The Kernel: A Tool for Developing Good Strategy (and Avoiding Bad Strategy)

A case study from campaigning with the Sunrise Movement in the 2020 Presidential Election. 

Dyanna Jaye | September 2023

I grew up in Virginia and joined the climate justice movement through campaigns to stop the construction of new fracked gas pipelines in our region, end mountaintop removal coal mining, and break the stranglehold that fossil fuel executives had on our state government. I loved this work and the power I experienced from people coming together to build a better community for us all. 

However, after years of campaigning, I grew defeated and exhausted from putting my energy into one-off actions or short-lived campaigns that failed to achieve lasting change. During that time, a friend recommended a book to me – Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters – by Richard Rumelt. 

This is not a book about movements, but reading this book forever changed how I approached movement strategy. After reading Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, I became aware of the "bad strategy" that I had experienced (and even led), and I started intentionally practicing good strategy development.

The framework at the heart of Rumelt's writing is what he calls a strategy kernel. He explains, "The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: 

1. A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical. 

2. A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis. 

3. A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.

Using the Strategy Kernel for Campaigning 

During my tenure in leadership in Sunrise Movement, I became known for the strategy kernel. In moments of deliberation or confusion, I would return to the kernel. First, I would block off several hours of focused time to write a kernel to personally understand and clarify the challenges we faced, our approach to moving forward, and the clear actions we could take. Second, I'd share my writing with the team involved in strategic deliberation. It often felt vulnerable to invite my teammates to comment on my writing, find the holes in my analysis, and raise big questions, but it always paid off. 

Afterward, we'd convene the team for a meeting to discuss each layer of the kernel. Usually, a small team would then take responsibility for completing the kernel, providing overarching direction for our shared work. 

The kernel was a framework to have candid conversations about specific layers of the strategy. When we discussed the diagnosis, we were building an analysis of the current moment and identifying the most critical aspects of what was often an overwhelming situation. When we discussed the guiding policy, we were identifying our unique strengths and building an approach to apply our strengths to address the most critical aspects of the challenges. After building alignment in these areas, the third aspect of determining coherent actions often flowed easily. 

In strategy work for movements, I've been part of many conversations that began instead with deliberating the third layer of the kernel—the actions we should take—and ended up spiraling into disagreement. The kernel framework helped pull us to a higher level of strategic thinking and build the alignment necessary to inform our actions. 

An Example of the Kernel in Action 

We can look at the #ChangeTheDebate campaign in the spring and summer of 2019 for an example of how we used the kernel in Sunrise.

Let me first share some background information. About six months earlier, in the lead-up to the midterm elections, Sunrisers contacted over 200,000 voters and worked with partners to push over 1,300 candidates up and down the ballot to take the "No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge," to reject campaign money from fossil fuel lawyers, lobbyists, and executives. After the election, we teamed up with the newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to launch the Green New Deal, and 200 Sunrisers sat in at the office of the House leader, Nancy Pelosi, to demand that Democrats address climate change at the necessary scale and urgency. 

This combination of voter contact work, the sit-in, and a unifying demand laid the groundwork for the rapid scaling of our movement. Thousands of people joined Sunrise and went to the offices of their members of Congress, calling on them to support the Green New Deal. In just three months, 95 members of the House and 14 members of the Senate signed on as co-sponsors of the first Green New Deal resolutions.

However, we knew that a bigger battle was approaching for the Green New Deal – the presidential election. Our long-term goal was to win the presidency with a candidate ready to implement a Green New Deal on day one. To get there, we had to shift the movement from targeting Congress to targeting the presidential race. 

Here's the kernel we drafted to guide our first campaign in the presidential arena, the #ChangeTheDebate Campaign: 

Diagnosis: Americans broadly support the Green New Deal, and the more they hear about it, the more they support it. A central challenge we face now is that the Green New Deal is polarized and presidential candidates are not talking about it because of the strategic narrative attacks from Fox/right-wing media. The presidential debates are the primary mechanism for shaping the national conversation for the presidency. However, there hasn't been a question about climate change in a general presidential debate in over 10 years. 

Guiding Policy: Our movement must force presidential candidates to publicly and boldly talk about the Green New Deal (GND) in the media. If they do, the media will cover the GND, people will hear about it, and support will grow. By campaigning for a climate debate, forcing urgency through setting a deadline, and applying pressure through targeted actions and mass mobilization, we can create the space for candidates to step forward as champions of the GND and force a race to the top of commitment and ambition across the policy platforms of presidential candidates. 

Coherent Actions:

• Launch the campaign with a small, visually compelling action at the first presidential debate. 

• Host debate watch parties across the movement and pair them with a social media campaign to shape the youth and climate reaction and conversation surrounding the debates. 

• Catalyze a centralized mass mobilization – the largest yet for the GND. 

• Birddog (a common tactic of Sunrise – confrontational questions on live media) Biden and other candidates to force them to respond to our movement and speak to the media about climate change and the GND.

• Run a targeted, escalated action demanding debate time regarding the climate crisis. 

This kernel outlines the strategy for a people-powered campaign popularizing the Green New Deal and pushing specifically for the Climate Debate, an urgent demand that we could win or lose in a time-bound campaign in the summer of 2019. Alongside this campaign, we also ran an inside-game strategy to push the leading presidential candidates on the content and ambition of their climate platforms.

We developed the coherent actions from our kernel into specific, measurable goals. Our goals included: 

• One visually compelling action at the first presidential debate in Miami

• Mobilization of 5,000 people at the second presidential debate in Detroit

• One targeted protest and two bird-dogs on Biden directly

• Train 1,000 people in the movement strategy and organizing structure through a series of regional summer summits 

Lastly, we set specific political goals for the number of presidential candidates to endorse the demand for a climate debate and take our pledge to reject fossil fuel money and make the Green New Deal a day-one priority. 

The Climate Debate campaign was timely and clear, and participation grew rapidly. With allies, we introduced a formal resolution for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which manages the rules of debate, to host a climate debate. The resolution was scheduled for a vote at the DNC National Convention in California, which took place in late August 2019. This gave us a deadline to gather support for our demand. Sunrise hubs across the country joined the campaign by taking action at the presidential debates, hosting trainings, and pressuring local DNC representatives to support the resolution for a climate debate. 

In the end, we never won the formal climate debate, but we created a whirlwind of media attention on climate and a race to the top with presidential candidates demanding more airtime to discuss their plans to address climate change. Because of this, CNN hosted the first-ever Climate Presidential Town Hall, featuring seven hours of primetime coverage in which each candidate pitched their climate strategy to the nation.

Rumelt says, "The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors. A leader's most important responsibility is identifying the biggest challenges to forward progress and devising a coherent approach to overcoming them." 

It was never the climate debate we really wanted; it was the Green New Deal. By using the kernel to identify critical aspects of the political moment, we developed a sharp strategy that cut through the noise, took advantage of the vulnerabilities of our opponents, and played to our strengths.

Dyanna Jaye is a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, where she helped launch the Green New Deal. As the National Organizing Director, she supported the movement to grow to 500 local chapters, contact 6.5 million voters, and elevate climate change as an urgent issue across the United States.

Before Sunrise, Dyanna led delegations to the United Nations climate negotiations and co-founded a statewide student organizing network, for which she won the Brower Youth Award. She also serves on the board of the U.S. Climate Action Network and is a chapter author in Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can.