• Common agenda.  If you don’t have a shared vision for change, you can’t really expect to collaborate effectively.
• Mutually reinforcing activities.  Successful collaborators need to coordinate their activities, play to their strengths, and know their role in the larger effort.
• Continuous communication.  If you don’t communicate regularly you can’t hope to build enough trust and shared language to collaborate effectively.

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Jon, why are you wasting my time with such obvious folderol?”  Most coalition efforts I’ve seen fulfill these first three conditions pretty well.  Hang in there, it’s the next two that are the most interesting:

• Shared measurement systems. Hmm, now we’re getting somewhere.  Collective impact suggests that collaborative efforts need agree on a shared set of indicators of success and the systems for monitoring and reporting on those indicators.  Without shared indicators, collaborators have no way to really know if they are succeeding or failing, and no feedback systems that allow them to “course correct” as needed. 
• A backbone support organization.  Proponents of collective impact assert that successful collaboration efforts need to have a strong, staffed organization at their center, in order to run the collaborative process with sufficient intensity and focus to drive it forward in the face of distractions.  It’s not clear to me whether they think a strong “lead coalition partner” fulfills this condition or not.  (I suspect not.)

It’s these last two points where most collaborations falter, and probably not concidental that they require sustained, long-term resource commitments.  How do collaborations you’re involved with stack up?

1. from liberty plaza, Adrienne Maree Brown
2. Turning Occupation into Lasting Change, Tom Linzey and Jeff Reifman
3. Occupy Wall Street is Not a Brand, Marty Kearns

Very different perspectives, but some amazing thematic resonance: opportunity, radically democratic process, networks instead of organizations, diversity (of people and ideas).  Will these seeds blossom or wither and wait for the next season of discontent?

Like most hard work, it takes a lot of practice to get really good at it.  Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers” claims that it takes about 10,000 hours (10 years) of practice to really master something.  I don’t see why social change organizing/campaigning should really be any different.

People who have the skills to be outstanding social change activists have lots of choices and opportunities in their professional life–they have the leadership, analysis and “getting things done” skills to be valuable in many fields.

So, given these realities, are social change movements structuring themselves to attract highly skilled potential superstars and to retain them for the 10 years it takes to attain mastery… and beyond, into the most highly productive years that follow?

In my anecdotal experience, not so much.  To me, the sector looks like its strategy is more “burn and churn.”  Get ‘em in while they’re young, pay ‘em as little as possible, and work ‘em hard for 3-5 years until they burn out.  Minimal investment in tactical skills, strategic thinking or leadership skills.  The survivors become the next generation of leaders.

In a world where it’s organized people vs. organized money, why aren’t we doing a better job of investing in our people?

Update: Some great discussion on this post over at Google+.

Effective social change organizing creates relationships in order to build measurable power and wields that power to achieve specific, significant behavioral, policy or political outcomes.

How does that work for you?

We like that it is succinct and clearly connects relationships, power and tangible outcomes.  But it also raises questions of what we might mean by “measurable power” and “specific, significant outcomes.”

Any organizing campaign or organizer will need to figure out what measures of power are most meaningful for their context, but in general, we think that power is most often measurable in terms of “I can motivate X people to take action Y, which results in Z.”

“Specific and significant” outcomes will also vary greatly across campaigns, but again, we want to emphasize how important it is to be able to articulate these outcomes in specific and measurable terms.  Some examples could include:

• Winning an election
• Passing legislation or administrative policies
• Measure shifts in public opinion or behavior

If your “big hairy audacious” goal will take years to achieve, that’s OK, but you need to be able to define some specific shorter-term outcomes to let you know whether you’re on track.

The arc of Mortenson’s fame also reminds me how much our culture enshrines lone entrepreneurs as the ultimate change agents, while displaying a commensurate disdain for those who’ve long worked in the trenches. We see this in international development, where businesspeople or celebrities receive massive publicity for their glamorous new projects, while groups like Oxfam or CARE that work year after year in local communities are left invisible in the shadows, or presented as dull, bureaucratic, and retrograde in comparison.  We see the same thing with America’s educational debates, where those who talk glibly of solving poverty and inequality with the instant solutions of high stakes testing, charter schools, or eliminating the long-held rights of teachers receive massive attention, while the experiences of those who’ve actually spent 20 or 30 years in the classrooms are disdained and ignored.

