a good jumping off point, but I ended up finding useful pieces in other sections too. Interestingly this section, while it seemed like it should be straightforward, actually felt like each section required a lot of rumination and journalling to apply to the situation I am in. I don't say that as a drawback at all, just that I expected to be able to wholesale take the talking points and apply them and that was not how it worked at all. In someways the wisdom here required just as much thought as the wisdom section.

A book I found incredibly profound and useful and will return to again and again.

[Lisa Kentgen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gave it 4 stars rather than 5 primarily because the book is less for a general audience. For those who are interested in the critically important work of facilitation, 5+ stars. I read it for a chapter I am writing on skillful ways to navigate conflict - and this is loaded wisdom.

[Alissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super solid guide to facilitation, one that I wish I had when I was doing a lot of facilitation work. There's some practical knowledge here on agendas and scheduling, but mostly a theoretical framework to guide facilitation that puts the emphasis on the group rather than the individual.

[Nadav David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful resource I want to return to in my work and organizing with various types of groups. There are many beautifully written essays about group dynamics, boundaries as a facilitator, when/how to offer mediation, and how we create nourishing and impactful group spaces. There are also tangible and specific tools to integrate with groups. My favorite pieces were “Facilitation as Experiments in Culture Creation” by Sage Crump, “Stepping Up, Stepping In: Facilitating for Freedom” by Makani Themba, and “To Give your Hands to Freedom, First Give Them to Grief” by Malkia Devich-Cyril. Two things that were more challenging for me- the format felt choppy at times, i was hoping for specific pieces to go deeper and offer examples, and there seemed to be a gap in deeply addressing in-group facilitation (rather than external facilitation) which I would’ve loved to hear more about.

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

i am grateful for amb’s adept mind and deliberate offerings to folks in movement spaces. this is a useful follow up to emergent strategy (which i would def recommend folks read first) that offers applications to group work that i sorely needed. the section on Black feminist wisdom was a gorgeous offering. i thought the second section that applied emergent strategy to different facilitation tactics could have been structured better — i would have grouped facilitation separately from mediation, as those skills are so distinct, and i would have moved the cliffnotes of emergent strategy closer to their relevant practical application settings. i also just wanted more practical tools — more sample agendas, more useful questions, more examples of getting it wrong.

[Chris Linder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can’t miss with amb. I have always wanted a book for my classes about facilitation and this is it. When I FINALLY get back to teaching full time this will be a go to. And I think it will stand the test of time. amb makes me see the ways that I am a spiritual person, tho I resisted that idea for years, not having found the right connection to the word “spiritual.”

[Kenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm so thankful to have read this resource as I step into a facilitation role in my workplace. There are so many nuggets of wisdom in here that I wish I read this sooner but I'm also so glad I read it right now.

This book is a resource for facilitators (defined in the book as people who hold space for others) on helping to shape and create meaningful spaces for groups. This book does use adrienne maree brown's book Emergent Strategy as a backdrop, but there is a lot uncovered and shared in this book that it could still be read without it. It's organized into a few different sections: an introduction to the principles of facilitation and mediation, a few assessments someone can do about a group's dynamics, a section of essays written by different Black women about facilitation and mediation work, and a final section of essays on different methods for facilitation and mediation.

One of the main takeaways I have from reading this book is how leading with vulnerability allows others the permission to lead with their truths and whole selves. I would love to have this as a resource to keep coming back to, I feel like I would find new pieces of wisdom with each re-read.

I was itching for some more tangible resources for facilitating a group's first meeting or establishing goals or shared vision of group dynamics a few weeks into knowing each other or how to revisit conversations around shared goals throughout the time knowing each other or how to implement these strategies in a professional context where there are sometimes stricter deadlines and concrete goals- but that's also a personal desire of mine that I've been thinking about as I facilitate a space I'm in!

