5.5: What Can I Do? Developing Creative Strategies and Taking Effective Action

In this final section, we turn from leadership practices that you can use to build your power to a second set of leadership practices that you can use to deploy your power. These leadership practices continue to draw on Marshall Ganz’s work. We will focus on two different practices he identifies: developing a creative strategy, and taking measurable, effective action.

Imagine that you’re a social movement leader and you have used the leadership practices we discussed in the previous section to create shared purpose, build commitment, and develop a structure through which you organize all the activists whom you have engaged. The next question is, How do you turn that sustained activism into power? You do that through strategy and action.

Developing strategy

Let’s start with developing a creative strategy. Strategy is fundamentally the process of turning what you have into what you want—in other words, turning your resources into your goals. One thing scholars have learned from research on social change and political change is that simply having more of something—whether it’s money or people—doesn’t necessarily result in achieving a particular purpose. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to win.

Sometimes people say, Of course the fossil fuel companies win because they have more money. But researchers found that, when we look at different kinds of political or social change efforts, the side that has more money only wins 50% to 53% of the time. It’s little better than flipping a coin. Simply having more money doesn’t mean that you’re going to achieve your goals. Instead, the extent to which a movement or organization develops creative strategies that help them achieve their purpose separates those who reach their goals from those who do not.

How do social movements develop strategy? Scholars have found that one of the key ways in which social movements develop creative strategy is to reflect on their outcomes on multiple levels at key points in the trajectory of their work. Most movements organize their work into a campaign with a variety of peaks. A movement might be building toward a peak, like a rally or a march, or maybe a media event or a meeting with an elected official. Activists do a great deal of work leading up to that peak. Then the work will slow down a bit afterward, and it will go back up before the next peak.

At each peak, social movements measure their outcomes at several levels. Leaders ask the obvious questions about immediate outcomes: did we bring out the number of people we wanted to the march? Did we convince the elected official to support our proposals? But leaders also reflect on three other outcomes. They ask themselves: First, did we make the change in the world that we want to see? Second, did we make that change in a way that built greater capacity for the movement? And third, did we develop individual leaders in the process?

The analogy of a company clarifies why those last two questions matter. At the end of the year, a company sends its investors an annual report. Their annual report says not only what their profits were for the past year, but also what their assets are going forward. For a company like Boeing, their assets might include their engineering crew, their patents, the quality of their airplane designs, and so forth.

What are a social movement’s assets going forward? They include the movement’s leadership capacity and organizational capacity. So after any campaign peak, social movements develop strategy by thinking about how to make the change in the world in a way that also builds the individual and organizational skills, capacity, and motivation that they need.

Taking measurable, effective action

The second leadership practice Marshall Ganz identified to help you to deploy your power is taking measurable, effective action. Sometimes organizations become caught in a snare of preparation. It’s easy to spend all of your time developing strategies and plans and making sure that your plans are perfect—but never actually putting them into practice.

Scholars have found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that movements that win are really good at taking action. They do so at the individual and local level, at the community level, and even at state, regional, and global levels. To address an issue like climate change, we cannot focus only on the local community. Movements also need to take action at national and international levels.

Social movements link together all the work at those different levels, and a story about a woman named Frances Willard shows how. In the United States in the early twentieth century, Willard started the temperance movement—the movement against alcohol that eventually led to Prohibition. But she started out as an advocate against domestic violence. When Willard realized that alcohol was causing a great deal of domestic violence, she decided her goal was to pass a constitutional amendment banning alcohol.

In the United States, passing a constitutional amendment is quite difficult. That amendment has to be passed by a supermajority in both houses of Congress, and then three-quarters of the states have to agree to it as well. But that was Frances Willard’s goal, and she went about it by starting a social movement. She traveled all over the US by train, trying to identify people who wanted to join the movement. If someone wanted to join, the first thing she asked that person to do was take a pledge to swear off alcohol. She started with the individual’s own behavior.

Then, after a new member of the movement swore off alcohol, Willard asked the person to join with others in the local community to shut down a bar. She did this not because she thought that whether Joe’s Bar was open in Anytown, USA, mattered much for the movement, but because she wanted people to have the experience of working with others. She wanted them to realize what they could do when they came together with others to achieve a particular purpose, so that they would be committed to that process of collective action.

Finally, after they tried to shut down that bar—it didn’t matter if they had succeeded in doing so or not—she would invite them into the movement. By inviting a set of people into the movement who had developed those capacities of working with others, and who had been personally transformed in that way, Frances Willard was eventually able to get a constitutional amendment banning alcohol passed.

Figure 5.5.1 Finding our “Joe’s Bar”—the experience that teaches us to work with others—can be difficult, but people around the world are coming together to call for climate action, as these fossil fuel divestment activists did at the University of California in 2013. Photograph by Jamie Oliveira. Reproduced from Flickr.

We tell that story not to advocate for banning alcohol, but simply to make the point that whenever we take measurable, effective action, we need to think about how we can link individual action to community action to national or international action. A major question and challenge that we confront when we consider social movements to address climate change is: What is our Joe’s Bar? Where can we join with others to realize the power that we can have together—not study it by reading a book or taking a class, but instead believe it in our gut so that conviction carries us forward into the work that we have to do? (Figure 5.5.1.)

By actually engaging in all of these leadership practices—creating shared purpose, building relational commitment, creating interdependent structures, developing creative strategy, and taking measurable, effective action—we come to realize that, whether we’re addressing climate change or any other kind of issue, the work begins with us, because we are the change that we need.