Think Radically, Act Incrementally
In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown writes, “I would call our work to change the world ‘science fictional behavior’ — being concerned with the way our actions and beliefs now, today, will shape the future, tomorrow, the next generations.”
I read this quote aloud this spring for a little book club at our community garden.
We sat around our long table and challenged ourselves to imagine.
We looked at the highway above us and at the street nearby and dared to think of something different, of mini-parks, urban gardens, and trams, where today it’s all concrete and cars.
As we spoke, I looked at a seedling we had on the table, ready to plant. For a moment, I felt unmotivated.
“We are so far from this, and what we have in front of us are these seedlings,” I said.
In an essay on urban planning, the scholar Edgar Pieterse wrote that “the existential core of urbanism is the desire for radical change… in contrast to the necessary prudence and constraints of incremental change.”
We want to fix everything, all at once. But the world is too complex, too entrenched in old systems and habits, for sweeping solutions to take hold.
Around our table, someone posed a different question: how can we stay radical in vision, but incremental in action?
This month, I was watching a YouTube video about how Amtrak achieved record ridership in 2024 (if you’re wondering what my YouTube algorithm looks like).
Despite how unsexy Amtrak’s slow improvements have been, they have quietly succeeded.
For decades, Amtrak’s people chipped away, advocating for a route here, improving a schedule there.
In 2022, the Ethan Allen Express expanded from New York all the way to Burlington, Vermont. I rode it not long after it opened. The trip was slow, sure. But it was also symbolic. It was a slow train of progress.
The video author called Amtrak’s approach “radical incrementalism.”
This week, our garden volunteers helped plant daffodil bulbs in an abandoned strip of sidewalk.
Many of us were around the table months earlier as we brainstormed how we could close down the highway and turn it into an urban farm.
Like Amtrak, we act incrementally.
There’s a popular saying to “think globally, act locally.” We should also “think radically, act incrementally.”
We must dream of turning the parking lot into something that heals us. But if you take too many parking spaces at once, you get yelled at during community board meetings.
If Amtrak depends swings for a big project, funding for that project may get canceled when the wrong man takes office.
To think radically and act incrementally is to say, “I will not lose sight of the big visions, but I will also do what is strategically prudent.”
It takes a different form of radicalism to have the discipline to take small actions.
~David
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