Part 2 strategic frameworks

Wave Your Hand, Fan the Flame
Strategic Frameworks
Tools for Creating a Specific Change Strategy
Over the decades of the expanding advocacy effort by our
communities, we have become more professional in our approach
to creating change. Primarily, this has been through improving our
implementation of change tactics, and by mapping change plans to
operational frameworks like logic models. While these changes in
our approach have improved achievement of outcomes, we have
reduced the scope of what we think are useful outcomes:
● Tactics require very specific and detailed planning to be
effective
● Operational planning requires a specific framework and
coordination of the threads of the plan to be effective
● While we tend to think that outcome focus and detailed
development of the plan and tactics are the only things we
are doing to improve our results, we also reduce the scope
and potential impact of our change plans in order to make it
easier to detail and coordinate our work toward outcomes.
The traditional way to avoid this reduction in scope and impact is to

build a strategy within which our operational plans and tactics make
sense. But the concept of strategy in social change has been
watered down and misused, resulting in strategy becoming a
useless concept.
Today’s presentation is aimed at understanding different
frameworks that you can use in developing a real change strategy.

Part 2: Strategic Frameworks
If it was easy to create and use a change strategy, we wouldn’t
need to change anything; those changes would have already
happened.
There are a lot of ways to think about creating a strategy. Most
strategic frameworks are aimed at doing just that. But, most
strategic frameworks were created either for military or business
purposes, and are cludgy for use in social justice. This presentation
will cover some frameworks I have run across over the years that I
believe can be used successfully to support building an effective
social justice change strategy.
Having said that, there is no “7 steps to a successful change
strategy” technique. Our change work is focused on very complex
systems within very complex networks. Generally, an organization
that chooses to focus on a particular change target does so
because the organization has a deep relationship with those
persons affected by the target’s discrimination and disempowering
behavior. Such deep and largely implicit connection with values like

self-determination and autonomy can be very effective in pursuing
social justice change, but the values don’t dictate the strategy. We
have to mesh our energy for the mission with an understanding of
our target system. That requires real work and not dependence on
some “silver bullet” method for achieving a plan outcome.
My suggestion is that you pick one of these frameworks that you
find interesting for whatever reason, and learn more about it from
the resources focused on that framework. Our interest in, or
fascination with, a framework can reflect some resonance between
us, our implicit connections to the issues with which we struggle,
and the language or concepts of the framework.

Open and Closed Approaches to Targets
When thinking about a system as a target of change effort, there
are only two ways to view that target. Christopher Alexander calls
them Type A and Type B in reference to architecture, but this basic
way of seeing systems arises in many contexts.
I think the most useful way of describing the two in a change
context is to view the target system as open (Type A) or closed
(Type B).
Viewing a target system as Type B (closed) is viewing it as though
it were a casino game, let’s say Blackjack. While you can’t predict
which cards will show up in any single hand, you know that there
are only 52 cards. The closed nature of the deck means that you
can count cards and build a model of how the hands will play out,
at least over time.
The same kind of closed view of a target system means that your
change planning only includes a limited number of future
possibilities. This means that an operational plan can assume that

only certain possible responses to a specific change initiative can
occur. Since our target systems are almost never closed, we are
commonly surprised by the outcomes of our work, by the
unintended consequences of our actions. In general, we are less
surprised by unanticipated results if our focus is on the short term
and the outcomes we seek have little system-level impact on the
target.
Real target systems are open, which is to say, they are affected by
the environment in which they operate (including us). When we do
something to change a target, we are not just dealing with the
target’s innards; we are also dealing with all the target’s
interactions with the rest of the world.
As much as targets (especially bureaucracies) would like to believe
that they are in control of the way the world affects them (perhaps
using the laws, policies, and rules that govern their organization as
defense against change), they are not, especially over the medium
to long term. Change strategies that don’t respect this reality will
find significant difficulty in producing longer term change. In effect,
keeping our change efforts focused on the short term reinforces
the target’s bureaucratic defenses, making them more effective.
The laws, policies, and rules that govern any target are a closed
system (albeit one full of ambiguities, and unanswered questions)
and can’t protect the target system from environmentally forced
change. Our change strategies must respect the actual openness
of our targets if those strategies are to be effective.

Closed Systems
When you view a target system through the lens of closed systems,
you feel comfortable ignoring any changes that might happen to the
system beyond the ones you want to cause. To take the example
from the previous slide, consider using card counting to manage or
change your luck at Blackjack. While there is clearly chance
involved in the outcome, you can use card counting because the
deck in the game has 52 predictable cards even if you can’t know
ahead of time which cards will turn up in a particular hand.
Suppose that in the course of a game of blackjack, entirely new
cards could be invented unpredictably and introduced into a hand.
These cards could have any numerical value and could be
unrelated to the standard ranking and value system If this
happened, you could still use card counting but it would be far less
effective.
In a book called the Craft of Power, Siu introduced a similar
distinction in defining a game called Chinese Baseball. This game
was just like the American version except that when the ball was in

the air, anyone could move the bases any place they wanted.
A closed view of a target system ignores the possibility of
contextual change, which is the same as ignoring the environment
of a target or the impact of the environment on the target aside
from our change effort. Techniques of change typically ignore the
environment (i.e., “7 steps to producing systems change”), as do
operational plans and logic models.

