The problem with focusing on scale 

Randall Smith | October 2021

This is an excerpt from Breadth and Depth, the PowerLabs newsletter. Sign up below to get the next edition in your inbox.

I used to believe that more people, more activity, more disruption led to more power.

“They’ve got money, we’ve got people” was the (often) unspoken mental model that guided my day-to-day decision-making.

That led to some big actions with lots of people — tens of thousands of people in the streets, hundreds of meetings with Congressional staffers, dozens of people arrested, etc — but often, all of that activity didn’t change much.

In the last few years, my understanding of what makes organizations powerful has fundamentally shifted.

I’ll let three of the leading experts on what makes organizations powerful, Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa, weigh in here:

Empirical analyses and history alike show, however, that numerical majorities or simple accumulations of material resources are not always equivalent to power. In fact, research shows there is no linear relationship between any given resource and political power, whether that resource is numbers of people, amount of money, or intensity of adherents (Baumgartner et al. 2009; Hojnacki et al. 2012). Analyses of lobbying and social movement activity underscore the importance of organizations and leaders in strategically translating collective action—even collective action at scale—into political power (see, e.g., Clemens 1997; Ganz 2009; Hansen 1991). Just as we can point to data showing that having more people, more passionate people, or more people distributed across strategically identified locations was associated with movement influence (e.g., Madestam et al. 2013; Gillion 2013), we can point to numerous situations in which simply amassing resources was not enough to enact the change activists sought (e.g., Skocpol 2013; Ganz 2009).

from Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America

If we want to win, we need power.

To build power, we need to focus on building strategic capacity, not scale.

Put simply, strategic capacity is the ability of an organization or movement to adapt to changing power dynamics in ways that help it move closer to achieving its goals.

Building strategic capacity might get an organization to scale.

But if you start with scale as the goal, it's unlikely that you'll build strategic capacity.

Another quote from Prisms:

A system focused solely on aggregating actions to build power creates a supply of participatory opportunities that simultaneously responds to and reinforces people’s instincts for the thinnest forms of participation. Dominant models of collective action conceptualize it as the additive sum of individual behavior, thus shaping both what organizations ask people to do and what people expect to do. This approach, we argue, makes it less likely these organizations or individuals will build power. As constituents get locked into a set of invisible structures that deprives them of any real voice in the political system, the probable becomes inevitable.

A new report, Understanding Strategic Capacity in Constituency-Based Organizations, synthesizes “what is currently known about organizations that successfully build and wield strategic capacity, with a particular eye toward how it might apply to constituency-based organizations.”

The project includes a strategic capacity assessment and workshop guide that is described as:

an agitational, reflective tool designed for teams and organizations to build a shared understanding of and investment in strategic capacity, while taking an honest look at how effectively you have (or have not) already built the practices and processes likely to help cultivate strategic capacity and identifying how to prioritize your time going forward. It includes an individual survey and a guide for a daylong team meeting.

We may have availability for new team coaching and people-powered campaigns coaching/advising projects.

Get in touch at [email protected] if you’d like to chat about how we could work together.

Keep scrolling for more on strategic capacity, grief in social movements, the problem with advice, and other topics.

Randall

This is an excerpt from Breadth and Depth, the PowerLabs newsletter. Sign up to get the next edition in your inbox.

Understanding people power

By Michelle Oyakawa, Muskingum University

Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First Century America (a book I co-authored with Hahrie Han and Elizabeth McKenna) asks what grassroots organizations that have won victories for racial and economic justice have in common with each other, if anything. We argue that effective people-powered organizations win unexpected victories by coupling investments in building a flexible, committed, and independent constituency base with strategic leadership capable of negotiating for power.

Power is not just about the quantity of grassroots actions the organization generates—or even the number of people they engage—but also the quality of relationships in the constituency that enable leaders more strategic flexibility in negotiating power. The organizations in our study spent significant time and resources on intensive leadership development and on building connections and capacity that they were able to draw on later as strategic resources.

Prisms of the People provides evidence that the most powerful organizations sometimes win because they swim against strong currents that promote more transactional modes of doing politics.

How do we know whether or not an organization is winning power? While it can be relatively straightforward to gauge the direct outcomes of a single campaign (e.g. did the policy pass or not?, how many people were involved?), it is often less clear how to measure if that campaign drained organizational resources or built the organization’s power in a way that can be used for the next campaign.

We provide some ideas for those interested in measuring the way organizations wield power in politics.

• In Ohio, we used a social network survey to show how the case organization moved to the center of power networks in Cincinnati, bringing together clergy, city officials, business owners and nonprofit leaders seeking to pass a universal preschool ballot initiative. (A “social network survey” aims to map a set of relationships among people and/or organizations and to describe the strength and nature of connections within the network.)

• In Virginia, a social network survey with elected members of the state assembly shows how the case organization’s efforts to expand voting rights led to ongoing governing relationships with elected officials. We found that our case organization was viewed as a strategic partner and resource by legislators.

• In Minnesota, the organization’s power to influence narratives around race and class in a gubernatorial campaign was manifest in our content analysis of candidates’ Twitter discourse. We show how candidates adopted the language and rhetoric of the case organization.

• In Arizona, we tracked legislation related to immigration and found that after our case organizations formed and started their work, fewer bills with a restrictive approach to immigration were introduced, demonstrating their ability to shape political agendas.