Sometimes fresh approaches can shake things up, and Mortenson’s focus on getting Pakistani and Afghan girls enrolled in school may well be one of those transformative ideas. But his books still feed the narrative that the best way to make change is to ignore pretty much anything that anyone else has been doing all along, and to charge ahead with your own Lone Ranger initiatives.

Buildings are really complicated.  They can’t be designed and built by just one person, or by a team of people with only one set of skills.  For example, on Molly’s current project, there’s a mechanical engineering team (they figure out the heating and air conditioning), an electrical engineering team (the do the lighting and electricity), and a structural engineering team (they make sure the building doesn’t fall down).  And that’s just the engineers!  There are also multiple teams on the construction side, the data center designers, and more.  Playing the role of designer & project manager are of course the architects.

Each of these disciplines sees the world very differently.  Each of them have different expertise, and each brings important knowledge and skills to the project.  Failure to incorporate any of these disciplines’ perspective would almost certainly lead to a failed project — a building that is too hot or too cold, doesn’t have reliable power, falls down, is ugly, doesn’t have the functions the owner needs, or goes wildly over cost.

As you might expect, these different teams often have wants and needs that conflict with the other teams.  The most beautiful building design might be impossible to cost-effectively heat or cool.  Electrical and mechanical teams can tussle over limited space in the service spaces.   Structural wants bigger, heavier beams while the project owner wants to keep cost down.

All of these differences of opinion have to be worked out, typically through ongoing “coordination” meetings.  In the best cases, potential conflicts are identified early in the process, before too much time and energy has been spent.  But since building design is always an iterative process, coordination is a continuous process, and as the building design evolves, it can become more and more stressful and high-stakes.

Let’s talk about advocacy campaigns.  As you may be starting to suspect, I think there are some parallels.  Advocacy campaigns are often big, complex, multi-year endeavors.  They have a clear goal, but the process can be very messy and filled with unexpected twists and turns.  Successful advocacy campaigns will involve people with many different forms of expertise: strategists, lobbyists, field organizers, communications, technology, policy experts, attorneys, fundraisers.  Each of these disciplines sees the world very differently, and advocates for different values.

So far, lots of parallels to that big building project, right?  But when I look around at the leadership circle of most of the advocacy campaigns I’ve been familiar with over the years, I don’t see that diversity of disciplines represented.  Mainly I tend to see lobbyists and/or policy experts.  Strategy, field organizing, communications, technology, or development are rarely represented at the leadership table, and if they are, they’re typically represented by junior staff who are lack status and power with respect to more senior lobbyists/policy experts.

Over time, this results in unbalanced campaigns, where critical expertise from all of the relevant disciplines is dominated by one or two limited perspectives.  Such campaigns may experience short-run success, but they quickly run into the limitations of their narrow leadership perspective.

Worse, I see a disturbing pattern wherein certain of these disciplines (e.g. communications, field organizing) are long-term under-resourced, which results in these disciplines never developing senior staff-level expertise, which makes it all the harder for these disciplines to credibly represent themselves and be taken seriously at the leadership table.   This further deepens the vicious cycle of unbalancing.

Have you been a part of an “unbalanced” campaign?  What was it like?  How do we create more balanced campaigns?

Here are some rough notes that popped out as I was gathering my thoughts for a meeting.  I’d love to know what thoughts they provoke for you.

From –> To

1. Broadcast –> Dialogue
2. Formal –> Conversational
3. Organizational voice –> Personal voice
4. Goals –> Values
5. Centralized communications –> Distributed through many channels
6. Intuitive decisions –> Data driven decisions
7. Master planned –> Continual refinement toward clear big picture goals
8. Set the agenda –> Respond to what’s hot that fits your goals & values
9. Always the center of collaborations –> Partner more, and more informally

[1] “we” = those of us standing astride the worlds of technology and social change.

Stories of “now” articulate a challenge we face now, the choice we are called upon to make, and the meaning of “making the right choice”, in particular the hope that may be there. Stories of “now” are really stories set in the past, present and future. The challenge is now; we are called upon to act now because of who we have become, a legacy of the past; and the action that we take can shape a desired future. These are stories in which we are the protagonists. We face a crisis, a challenge. It’s our choice to make. And, if it is a story of hope, there’s hope if we make the right choice. It’s not a sure thing, but there’s hope… and it’s the right thing to do. The story teller among us whom we have authorized to “narrativize” this moment finds a way to articulate the crisis as a choice, reminds us of our moral resources (our stories, stories of our family, our community, our culture, our faith), and offers a hopeful vision we can share as we take our first steps on the journey.