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Strategy Skillshare for Movement Building
Two key social change groups, Ruckus Society and Training for Change, joined together to host this event at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in Northern California. The aims were to learn how to best offer our movements strategy trainings and how to increase strategic thinking. This is my personal take on what happened.
What is working?
We have a lot of successful tools. We only got to the tip of the iceberg, but there were a lot of very useful things introduced, including:
-Spectrum of allies, that allows for a mapping of the range of people and groups who would be affected or connected to a particular issue, campaign, strategy.
-SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats)
-Reclaiming our ability to tell the story and use "smart memes" (for more info on this check out http://www.smartmeme.com- very compelling stuff)
-Storytelling and "case studies," This included watching the film "Bringing Down A Dictator" about the student-led movement Otpor that led to the overthrow of Milosevic in Serbia. The film, and participant members' stories about their own strategic highs were incredibly effective in generating discussion and principles.
-Six-stage campaign framework, as developed and used by MLK and the Civil Rights movement. The stages are: gathering info, doing education and leadership development, negotiate, increase motivation for struggle, direct action, new relationship with opponent.
-Scenario work (see fuller description at the end)
-Tableaus, that allow us to reconnect with a particular moment in time (from our activist work) and the visceral impact of success or transformation or pain.
Questions for the future
1. What are the new forms and language that will assist activists to engage in dialogue about strategy that has not just winning, but liberation at the heart? This would mean that strategy would systematically and explicitly be set in a context much broader than planning and tactics. And it would mean new language and framework to replace winning/losing and us/them.
2. What are the new forms and language that will assist activists to engage in dialogue about strategy, across multiple lines of difference? By this I mean not just identity (race/ethnicity, age, gender, and sexual orientation) but also our ideological differences and our different approaches. This is the kind of diversity we have not yet begun to engage adequately. Similarly, we need to do a bit more definitional work upfront - what do we each mean by strategy? What are the growing edges of our work in this realm? What is working?
3. What are the new sources of inspiration, the new models that offer us possibility? We can still learn a lot from the Civil Rights movement for example, but only alongside more modern day examples, like the emerging global justice movement, youth organizing in the Balkans, etc.
Scenario work
I have been learning some about scenario work from a mentor and friend, Katherine Fulton at the Global Business Network. It is a way of engaging people with the future and with things that are out of their control. I like it because it gives us permission for not knowing. It also gives us another way of thinking about strategy beyond the often-felt despair of feeling like current conditions will continue indefinitely and getting stuck in a fantasy-land when we only think about what should be. Here is a look at the steps, a very basic version:
1. Develop a focal question
This should be specific, open-ended, non-rhetorical, and in a future frame of ten years. Folks work on their question, first alone, then with a partner. We decided we wanted more guidance on the best way to develop these questions, but people felt sufficiently satisfied with where they ended up.
2. Certainties and uncertainties
The next part is to make a list of certainties (things that probably will not change in ten years, for example - the state of U.S. military power or the use of the Internet) and uncertainties (things that probably will) that will affect the focal question. There can be a lot of juicy debate about which fit where. Again, folks work on these two lists individually and then share with their partner.
3. Creating the matrix
You choose the two uncertainties that would have the most impact and create a matrix. This was all very eye-opening for people. This was when the real strategy work would begin, the fleshing out of each the four quadrants that result from the matrix. I shared some thoughts about how to do this: consider what you know about these variables, how people often react in the face of them, what has been true in the past, what you can imagine. Many of our other strategy tools would now be useful in each of these quadrants as well.
.: posted by Claudia Horwitz, 3/31/2004 10:36:12 AM