Going Public — This Week's Insights
“At the end of several months of training and strategy, the staff came to a critical decision: everything that they did…would be put to a simple test. Did the activity lead to the training and developing of leaders? Or not? If it did, they would invest their time and energy in it. If it did not, they would avoid it, or withdraw from it.”
- Mike Gecan, Going Public: An Organizer's Guide to to Citizen Action, page 139
“Effective organization doesn’t begin with furniture, office complexes, and snazzy logos. It begins with a team of talented leaders, clear on its mission, and willing to act to try to accomplish that mission.”
- Mike Gecan, Going Public: An Organizer's Guide to to Citizen Action, page 142
This chapter continues the theme of the need to sometimes shake up an organization and ‘disorganize’ it, so that it can become more effective. There are many lessons in the chapter, but reading it this time made me think of how effective power organizations responded to the circumstances of the pandemic by disorganizing and reorganizing.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I began working on a study of local power organizations along with my colleague Nooreen Fatima. We wanted to know, how are these organizations, that are so committed to face-to-face relationships, adjusting their work under the conditions of the pandemic? Could they even do their organizing work in these new and unprecedented circumstances?
We studied what the local organizations that are part of a national network were doing by looking at their public-facing information (such as websites, social media posts, and public records such as local newspapers) and then interviewing leaders from some of the most active organizations. You can see more details here.
One of the things that we argue in the piece is that the habit of disorganizing and reorganizing, used by these organizations to respond to situations whenever their existing strategies are not working, was useful to the leaders and organizers when the conditions of the pandemic required a complete rethinking of the work. Given the conditions of the pandemic, leaders and organizers had to go back to basic principles, what many leaders described as a “pivot” to refocus their work.
The pandemic disorganized everything. In response, we found that these effective organizations went back to basic principles and to their first step in organizing, which always starts with listening to their leaders and members through their institutions to find out what was happening and what people needed. Leaders described shifting to digital tools, and meeting even more frequently than usual to respond to what their communities needed and also to stay connected with one another. Many leaders talked about how this grounding in the fundamental principles of organizing practice also kept them connected and helped them through the many challenges of the pandemic. And many of our leaders talked about how they built power and were effective in accomplishing their goals even under the conditions of the pandemic, and about how meaningful the work was for them personally as well as for their communities. In these organizations, as Gecan notes, it took “a team of talented leaders” who were “willing to act”, and did so very effectively even in the difficult conditions of the pandemic.
One way of seeing this work is that it is a way of developing leaders, investing in people to build the skills, capacity, and persistence to work to make their communities better. Part of that work requires the flexibility and faith that disorganizing and reorganizing provide.
I really appreciated the penultimate paragraph in this chapter after the process of starting to disorganize on the road towards reorganizing:
“...I ask people how they feel. Everyone is positive. One man puts it best, ‘I feel so much better than when I walked in tonight, energized, enthusiastic…’” (p 147)
Disorganizing and reorganizing takes real effort and responsibility. By definition it’s a dismantling of a status quo that is working for at least a core group (because there is something to at least “disorganize”). So disorganizing is done by leaders who are about something much bigger than themselves.
Re-organizing requires - again, this is definitional - likely change. You do not know what you’re going to get at the end of it; a core group of leaders must open up to a future that is less certain - at least in the short-term - because they are deliberately creating space for new voices, new perspectives, new ideas.
I recall the first time I heard the term “we have to disorganize and then build back up, re-organize.” I was one of the status quo leaders and I recall thinking, “Are you kidding me? We just did all this work!” But looking back, it made so much sense, I was just too inexperienced and a bit too immature (in my organizing days) to understand: disorganizing and re-organizing requires going back to basics with relational meetings, listening, and learning. And that is life-giving work that I’ve seen, again and again, people respond to with energy and enthusiasm (like the man on page 147).
Disorganizing and reorganizing is helpful for both existing and new, potential leaders.
It is helpful for new leaders because it creates space for them to be invited into the work.
It is helpful for the existing, more experienced leaders, because they are part of some sort of status quo and may need a break. If you rely on the same group of leaders to do the work of growing a team, then the work will grow disproportionately on that core group and that is not sustainable.
This is also a good time to see who wants to be part of advocacy versus who wants to be part of organizing. Because they are two different things. Advocacy is leading around a mission - making the thing you are advocating for the center of your energy. Organizing leaders is leading, and it’s about finding and attracting leaders to the work and helping them understand the role of leadership as a separate, standalone, essential skill. Not everyone wants to do the “leader” work and that’s ok; but you need leaders to lead.
Self-interest, once again, is key to all of this. It must be understood and dialogued around so that there is clarity of purpose and direction.
A final word on “asking how people feel.” I learned this practice from organizing with Jersey City Together and I now practice it with my kids, my family, and people I work with. My kids actually roll their eyes at me sometimes because it’s so ingrained in my habits of engaging with them, so that I can understand where they’re at.
It’s such an effective tool to ask someone: “What’s one word to describe how you feel about X” where “x” is something specific, like a meeting (in the case of adults who are organizing) or the state of a ministry or team (in the case of volunteers) or a class or school project (in the case of your child who may be in school).
“What’s one word to describe how you feel …” creates an immediate permission structure to be honest about your perspective.
It is an effective question you can ask as part of a debrief, in a group, with others present. It forces a person to reflect a bit, then dig into their gut and pull out that one word (not a lengthy explanation filled with caveats and caution) that helps point to the true feeling they are actually feeling. I view it kind of like a community compass; it helps orient you to what a group just experienced, which then helps orient you to a mean, which then helps orient you to how far you are from that mean. Because if you felt “joy” but the majority of others felt “dread” or “despair” or “frustration” then there is internal work to do to understand that disconnect.
This Week's Action
