Organizing the Country
Organizing the Country
The Christmas season reminds us that a small group of people can organize a world-wide movement by providing a new set of assumptions.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world;
indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
-Margaret Mead,
Organizing people means changing their assumptions.
Organizing is education which inspires.
One of history’s most successful organizing methods is that of Saul Alinsky. His Rules for Radicals are the 13 Commandments of both labor organizing and civil rights organizing.
The success of these methods has generated a deep faith among a number of groups:
Alinsky has much in common with other extremely successful organizers such as Paolo Friere and Socrates.
In the 1990s a course in organizing at the University of Toledo described their common approach. The description is paraphrased below.
The word for deliberation derives from “to liberate, to free from assumptions” and is often about challenging the “frames” with which we interpret experience. Socrates, for example, challenged people to evaluate their experience against their frames by employing critical reason by asking questions in the “Socratic method.” He also created so much tension that he was accused of impiety and made to drink the fatal hemlock.
In more modern dress, Alinsky invokes use of “critical reason” to challenge existing frames or “rationalizations.” Similarly Friere contrasts the “banking method” of teaching with his method of dialogic challenge. Although their styles are different, Alinsky and Freire go beyond Socrates in that they explicitly challenge people to act based on critical reflection on their experience. In this way, they create constructive “tension” that can lead to new action.
This contrasts with “unreflective action” based on the unthinking acting out of norms, habits or patterns of behavior that serve the interests of others that Langer describes as “mindlessness.” Strategic thinking is reflective, critical, and often occurs in interaction with others. It requires taking seriously people’s ability to know, reflect, understand, and choose.
Deliberative tactics may come into play one-on-one, in small groups, or as meetings. The “one-on -one” model is employed by Socrates, Alinsky and Friere. It is a tension creating dialogue in which one party “agitates” the other. Its goal is not only the insight that the tension can produce, but choice, action, and commitment that leads to new experience. Of course new experiences generated in other ways can also stimulate deliberative understanding — one reason why “debriefings” are so important after every action, meeting, etc. Collective deliberation takes place in larger groups and is most effective when those doing the talking also do the acting.
Challenging frames
Although good strategy can be the fruit of a strategic genius,
it is more often the result of a good strategy team
that a good leader has put together.
Explore how to set up such teams.
By clicking below, explore the process and skills which good organizers all have.
The way good strategy emerges from well-facilitated groups is succinctly expressed in the Tao Te Ching:
The Master doesn’t talk, he acts,
When his work is done,
the people say, “Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!”
You, as the facilitator, can be the channel for inspiring a group. However, the organization must come from them or it will never last. The facilitator doesn’t provide the ideas, he sets the stage for them to emerge. He provides the conditions which make their emergence possible.
Her most basic task is to start the flow of ideas by valuing ideas over power. No one is allowed to take control in the group. Only ideas take control. You accomplish this by integrating each idea expressed to those expressed before it. Everyone’s attention becomes focused on the content of the ideas instead of who said it.
All groups of people self-organize.
The possibilities are limited only by
the integrative abilities of the members.
Enforcing “equality” among members of the group is the facilitator’s main early role.
If the group has internalized this and the other norms which permit blossoming of the group, little action is required by the facilitator. The group develops and organizes with it’s own unique structure.
In effect, successful, lasting groups self-organize with the facilitator as a catalyst. The vast literature on self-organizing systems is full of gems which help us understand how groups get organized.
Explore the edge of chaos
and self-organization in social groups
Self-organizing systems (whether of one species or several) depend on voluntary cooperation in order to arise. Jurgen Habermas has shown values of respect, honesty, equality, and voluntary agreement to be embedded in language. The same holds true for the market, science, and democracy. The market depends on the law of contract. Science exists only when scientists can persuade one another of the validity of their theories.
Scientific method developed because of its capacity to convince others. All democratic rules: equality of the vote, freedom of speech, freedom of organization, and the like, are justified by their capacity to enable citizens to persuade one another as equals.
Competition within these systems arises out of their persuasive foundation, for in these orders competition is always the result of differing efforts at persuasion.These fundamental kinds of order arise mostly without deliberate intention, and can survive only when free to evolve outside of conscious direction.
They arise spontaneously when people use certain general procedural rules for dealing with others while pursuing their own goals. Because these groups are not consciously constructed, they are not bounded in their complexity by the limitations confronting the individual mind. Consequently, self-organizing systems can weave together far more knowledge and insight in useful ways than any group could ever deliberately devise.
Human relations in self-organizing systems are based on agreement over procedures and appropriate means rather than agreement over ends. Because requirements for agreement are less demanding, such cooperative networks can grow larger than in more personally oriented societies (e.g., tribes where the chief’s word is law or their modern version, totalitarian societies). A market is a clear example of such a cooperative network. As they grow larger, these networks become less deep and more impersonal. This impersonal nature of modern markets and other structures in democratic societies triggers the common criticisms that these social structures are inhuman and amoral. Events of late 2007 in financial markets give ample evidence.
The only basic value they do all possess one basic value: “freedom of ideas to persuade others.” Upon internalization of this norm/assumption/value, all other beliefs are fair prey. Nothing remains sancrosanct except this value. And these groups and structures are bound to be amoral if the only norms the facilitator has instilled are norms related to process–that is, only to means instead of ends.
So the facilitator must establish other norms. Else amoral growth is the only outcome of a successful group.
Every successful group, early in its development, will reach agreement on a common set of assumptions. As a facilitator, this is your best, and often sole, opportunity for steering a group away from the natural amorality. The natural amorality is much easier to encourage. Encouraging other norms is not done by arguing for a particular norm, because this then puts the new norm at odds with the most basic norm “freedom of ideas to persuade people.” The facilitator must just act as if certain assumptions (e.g., honesty, trustworthiness, environmentalism, value of profit above all) are natural laws. Then they become natural laws for that group.
This approach fails only when another adept facilitator is in the group and he has contradicting assumptions. Then, the facilitator must use the principles of integration and synthesis to help the group come up with a more basic assumption which integrates both original assumptions. Then you can again begin building consistent with your original assumption and eventually co-opt and bypass the conflicting assumption.
At DEN, we’ve worked to develop lasting groups in agriculture, water quality, economic development, state policy, national policy and a number of other areas.
Other perspectives:
Self-organization in social groups