Nuggets I want to hold onto (personal notes of quotes and ideas from the book I want to come back to and ruminate on):
-"To hold change is to make it easy for people with shared intentions to be around each other and move towards their vision and values (facilitate) and/or to navigate conflict in a way that is generative and accountable (mediate)."
-Less prep, more presence
-Release "your" way to feel "the" way
-Create a culture of celebration- pivot towards pleasure, critique is important but can be detrimental if it is the dominant force
-Be the grounding presence in the room
-"Facilitation is a way of listening through and beyond the words being spoken, feeling for the current of longing underneath what can be spoken, listening through the fear, listening through the scar tissue: What is possible? What is the next step towards that possibility?"
-"As the facilitator, you need to be a presence that the whole room can trust- trust to be present, on time, on purpose, trust to be a neutral person to whom anyone in the room can bring concerns, feedback, and ideas"
-"People often think they need to take action when they actually need to build relationship"
-"Our work as facilitators is to help every group find ways to generate intimacy, deepen relationship, and learn respect for each other. Each connection between two people in the room is a thread, and as they connect, the group can weave into a fabric strong enough to hold the collective through change and crisis".
-Ask questions to help people unveil their collective longings
-Build agendas that can breathe and pivot
-Release perfection
-Learn to acknowledge what is happening not what you planned to happen
-"Intimacy is the closeness present when you can be yourself, be honest about your needs, and share the layers and details of what you are feeling and why you behave the way you do, particularly when you feel mistaken, hurt, or not in control"
-"When a group shares nothing about their personal lives at all, it is very difficult to break patterns of independence, isolation, martyrdom, and burn out. It's also very difficult to generate authentic connections, because people are intentionally trying to repress their truth."
"Interdependence and decentralization are present in the room when the care is mutual, vision is held by each person, and people can speak their needs and be supported in having them met".

[Hannah Bergstrom de Leon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Black Feminist Wisdom essays are incredible, particularly Malkia Devich-Cyril's on grief. The later portion of the book serves as a continuation of Emergent Strategy with accessible resources and inspiration to further integrate this type of being in the world into your own life and institutions. A helpful resource that will find it's place on my desk.

[Sarah Dennis · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The presence of difference in this phase of human history, unfortunately, and too often, leads to harm. Difference is, quite probably, the main thing we need to get comfortable with, and good at, if we hope to survive as a species.
We are an ecosystem, being told we should be a monocrop. We have some inkling that this bad advice is costing us everything, but so far the majority of us are not convinced enough to take urgent action. Facilitating across difference might be the most urgent work we can do right now”. Although this book presents itself as a facilitation handbook, its also a guide to deep relationship with self and others. An incredible companion to her previous title Emergent Strategy.

[luca verano · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was deeply moved by the Black womxnist writing in this book. I was deeply moved by the description of the experience of Black doulas, femmes, women, and mediators; how they create life and hold space to create change in spaces larger than ourselves.
I really enjoyed the assessment tools and techniques given to the reader. Certainly helpful for folks who are holding space for others and who are interested in creating change.

[Jalisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had this book for a number of years and participated in an emergent strategy facilitation training, but haven't had the chance to read the book from cover to cover before now. I truly believe the universe brings you to a book when its the right time to read it because I got so much from it this time around. I'm using the book as a guide through my own professional facilitation work and also to inform how I hold space as a friend, partner, and family member. For me this book is really about getting in right relationship with change and each other. To center the ways we hold space and create containers around seeing the divinity in ourselves and one another. adrienne maree brown says "to 'hold change' or 'hold space' is to hold both the people in, and the dynamic energy of , a room, a space, a meeting, an organization, an movement. To hold change is to make it easy for people with share intentions to be around each other and move towards their vision and values (facilitate), and/or to navigate conflict in a way that is generative and accountable (mediate)...facilitation is making it as easy as possible for group groups of people to do the hard work of dreaming, planning, visioning, and organizing together."
I really appreciate that the book mixes tactical suggestions, assessments, rubrics and questions, with wisdom from people who have been facilitating for some time. As always Prentis Hemphill and Alexis Pauline Gumbs words served as a re-centering. Their words will definitely serve as a reference guide that I will return to again and again. Some of my favorite quotes and questions from the book are:

"How do we attend to generating the ease necessary to help us move through the inevitable struggles of life and change? How do we practice the art of holding others without losing ourselves?"

"Every facilitator is a doula, easing some necessary rebirth organizational, political, interpersonal, r otherwise for some folks who want change."

"some of us are called to hold the containers in which life transforms and the future unfolds."

"...we begin by listening; we presume our power not our powerlessness; wherever there is a problem, there already people working on the solution; center and follow the innovative solutions that come from those living in intersecting crises, because those solutions work in the widest range of conditions."

"I am a commitment to trusting love the way I trust gravity."

"We learn through an accumulation of lessons. We change through an accumulation of practices...release perfection. The idea of iteration is that we are repeating - not failing, but practicing and learning."

"One of our facilitation roles is to help groups remember that they are not the first humans to try to change the world, have a vision, wrestle with philanthropy, grow, have a financial crisis, have internal conflict, contradiction, and/or combustion, or to end. If groups can grasp that others have tried and experienced all of these things, they can return to curiosity and experimentation."

"You learn to wield your power thru surrender, particularly of limiting internal logic, imposter syndrome and the tools of the disconnected. If you are connected, there is less to figure out, less to analyze. To be a sacred being is to be connected...part of your work is to remind everyone of their sacred selves."

