Holding Change

Holding Change is adrienne maree brown's practical guide to facilitation and mediation, built on her theory of Emergent Strategy. Before becoming a bestselling author she worked as a facilitator, mediator and teacher, and she still travels to help organizations, especially Black organizations, clarify their goals, state their values and work through conflict. Much of that work happens in multi-day workshops called Emergent Strategy Immersions.

Brown treats facilitation and mediation as life skills that everyone should practice, not just tools for organizations. In her approach, an organization's goals and values come into line with those of the individuals within it. The book is therefore not only for nonprofits. Her core audience had long asked for a book applying Emergent Strategy to this work. It goes deeper into practicing Emergent Strategy in real time, drawing on lessons from her facilitation and on a year and a half of experiments in immersing people in emergent strategy community through her Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute.

The structure is unusual. The introduction, called the Heart, sits in the middle of the book, with the front half given to Facilitation and the back half to Mediation. The lessons are brief, to the point and highly practical, and readers can move through them in different orders to suit their needs, a little like a choose-your-own-adventure book.

Brown's approach is rooted in a Black feminist worldview. The book is meant to serve as a textbook for her many yearly workshops and as a primer for everyone else.