Social Change is a Fractal Thing
Originally published in June 12, 2019 on www.Medium.com/@fierro.evaluation (that account will be deleted)
In the past 20 years, four questions have driven my work as a consultant:
1) What’s my place in the world?
2) What is the difference for me to make?
3) Who is my tribe?
4) What am I aware of? What am I not aware of?
It just so happens that those same questions are crucial to navigating our complex world where violent conflict is on the rise, non-profit organizations are struggling to meet their missions within the restraints of the non-profit industrial complex, and historical and intergenerational trauma seems to be coming to the surface more than ever. Many businesses and non-profits claim to support social change but many are “cobbler’s children with no shoes” and what to do social justice without being socially just. It seems that divisions are surfacing more and our ability to overcome conflict is lessening.
These questions led my journey. A core passion that I fulfill with Fierro Consulting, LLC is expanding integrity, humanity, and honesty in organizations while measuring social impact. Because healthy communities and organizations are better at fostering change.
On April 24–25, I co-facilitated a training in New York City with Dominica McBride and Chris Corrigan. Each of us has been extremely committed to racial justice among different communities, grounded in different — but connected — theoretical foundations: complexity theory, culturally responsive-evaluation, and fractal systems change.
The concepts of fractals, which adrienne maree brown lays out in Emergent Strategy is that social conditions are fractal, meaning they follow the same pattern but at different levels. Think of a fiddlehead fern of spirals, within spirals, within spirals. The pattern is the same, but the levels are different. In fractals, if we can change the pattern at one level, it affects the other levels as well.
Dominica, Chris, and I discovered our work together has a common core: forwarding Beloved Community. Martin Luther King popularized the term Beloved Community coined by Josiah Royce. Beloved community is a prospective future of peace, where conflict doesn’t become violent, and where differences don’t drive people to the extremes of prejudice and hate. Now more than ever, in times of rapid change and profound uncertainty, building Beloved Community is essential. Indigenous cultures know this, as Chris shared in our training hearing from an indigenous elder: “In times of uncertainty, focus on relationships, not expertise. We must rely on each other.”
Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.
~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Far from wishy-washy love, Beloved Community is a bold vision for powerful, transformative love exercised at a collective level. It requires discipline and skill and prefigurative work: being the community we want to call forth by choosing processes and infrastructure that reflect our vision. This is essential because social change is fractal — meaning the same pattern at different level so that if you change the pattern in one place all places will readjust. Big changes impact small changes, small changes impact large change. Everything is interconnected.
Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. ― Martin Luther King Jr.
Decades of facilitation, self-development, healing, storytelling, evaluation experience are woven in this model of how beloved community is fostered by fractal social change. The essential concept is that we propagate who we are into the world, the rims are the rippling of who we are.
Fractal Social Change Model
This model has four components:
1) The goal (upper right corner): as much beloved community as possible!
2) The core driver (center arrow): our ability to shift from power over to power to.
3) The fractal levels of work (circles): I, team, client, community, and systems
4) The aspects of work (thin arrows): positionality, intention, inclusion, and lens.
The goal: Different clients, contexts, and cultures will call for different skill sets: whether I’m coaching, facilitating, or evaluating the main goal is always the same: forwarding Beloved Community. After I’m done, I aim for there to be a deeper sense of affinity, power, love and generative conflict and justice, than there was before.
The core driver: To build that deeper and more empowered beloved community we give up frameworks of power over which oversimplify the world into the trauma triangle of perpetrators, victims, and rescuers, to embrace more complex aspects of power to… create something new, revive something new, start all over.
The fractal levels of work
We can transform power over to power to at many different levels. We can do work within ourselves, with our teams, our clients, our communities, or within systems. Whichever level we choose to work at will require we also work at the ones below it, because of the fractal nature of social change. The team work requires the I work. The systems work, requires the team work. But because social change propagates fractally, whichever level you work at, will affect the other levels, even if you may not see it at first.
The actual work entails higher levels of interaction, awareness, and just action. Here are four places to look for direction:
1) Position (what’s my place in the world?): where are we located in relationship to our communities/families/culture?
2) Intention (what’s mine to do?): what are we committed to?
3) Inclusion (Who is my tribe?): Who have we involved in the work? Who did we exclude?
4) Lens (Where do I need to grow the impact of my work): What are we aware of? What are we not aware of?
This model is still in development. Does this layout reflect the way you work? How is it similar? Different?