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some quotes:

“What you pay attention to grows. Bring attention to the small, to each step people make towards each other, towards their work. Make room for many possibilities, especially early in a process. Help groups learn to tolerate many paths in the pursuit of best options, versus reducing to less satisfying solutions in the rush to end the discomfort of the unknown. Bring attention to presence and the allot meant of solutions. Change is constant.”

“…the real problem is so much simpler and also so much harder to see: we think we agree because we think we mean the same things with our words, but we don’t. The fissure is there long before the conflict arises.”

“Some of this ego is born out of insecurity. By moving from point to point but barely being anywhere, we can make ourselves look and feel important, covering the truth that we often don’t know what we’re doing, how to contribute, or what our value is outside of constant production.”

“Perfection is a commitment to habitual self-doubt. - Prentis Hemphill”

“People assume moving at the speed of trust means moving slowly all the time, but I’ve found the opposite to be true. At first, trust and relationship building take time. As we share our stories, work together, uphold our commitments and follow through on our tasks, respond to pressures, and support each other, we begin to move faster because we know what’s important, what our skills are, and what our collective magic looks like.”

“Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it. -James Baldwin”

“Often the grumpiest person in the room is the one with the most tangible vision, or the most need for our efficient and impactful work. I love my apparently hopeless participants, they remind me that it is egregious the amount of radical time we waste in bad process, the amount of community attention capital we squander. Real relationships make it harder to waste each other’s time. Real relationships are a building block of hope that can change material conditions.”

“I believe there is also a practice of power under — that we can get comfortable in the role of subservience, subordination, not even imagining that we could be in equitable relationships of power. From this place we weird our power through venting, complaints, and dissatisfaction. Instead of just listening to our comrades take a consistent stance of power under, how can we invite people into held space in order to clear their dissonance?”

[Larkin Tackett · Rating 4 out of 5]

adrienne maree brown is one of a handful of authors who help me really understand the complexity of life. Holding Change, a follow-up to her Emergent Strategy, is about an approach to facilitation of mediation. My copy is full of highlights and insights. Here is a key description of the work from the opening:

To "hold change" or "hold space" is to hold both the people in, and the dynamic energy or, a room, a space, a meeting, an organization, a movement. To hold change is to make it easy for people with shared intentions to be around each other and move towards their vision and values (facilitate), and/or to navigate conflict in a way that is generative and accountable (mediate).

Central to her approach is "what Espinosa Jones calls a 'relationship culture." Meaning: a culture of noticing and acknowledgement."

"Release perfection, which Prentis Hemphill describes as 'a commitment to habitual self-doubt.' The idea of iteration is that we are repeating--not failing, bur practicing and learning. And with each repetition there are things to learn, notice, grow from. Love the body that does the practice, love the imbalance that yields to balance, love the shaking muscles that grow strong, love the fumbling tongue that becomes fluent, love the chaos that fins and organize and exciting center. Let love show up and change the possibilities."

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the first half of this book last fall as I was starting to facilitate again after a very long break (after a very bad experience facilitating) because I felt like I needed to brush up on my facilitation skills. In very typical Adrienne Maree Brown fashion the flow is quite winding and unstructured, but its packed with wisdom and insight. As I read this late summer/early fall, I could feel it supporting me in the different groups I was facilitating and finishing the last two sections today, I found myself thinking a lot more about the transformative justice/conflict mediation parts. It is less a "how-to-facilitate" book and more a meditation on what skills and lessons we can carry into our facilitation/mediation work. Probably best for people with some facilitation/mediation experience under their belts, not as much for beginners.

[Myranda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for a book club, and found it really interesting. Though I don't really do much facilitation, I definitely found things to take into consideration as a person in facilitated sessions, and I think this would be a very useful resource for those who do facilitate. I did feel that, because this is part of a series of books on emergent strategies, my reading of it was weakened a bit, because I didn't have some of the foundational concepts, as it isn't clear that there's"prerequisites" to the reading and I might have been able to grasp some of the material a little better if there was some "crash course" built in for those who hadn't read the previous books/to make sure this could be more of a stand alone source. Still, over all excellent and I would recommend to those working to facilitate change.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really meant for facilitators and mediators, but there's good insight for the rest of us as well.
57 Many of our movements are in desperate need of, uh, movement. We can get caught up in meeting process as the sole container for how we work together, for how we practice democracy. It is the difference between understanding the meeting as one of many tools for clarifying values, work, and roles and the meeting as "the work" itself. Hint: If you are organizing and the only thing you invite your people to is a meeting, this might be an indicator of where you are on this continuum. It is sad how many groups never quite get to do change work in the world together, to learn together, make mistakes together, and most importantly, make a difference together.

see 60-62 "principled struggle"
80 "brave space"
99 this moment is temporary and survivable

[Ariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A liberationist guide to facilitation and mediation, Holding Change lends both practical suggestions and a values-anchored ethos to the work.