One takeaway from the above examples is that our approaches to measurement attempt to capture the broader social and political context that is generated by the organization or campaign. While we are not able to offer any quick or easy solutions to the question of measurement, we hope that our work inspires donors, researchers, and practitioners to examine the questions they are asking and the measures they are using.

Are organizations focusing only on maximizing short term “deliverables”? Are they spending down or building up organizational resources during campaign mobilizations? What are the consequences of this? How can we measure organizations’ ability to build a community’s capacity for collective action over the long term? Are organizations leaving volunteers burned out and disillusioned by the political process? Or are they creating “distributed strategists” who are ready to help construct and lead the next campaign?

If the ultimate goal is to build powerful organizations that enhance democracy, understanding the strategic logic of prisms of the people may lead donors, researchers, and practitioners to rethink their criteria for evaluating organizations.

This piece was originally published in the Analyst Institute's newsletter.

Watch this book talk with Liz McKenna to learn more about the Prisms of the People findings on the organizational design choices that make organizations powerful.

What I'm reading and watching

Grief Belongs in Social Movements. Can We Embrace It?
During those first five years after my mother’s death, I entered what poets and psychologists alike have dubbed the ​“dark night of the soul,” a stage in personal development when a person undergoes a difficult and significant transition, and the previous frameworks like identity, relationship, career, habit or a belief system that previously gave life meaning no longer do. Author and grief activist Francis Weller suggests that while this dark night can often look like depression, it is actually the deformation of personality that occurs when oppression forces individuals, communities and generations to carry grief as a solitary burden. He says ​“the psyche knows we are not capable of handling grief in isolation.” Whether the message is coming from the nation-state, your employer, or family and friends, when the message is ​“Get over it. Get back to work,” people frequently try to numb themselves to cope with the discomfort of loss and the feelings of extreme deprivation and isolation that can follow.

Malkia Devich-Cyril, In These Times [13-minute read]

People Power: Powerful organization, rather than efficient mobilization, is the way to re-center people in our political life.
The underlying assumption that scale is synonymous with impact should be interrogated—these mobilization outfits produce scale absent of impact, participation without commitment, and breadth without the depth needed to sustain it. Given these challenges and the reality of a political system unresponsive to the demands of the larger public, programs of action should combine scale with impact.

Doran Schrantz, Michelle Oyakawa, & Liz McKenna, Stanford Social Innovation Review [6-minute read]


The Left Needs to Engage Members if We Want to Win Big
There’s a familiar refrain in the labor movement: our members would never do that; they’re just not there. Most recently, at the Labor For Single Payer digital conference, some attendees complained that their union leadership assumed the members were too invested in their negotiated benefits to support Medicare for All.

The truth is, rarely are these concerns grounded in actual conversations with members. I recently spoke with a coalition organizer about how the straw man of member readiness was hampering debate within their coalition. I suggested that, before the debate continued, everyone at the table needed to share the list of members they had spoken to about the issue and what their members thought about it.

This should be a common practice in the labor movement. Before making decisions that will impact our membership, leaders must ask: How many members did I speak to about the decision at hand? (Seriously, what are their names?) What did they say? What kind of conversation did I have with them? Did I take their temperature, or did I have an organizing conversation where I moved them past their fears and concerns?

Too often, leaders magnify the voices of a very small, often unrepresentative group of members, if they even cite members’ views at all. This reality reflects significant weaknesses in unions and their organizing practices, and illustrates how shallow and limited our understanding of democracy is. Ultimately, the failure among broad swaths of the labor movement to truly engage with members holds us back from deeper, more transformative wins.

Marybeth Seitz-Brown, The Forge [8-minute read]


Organization vs Mobilization
We said that we must come to know the difference between mobilization and organization because the enemy will use mobilization to demobilize us. Mobilization is very easy. Very, very easy.

Since we are a people who are instinctively ready to respond against acts of injustice, any time there’s one little act of injustice, we can blow it up and we will find people who will come and make some mass demonstration around it. ‘Ms. Sally lost her job, let’s rally, she’ll get her job back.’ People will come and rally. ‘So and so got kicked out of school because the teachers unjust.’ Unjust, the people will come and rally. They will come to rally at issues.

And this is what mobilization does, it mobilizes people around issues. Those of us who are revolutionary are not concerned with issues, we are concerned with the system. The difference must be properly understood. The difference must be properly understood.

Mobilization usually leads to reform action, not to revolutionary action.

Kwame Ture, YouTube [7-minute video]


Reflections on Occupy: Revolutions Are Made by Those Who Intend to Be Powerful
Movements that are hopeful and aware of their power sometimes lose. But groups that don’t believe it’s possible to win always lose. They prioritize style over strategy, protection of in-group culture over inclusion of everyday people, the tastes and desires of small groups over the needs and dreams of masses of people. They become used to being on the margins, and adopt behaviors that enforce that marginality, which makes it even less likely that they will ever leave the margins (after all, the margins, harsh as they are, are at least safe in a way). The margins are shaped by fear of the power being exercised against us, and we learn there to be afraid also of the power we might have, the power we are ultimately supposed to be seeking.

Yotam Marom, Organizing Upgrade [9-minute read]


Why Everyone Is Always Giving Unsolicited Advice
That is the thing about advice: It is seductive. Even though we resist being judged, we enjoy being the judge. Advice is a method by which we manipulate status to negotiate interpersonal interactions. By giving advice, we enact tiny theaters of social dominance to signal or procure our social status over others.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, The New York Times [7-minute read]