Our Orb

Marshall Ganz gives a substantial introduction and summary of his work in this video, but it’s long, so if you’d like a summary, read on.

Marshall Ganz defines leadership as “Accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose, in the face of uncertainty.”

In this fanastic introduction to his work, from MIT world, Ganz describes how to build leadership, build community, build power. You can’t, he explains, rely on super-talented extraordinary leaders, so you have to figure out how to grow & spread leadership. The only way you get to scale is by developing the capacity of lots of people to lead.

Social movements have rarely been successful as an isolated local movement, nor as someone sitting in capital central. It’s the combination of national purpose and local action that builds a social movement. Local action gains meaning and significance from being part of greater whole.

This is rich food for thought for my work at the Australian Conservation Foundation, as I think ACF can be powerful in this role.

It’s not sufficient to rely on systems and procedures, because in social change we are constantly confronted by uncertainty, says Ganz.

How do you adapt to change? Unless you build leadership capacity all the way through, he says, it will snap. You need multiple locations of leadership. You need to create the capacity to adapt to change, learn in real time, and discover.

Because Goliath usually wins, but sometimes David does.

In the 2008 Obama campaign, 13.5 million citizens contributed. Four thousand young people were trained, and thousands of local leadership teams were responsible for local objectives. There were 1000 volunteer teams in Ohio alone.

Ganz calls it, “The biggest investment in civic capital that has ever been made.” Civic capital is the skills and practices of working together and self governing in a democracy. Ganz believes leadership is a learned capacity.

In a recent piece, How Obama lost his voice, and how he can get it back, Ganz argues that Obama went from being a transformational leader in the campaign to a transactional one as president. It didn’t work, and he must reverse course.

In the 2008 campaign, Obama had a story of hope. He wasn’t stuck on issues and policy. This is important because values drive engagement, not issues. Ganz believes that issue campaigning fails if it tries to put issues in boxes – “Let me know when you get to trees, I don’t care about fish & birds.” Public narrative is discourse that taps into the values that motivate us to engage in public life.

Ganz describes a people turning up to a hall for a community organising training for a whole weekend – a big ask.

“Often making thing really easy to do for volunteers, trivialises, rather than motivates. We know that serious things require serious commitment. If you can do things with the click of a mouse, that’s cool, but how serious can it really be?” This is an interesting observation as we try to make online action easier and easier.

The first thing taught at the community organising training was how to tell their story. Why? “Because the fundamental challenge in organising and social change work is motivation. When we are calling on people to act in new ways, it requires letting go of habit, it requires letting go of certain kinds of safety. It requires venturing into the domain of the uncertain. The motivational challenge is enormous.”

Addressing the emotional challenge is not a matter of argument or policy or facts. It’s a matter of emotion. The significance of this, says Ganz, is often missed. If you are going to engage around values you have to speak the language of emotion. To try to make choices without emotional understanding is nonsense, you can’t do it. Ganz gives the example of people with damage in the brain in the amygdala can reason around options. They can come up with option after option after option, but they can’t make a decision. Because decisions come back to a value judgement. Value judgements rest on emotional understanding about yourself and the world around you.

Some emotions support intentional action, and some emotions inhibit it. Urgency is a powerful motivator as the first challenge is simply to get people’s attention.

If you can create a sense of urgency, perhaps a little anger, and then mobilise hope, community and a sense of self efficacy, then you have the power to motivate people into action. And how do you do this?

You tell a story.

This is why parents teach children through stories. Faith traditions teach through narrative. They teach us how to access sources of love, imagination and capacity. Stories describe how people face uncertainty.

When people came to the public narrative and community organising training we did at the start of the Say Yes campaign, they were very concerned about not knowing all the detail of policy and science. It was a challenge to show that the stories they told about why they care, and how their communities have risen to the challenge of climate change are good enough.

After learning story-telling, Ganz teaches would be leaders about relationship building. It sounds like this: “Let me tell you a little bit about myself and why I’m here, and then let me learn a bit about you. Let’s try to identify our shared values and common interests. Then we’re in a position to make commitments to each other.”

The next thing Ganz discusses is structure. He mentions how in certain phases of the feminist movement people tended to believe structure was in itself oppressive, but any time you get a group together they will structure themselves. But it may be invisible.

When structuring interdependent leadership teams, it is important that our team decides what norms they will operate with.

For example, when I had babies, my circle of mothers defined an explicit norm that it was ok to be late to a get together, even two hours late. It was more important to come than to be on time, and everyone understood that babies do things on their own schedule. We valued each woman not being isolated over punctuality. This is obviously a different norm than most groups would make.

The next thing is to define roles. Which sounds obvious, but in volunteer groups is rarely done. The team cannot achieve purpose without everyone doing their part. It is an interdependent structure. Ganz says that with this interdependent structure, they found they could create effective teams on a huge scale.

The next piece of the puzzle is teaching people to strategise. This is not about transforming people into a little cog in a big machine. You cannot motivate and then try to constrain or prevent any real ownership. People had to decide how they were going to do things.

Self organising is a myth, according to Ganz. He says the mortality rate of Meetup groups is huge because they don’t know how to work together.

The powerful combination in the 2008 campaign was brilliant new media and online tools coupled with solid organising training, structure and techniques.

All volunteers were given access to the voter file to contact people in their communities. It was a strategic choice, but also expressed a certain kind of values.

How did the campaign get to scale?

The key, says Ganz, is a cascade of leadership training.

Early on, the campaign invested in getting good organisers. Then organisers learned they would move up to become regional directors and then field directors. Over the campaign people moved up in responsibility, scope and possibility. They were continually given opportunities for more responsibility.

The internet is a set of tools, not a carpenter, says Ganz. You need to train carpenters, and then give them good tools. The internet was useful creating portals of access, sharing information and bringing new people in. It worked because the people knew what they wanted to do. It can help get to scale, but only if we understand its limitations as well as its benefits. It helped to facilitate a constant transparent reporting of what was happening, what people were a part of.

In the campaign there was no internet strategy, there was a strategy.