On Strategy: how movements can win against the odds

My first series of blogs, taken together, represent a broad theory of change for how local organising can root a movement, how that can scale to become capable of winning major national change, and the role for the most impacted within this work. This approach seeks to ground movements in place and people to bring the durability needed to win, while achieving the scale to ensure that those wins aren't trivial. In my next series of blogs I want to share reflections on the strategies and tactics through which those movements can win.

A Multiplayer Game

The Book of Samuel tells us of the duel between David and Goliath, where young David defeats the enormous armoured and armed champion of the Philistines in single combat. Marshall Ganz uses this story as the basis and title of his wonderful exposition of why the UFW's organising efforts with migrant farm workers succeeded where so many others had failed. He argues that it worked because they cared enough, that because they were so committed they worked out how to take what they had and use it to get what they needed - just as David took his sling, stones from the riverbed, and cast down Goliath.

I've experienced this link between commitment and innovation again and again in my work. It's a large part of why I think organising the most impacted by injustice is a critical part of making social change. I want though to add another strategic principle, that Davids often win precisely by refusing to fight in single combat. The fight is often easiest won by seeing it as a multiplayer game - in which there are a large number of diverse actors with competing priorities and agendas all of whom can potentially be leveraged.

The absolute mania for coalition building to be found in the charity and campaigning sector is a testament to how widely this insight is shared. The problem is we mistake paper coalitions, often formal ones claiming to “represent” enormous numbers of people, for dynamic ones. In dynamic coalitions it is our actions that align, rather than just our “positions”. They are networks, formal or informal, where organisations are deployed to their strengths and together create the pressure needed to win. So how can Davids build dynamic coalitions? 

The Give Strategy

As Safe Passage began we had little to work with. A growing movement of local groups in the UK but they were focused on resettlement, and one single Syrian refugee in the Jungle refugee camp in Calais willing to act. 

But the Syrian helped us understand that many of the refugees in the Jungle were children trying to reach families in the UK, and he proved able to persuade some of them to turn up for repeated appointments. That was enough - with that I could give activist lawyers at MLP and Doughty Street what they needed to bring a legal challenge and get into the fight.

The same Syrian conducted a mini census of Syrians in the Jungle. With that as proof of concept our single Calais based volunteer, Laura Griffiths, was able to begin a list of children with family links to the UK. We gave a version of that list to UNICEF and Save the Children, they used it to brief parliamentarians, and with that credibility added we used it to go public to the press.

The three women starting up aid operations in what would become Choose Love knew some celebs. Our growing teams of Syrians hosted visits from those celebs, helping them meet children with a legal right to be in the UK, and on the basis of those meetings the celebs developed the confidence needed to speak out.

The same tactic would work with local government leaders, many of whom are keen to have a voice on national issues. We took four council leaders out. They and their social workers met a number of the kids without anywhere to go, and so when 500 of us turned up outside the home office to hand over a list of 373 children's names at the moment of a key parliamentary vote, those council leaders were there with us offering the spaces needed.

Each and every time it was a case of looking at the little we had, and working out how we could give it away such that it would unlock the actions of another party in alignment with our cause. 

This is the opposite of what might be termed crass organisation building. We leant in to unlocking action by others partly by leaning out of the domains that would situate us in competition with them. Our name was often last on the releases where it featured at all. Our asks for money came after everyone else’s, and more quietly. We weren't even at events where our work was being leveraged without our name attached, like the parliamentary briefing mentioned above. This approach is often easiest when partner organisations are very different and therefore have fewer competitive domains and more complementary areas of specialism - dynamic coalitions tend to have fewer and more functionally distinct members.

There is a balance to be struck with the Give Strategy of course. It can be exhausting and dispiriting, particularly as a David working with powerful and well resourced individuals and groups, but precisely because you are a David and you care the most you can prioritise impact over narrow self interest. Focus on unlocking the actions of others, in doing so you'll build the trust and momentum needed to win and it will come good for your organisation as over time you then judiciously pursue your interests.

A changing context

Doing a power analysis, mapping out who the key decision makers are on the issues you care about and identifying the actors and interests that can move them is rightly taught as an essential first step in all modern campaigning. This is now commonplace, perhaps in no small part because it appeals to the slightly bookish tendencies among many progressives.