Much of the book is framed toward goal-oriented collectives with some sort of solution-based outcome. I found myself wanting engagement with more nebulously purposed groups that come to the table with diverse independent goals. The question occupying my current work is: How do we come to a space of shared goals and values to move as a collective?

That said, I found myself underlining and annotating throughout; my copy is abundantly dog-eared. I sense I’ll return to this over and over again as I marinate on the ideas, but the ones standing out to and sticking with me now are:
- Less prep, more presence.
- Move at the speed of trust.
- Release your way to feel the way.
- Create brave space grounded in authentic working relationship.

[Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tough book for me to rate. I'm not a facilitator or mediator, though I would like to increase my skills in those areas. Much of the advice seems solid, but I don't have the experience to really say. Its tough for me to dig through all the ancestor talk and building alter descriptions. I skimmed a bunch. The best parts of the book are the essays not written by brown. I read this just after my sister died and Malkia Devich-Cyril's essay on grief will be something I come back to in particular. Worth reading for that alone.

[Terry Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

You gotta love a book that displays wisdom that is so far beyond where you are currently at that your head explodes a bit. Thankfully adrienne maree brown speaks/writes in such a way that there is plenty of accessible wisdom regardless of where I’m at. There are so many great thoughts and suggestions for holding space for change. And like me, she seems to be a convert to Earthseed. God is change. Shape God.

This quote is bouncing through my head like a pinball as I finished and reflect: “We are always practicing something, and those practices move us towards and away from liberation.”

[Loren Cahill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite book by amb. I love her writing in general but have often left the books feeling that she was too abstract. This book is more concrete I think it’s the most helpful toolkit for holding space with others. Lots of helpful strategies for dialogue, mediation, and community building. I love that as always she shares her platform and brings in multiple writers to explore these topics. I’m def using in in my class next summer. Check this out to become a stronger facilitator in any setting.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of wise women. What could be better. “Joy is not the opposite of grief. Grief is the opposite of indifference. Grief is an evolutionary indicator of love- the kind of great live that guides revolutionaries.” (Malleable Devich-Cyril) who also refers to Francis Weller’s first gate of grief- “everything we love, we lose.”

I adore Adrienne maree brown. So many insights. This book is a bit fractured with short chapters and could use more integration but it has so much wisdom for our times regarding facilitation, mediation and guiding change I would call it a win.

[Dani · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started with the bookmark Olivia made me but then it fell out in my backpack and I was worried about losing it so I switched to my crochet one.

A very enjoyable and easy read, especially for a book for school. I want to go back and reread it more carefully at some point, especially when I'm in the middle of teaching more, I think it would be useful for that. I liked it a lot as a way to practice emergent strategy.

[Tristan Hunt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good book, will be very useful for facilitators and mediators. Because the advice is specific it is less generalizable. A few sections spoke to me, but not all. Regardless, I'm glad I read the book in its entirety and have a feeling that I will come back to it as a reference throughout my life.

[Diana Quinones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was such a gift. It gave me such hope and left me filled with curiosity, joy, and I inspiration. While this is a book about facilitation and mediation I feel that there are valuable lessons that can be received by all readers. Lessons on how to listen, observe, and generate and accept change. I’m so grateful that it was written.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book opened my eyes to the sacredness of facilitation. I have so many single lines from this book written down, worthy of meditation. I’m grateful for a resource that centers the black feminist tradition of facilitation and mediation, so that I can learn from it. A few more stories might have helped my comprehension - but this book will resonate for awhile.

[Rachel Moskowitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read if you do facilitation or mediation work. I am so thankful for this resource and will continuously refer back to it. Even if you don't do this type of work, there are sections that are relevant for everyone, from thinking about how to work through conflict to being in right relationship with one another.

[Briar]

This book was really inspiring. Changed a lot of my thinking around running groups and providing facilitation. I highly recommend this if you are running groups. I annotated the heck out of this and have already been revisiting parts to reread and gain more wisdom from. One of my top books of the year so far.

[Sarah Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy cow. This was a great book no matter whether you consider yourself a facilitator of a change holder or a movement agent or even just a human in the world who wants to show up well. As a professor, I felt like I was being summoned to a higher purpose to see teaching as facilitation. The collection is powerful, but I particularly loved the shorter pieces at the end by amb herself.

[Eric Clapp · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I prepare for a season of anti-racism trainings in the church, this was a fantastic book to help think about how I bring my self and my privilege into a facilitating role in a healthy and boundaried way.