5.4: What Can I Do? Building Power

In this section and the next one, we will turn to a set of leadership practices that you can use to build power and engage people around you in the kinds of social movement that we need to address climate change. Most of the leadership practices discussed here were developed by Marshall Ganz, who was a longtime organizer with the civil rights and migrant farm workers’ movements and now teaches at Harvard. Ganz has developed a set of leadership practices that takes the mystery out of how social movements are able to engage people in sustained activism.

Leadership practices separate organizations that don’t work from organizations that do work.

You can surely think of organizations that you’ve been a part of that have worked and organizations that you’ve been a part of that haven’t worked. Just take a minute to reflect on the differences between those kinds of organizations. We have all been part of teams, groups, organizations, and clubs that don’t really seem to work—and they have some characteristics in common. Organizations that don’t work tend to be divided. People don’t agree. They tend to be passive and reactive. Instead of thinking ahead about what they want to do, they just wait until things happen to them and then they react.

In contrast, organizations that work tend to be full of people who are motivated and committed to the cause. Their members are unified, all working together, and that makes it possible for them to be purposeful and proactive. Individuals within the organization can work on the agenda that they are all trying to achieve without waiting for other people to delegate tasks to them and define their work.

Social movement organizations try to engage people in sustained activism in order to build the power they need to make the change they want, through creating organizations that work. According to Marshall Ganz, there are three important leadership practices that help to build power: creating shared purpose, building relational commitment, and developing a clear structure.

First, how do you create shared purpose? In social movements, it is essential to make sure that everyone is engaged with the same agenda and has a sense of shared purpose. Often, we tend to try to persuade people with scientific or policy details. We try to explain exactly how a carbon tax will work, or we tell people what we know about humancaused climate change. That is important because it speaks to our heads and helps us develop a strategy for how to take action.

But we’ve learned from decades of research in neuroscience, psychology, and other fields that human action is not only about the how, but also about the why. The why is about the heart—the values that move us to take action. And we communicate our values not through arguments, details, or abstract statements, but through stories.

Someone could stand up and say, “I believe in equality” or “I believe in freedom,” and that wouldn’t really mean much to you on its own. It wouldn’t move you to take action. But if someone stood up and told you a story about a particular injustice that they witnessed and explained how they took action to counter it, then you might have some insight into their commitment to equality. You might have a more concrete sense of why equality is important, and that concrete sense could motivate you to take action as well. Through stories, we’re able to communicate what we value.

Sometimes the concept of stories can seem abstract. But, as Marshall Ganz teaches, for decades, film makers in Hollywood have known that there is a formula for telling stories, and it’s not that complicated. What you need is a character who faces a challenge that puts her in a place of uncertainty. Then, she has to make a choice, and that choice has an outcome. By telling a story with that clear formula—character, challenge, choice, outcome—we can communicate what we believe in through the choices we make. We can tell stories about ourselves, our organizations, and our movements. That’s how we use stories to help create shared purpose.

The second leadership practice is building relational commitment— that is, building people’s commitment to their relationships with others in the movement. Organizers often say that it is important to have one-to-one meetings. That’s where a casual social relationship, a personal relationship, or a new relationship turns into a public relationship.

Relationships become a source of power when two people exchange their interests and resources and make a commitment to acting together. People who come into a new setting or a new relationship bring their own set of interests. They might want to start a new club around climate solutions or talk to their local elected officials about climate issues. And people bring their own sets of resources as well. Maybe one person has taken the Bending the Curve online course and now understands climate science, while another is really good at social media. Maybe someone else is a visual artist and a wonderful designer. These are all resources that people bring to the table.

In a one-to-one meeting, people build relational commitment by exchanging their interests and their resources with each other. In doing so, they create a new set of shared interests and shared resources, and those become a source of power for the movement.

From decades of research in social movement studies by scholars such as Meredith Rolfe and Betsy Sinclair, we have learned that when the going gets tough, people don’t stay committed because of their commitment to the issue. They stay committed because of their commitment to each other. When it’s Thursday night and I have an exam the next day and I’m not sure if I want to go to that meeting, I don’t go to that meeting because I’m so committed to the issue. Usually I go to that meeting because I don’t want to let my friend down. In other words, it is important to build relational commitment because that is the glue that holds social movements together.

The third leadership practice is developing clear structures. Let’s say an organization has people who are committed and who share a purpose and a narrative. Then how should that organization structure its work so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts?

Figure 5.4.1 Dependent (top), independent (left), and interdependent (right) leadership structures. Images from Hahrie Han based on Ganz 2014.

We can imagine three different leadership structures. The first one is a dependent leadership structure where you have one leader who’s in the middle and all the work has to pass through that one leader (Figure 5.4.1). The leader organizes everything. Those of you who have been part of organizations like that know what goes wrong. The person in the middle gets overwhelmed, stressed out, and burned out, and the organization is only as strong as that person. If that person gets sick or doesn’t have enough capacity, the organization can’t do any work. And the people on the outside feel unmotivated because they don’t have any real say in how things work.

Another structure is the opposite of that: an independent leadership structure. Some organizations don’t want to have a situation where there’s only one leader, so they decide to make everyone a leader. The problem then becomes that, even though everyone is motivated, they are going in 24 different directions. It’s difficult to build a movement that makes sustained change if everyone is working on 15 different things.

Social movements usually work best with an interdependent leadership structure where everyone is working on the same vision and in the same direction, but the work is chunked out into pieces so that it can be distributed. Though each person is working with others for a shared purpose, each person is also responsible for a specific piece of that work. Because the meaningful work is distributed, individuals have autonomy and agency; they themselves are transformed by working with others toward the common goal of transforming society.