Dear ones,

Last week I wrote about hospicing — about the willingness to be present to what is dying in the governance systems that have organized most of human society for the past several centuries. About the 250th anniversary of a governance experiment that has produced both remarkable achievements and profound, structural failures. About the wisdom of Vanessa Andreotti, who invites us to be present to the ending without turning away.

This week I want to turn toward the other side of that same moment. Because a hospice is not only a place of dying. It is, in the hands of a skilled practitioner, a place of threshold — where what is ending and what is being born exist in the same room, often at the same time.

adrienne maree brown, whose work on emergent strategy has become one of the most important governance frameworks of our time, offers a way of understanding what is being born right now in the communities and organizations that are trying to govern themselves differently.

Emergence, brown writes, is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. It is the way a murmuration of starlings becomes a single fluid organism in flight without any one bird directing the whole. It is the way a community of people, each making small governance choices differently — sitting in circles instead of conference rooms, deciding by consent instead of majority vote, holding conflict as information instead of as threat — begins to produce something that none of them could have produced alone.

Emergent strategy is not a blueprint. It is a way of paying attention to what is already happening, what is already trying to emerge, and tending it — with skill, with intention, and with the willingness to follow the life rather than directing it.

What is already emerging

I want to name some of what I see emerging right now, in the governance work of women and matriarch-identified practitioners across the country and the world.

Organizations that have stopped calling their conflict resolution process a grievance procedure and started calling it a peacemaking or restoration circle — not because the name is prettier, but because the name encodes a different governance theory about what conflict is and what it is for.

Nonprofits that have added elder advisory bodies to their governance structures — not honorary positions, not token gestures, but structural roles with specific governance functions: holding the long memory, reviewing significant decisions against the organization's ancestral commitments, naming when a proposed course of action conflicts with what the community has understood itself to stand for.

Founding documents — charters, bylaws, member commitments — that include the land in the purpose clause. That name the specific watershed, the specific territory, the specific ecological community the organization understands itself to serve and be accountable to. That make ecological accountability a fiduciary duty rather than a programmatic preference.

Succession processes that treat leadership transition as lineage continuation — that convene a circle to honor what the departing leader is releasing, that transmit the organization's governance history and relational commitments to the incoming leader through a formal elder orientation rather than an HR onboarding, that hold the grief of the ending and the celebration of the beginning in the same ceremonial space.

These are not radical experiments visible only at the margins. They are happening in community organizations, in Tribal governance structures, in benefit corporations, in nonprofit boards, in legal practices, in households. They are the murmuration. They are what emergent strategy looks like at the governance scale.

The governance of becoming

brown names several principles of emergent strategy that translate directly into governance practice. I want to offer three of them here, in the register of this series.

Small is good, small is all. The large-scale change we need in governance systems — the shift from the triangle to the circle, from power-over to power-with, from extractive to ecological accountability — will not happen through a single transformative policy or a landmark piece of legislation. It will happen through the accumulation of small governance choices, made differently, in real organizations by real practitioners. The bylaws you draft differently. The circle you convene before you need it for a crisis. The member commitment you write in the first person, witnessed by an elder. Each of these is a small thing. Each of these is a governance act of the first order.

Move at the speed of trust. One of the most common mistakes in governance transformation work is the rush to produce visible change before the relational foundation exists to hold it. A circle governance document drafted by a community that has never sat in a circle will not hold. A consent-based decision-making process imposed on a community that has never practiced deliberation will not work. The speed of trust is slower than the speed of institutional efficiency, and it produces more durable outcomes. Build the relationships before you draft the documents. Sit in the circles before you write the provisions. Trust is not soft. It is structural.

What you pay attention to grows. This principle has direct application to the governance of our own communities and households and organizations. What we measure, name, celebrate, and attend to in our governance — that is what develops. A governance structure that pays attention to relational health, to elder wisdom, to ecological accountability, to the long memory — will produce a community organized around those things. A governance structure that pays attention only to financial performance, board compliance, and funder satisfaction will produce a community organized around those things, regardless of what the mission statement says.

What your hands are already building

I want to ask you something, dear ones, as we enter the second half of this letter series.

What governance act have you made differently in the past few weeks — however small? What circle have you convened, or proposed, or imagined? What document have you looked at with new eyes? What conversation have you had with a grandmother, an elder, a woman whose wisdom your community holds, that you would not have had before?

The emergent strategy does not require you to have everything figured out before you begin. It requires only that you begin — that you make the small governance choices differently, that you pay attention to what is trying to emerge, and that you tend it with the patience and the precision that emergence requires.

The murmuration does not have a conductor. It has practitioners — each one making small choices, each one in relationship with the others, each one following the life.

You are already in this murmuration, dear ones.

I am so glad to be in it with you.

With love,

Maija

🌿 For the first time, I am bringing this work into a live course for practitioners. If what you have been reading here has been useful — if it has given you language for something you have long known in your body — I invite you to join me. And please share this with any attorney, mediator, community leader, or governance practitioner in your life who is ready for tangible legal and governance tools to help shift culture from the inside out.

Register here: https://www.maijawest.com/2026-matriarchal-governance-design-for-practitioners-course

Maija Danilova West is a governance practitioner, peacemaker, and the author of Matriarch Makeover: A 30-Day Invitation. Her forthcoming book, From the Triangle to the Circle: Matriarchal Governance Design, is addressed to practitioners of law, peacemaking, and governance who are earnestly seeking a way to practice that is more life-affirming.

🌿 Matriarch Makeover

Original content by Maija, copy edited by Claude.

Last updated: July 7, 2026