As important however, and much rarer, is serious attention to the way in which the strategic context is changing around David and Goliath. Hitting or missing waves of support can make the difference between winning and losing for organisers and campaigners, and I know what both feel like. 

In Move Your Money some friends and I tried to hold the big banks to account for the 2008 crisis by persuading consumers to move their money to responsible institutions. We had some success, and some great tactics, but the massive response we hoped for from the public never came. 

In End Hunger Fast by contrast, our invitation to people of faith to fast during Lent in solidarity with those going hungry in Britain, scaled to tens of thousands in days. Our faith leaders' joint letters, which can land with a dull thud, commanded 7 front pages forcing both a meeting with the Prime Minister and the governments first concessions in its welfare reform agenda within just six weeks.

Why did we catch the wave with one and not the other? With Move Your Money we were furious, and to us the links between austerity and the banks were clear, but launching the campaign in 2012 we were too late to take the public with us. In End Hunger Fast I'd been organising on the ground with faith groups for two years, seeing food bank after food bank start up launched by volunteers who wanted to help but felt a quiet rage that their assistance was needed in the first place. In one case we were paying attention to ourselves, in the other to the constituency we were hoping to bring into action.

By anticipating likely future moments of crisis organisers can lay the groundwork needed to take advantage of them when they come. In 2014 After David Cameron declared the country full, and so unwilling to take more Syrian refugees, CitizensUK colleagues started working in a handful of local areas to persuade councils to pledge to take in 20 each if the government would open the door. We designed the campaign for scale and so, when photo of young Aylan Kurdi tragically arrived and moved the country to action, we were ready. We trained 1,309 people in ten weeks in 96 locations and built the backbone of the Refugee Welcome movement that would go on to welcome tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. 

We live in an age of extraordinary volatility. This will naturally advantage those who already hold power in society, who always hold the capacity to act, unless campaigners and organisers can get better at reading the tea leaves and prepare to act on them. 

The basis of evaluation

When I first moved to Nottingham to build a broad based organisation I spent a week shadowing different Unison organisers. At the end of the week the Regional Secretary, Helen Black, asked for my reflections and critique. I said that the organisers I'd shadowed were committed, talented, and doing almost completely different things.

My critique was that they lacked a common definition of organising and hence had no basis for evaluation across their work. No organiser’s work was better, no organiser's work was worse. All were experts in their own efforts and so there was no learning. By contrast at CitizensUK I'd been taught a couple of questions that any organiser could ask of any other - good answers meant it was good work.

So what should be the basis of evaluation for organisers? What are the right questions, and how do they tie to strategy for David against Goliath?

I believe there are three core questions all organisers should answer: 1) did the work help move us towards the justice we seek, 2) did it make us more powerful by building our capacity to act again now and in the future, 3) did it develop the leadership capabilities and identities of our people.

Each question, on its own, underpins different social change traditions. Activists focus most tightly on 1), unions on 2), training networks on 3). It is the combination of all three that makes organising distinctive - it seeks justice, while building power, in a way which builds people's capacity to participate in public life.

This isn't to say all three questions are always equally important, but organisers should be crystal clear when they are prioritising one over another and why. In Nottingham it was 3) that delivered, in Safe Passage 1), in Refugees Welcome 2). Clarity on your focus let's you pick the right tools for the job and make trade offs with intent. It was because 3) was the priority in Nottingham that when we got invited on Newsnight it was a leader, Revd Karen Rooms who took the spot. In Safe Passage, where the context changed immensely day on day and it was a struggle for leaders to always be on top of the brief, staff would step in because 1) was our focus. 

Clarity when trading these objectives off against each other is important in the short term, while remembering the place of all three in the long run is also critical. In Safe Passage our relentless focus on delivering justice meant our political base gradually withered. In Nottingham the focus on developing leaders meant the organisation, at its worst, was more a civics program than an organisation making the city a just place.

Final thoughts

To win against the odds we need to build dynamic coalitions in a changing context. Using the Give Strategy while paying attention to the right people, anticipating crisis and designing for scale can help us drive extraordinary results. All the while, building a shared evaluative framework can help us learn, stay focused and honest in the work.