Open Systems
When you view a target system through the lens of Openness, you
accept that the environment of the target must be part of your
change framework. Accepting the context of your target as an
important player in your change strategy means that you won’t be
making an abstract long term plan that you mechanically
implement, step by step. Instead your strategy will require you to do
something more like moving through your house at night in the
dark. You have to be careful even though you know the house well.
You have to check to see if you actually got where you wanted to
go.
You will move part of the way through the house, and make sure
you got where you wanted to get, and then you will make your next
move and check again.
Making moves this way is called iteration (do it, then do it again,
then again). Using iteration as a way of implementing your change
strategy allows you to adjust (adapt) your effort to what you have
discovered about your target and any changes it has experienced

while you were implementing your strategy.
Often implementing your change effort in this way allows you and
your target to adapt to each other, making your effort a better
match to the target.
Always keep Openness in mind as you develop your strategy and
enact your actions to change the target. Using a Closed approach
will undermine your effectiveness at change.
Resources: How to intervene in a complex system

Autopoiesis
Imagine that you stick yourself with a pin. You might say, “The pin
hurt me.”
Of course we know the pin didn’t produce the pain we feel. When
we say the pin caused the pain, it is with the understanding that it is
our brain that created the pain. The brain caused (created) the
pain, the pin caused (triggered) the brain to create the unpleasant
sensation.
Most of the time, in our lives, this distinction doesn’t mean much.
There is no real difference in thinking that the pin caused the pain
and remembering that it was the brain that actually created the
pain. But this distinction is the reason why autopoiesis (self-
creation) is important when we are trying to change a target. In
developing and using Change Strategies, we must understand that
our target will create the meaning for our tactics, not us. Our ideas
of what kind of change our tactics should produce when used
against a target are generally wrong in some way. When we have a
long-standing relationship in changing a target, it will be easier for

us to judge how the target will create the meaning of what we do to
change them.
This framework should be part of all your change work. The most
common mistake advocates make is to believe that their change
tactics will produce only the change advocates think they should
produce. Often, the change that actually occurs is different from
what we hoped for, and there are often unintended consequences
of our change efforts that we do not anticipate. We wrongly assume
that the intention of our change tactic is the only important driver of
what can take place.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s suppose that the pain we felt
when we were stuck with the pin was the first time we ever felt
pain. So, what kind of strategy might we use to prevent pain in the
future? Maybe we would pass a law that said that pins were illegal.
We would quickly find out that there were many things that could
trigger pain, and that it is impractical to outlaw all of them. Also,
since pins are economically useful, a black market in pins would
develop, so that there would still be people experiencing pain
because they were stuck with a pin. Maybe we would create a war
on pins to destroy the black market. We all know how successful
that would be. Although this example is frivolous, it “points” out the
risks of thinking that your meanings are universal, and that your
target will react to your change effort the way you want the system
to react.
Resources: Autopoiesis for Beginners

Anticipation vs. Prediction
From my previous statements about future uncertainty, you might
assume that we can’t produce anything useful by trying to foresee
what we will face in the future. That isn’t true. Prediction is not the
only way we can make use of our knowledge to guide our strategy,
operational plans, and tactics. Some of the frameworks I discuss
later in this presentation deal with this issue directly, but, for now,
let’s look at the distinction between prediction and anticipation.
Prediction produces a single causal change from what there is now
to the predicted future. Prediction assumes a lot of knowledge
about how the future will evolve. In closed systems (like casino
games), prediction is usually described as statistical-there is such
and such a chance of a particular value card showing up in this
hand. Over time, statistical prediction is pretty accurate-in closed
systems.
In open systems, prediction only works over a very short term-the
shortness of the time frame of the prediction depends on how
complex or chaotic the target system is.

Anticipation takes a broader view of the target’s possible evolution,
and is based on all the information and experience you have about
the target (and your own abilities to respond to change). Effective
anticipation requires that your change group or organization
develop flexibility of response while you actively try to change the
target. In turn, flexibility in your organization is a strategic choice.
You choose to have overlap in staff capability rather than super
efficiency in the division of staff work. You choose to pursue funds
that overlap the parts of your mission rather than trying to separate
each funding stream into equally separate outcomes. Anticipation
allows effective use of iterative, adaptive change tactics, permitting
the gaining of knowledge about the target system during the
implementation of the strategy, to allow better matching of strategy
to target dynamics.
In general, the less you know about the future of yourself and your
target, the more you should use anticipation and the less you
should use prediction in your planning and execution. Also, the less
you can predict about the future, the more important strategy
becomes.
Precarious Lives, Democracy and ‘Affective Politics’
“It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty
that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in
some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it
has so many times before in various periods in the history.” -
Richard P. Feynman

Grand Strategy
Your grand strategy, whether you ever make it explicit or not, is the
set of values that grounds and organizes your approach to wanting
change and making it. Those values always include contradictions.
(For example, the most common contradiction in the grand strategy
of disability rights is between creating protection and supporting
personal autonomy.) In creating strategy, operational plans, and
tactics, these abstract contradictions will frame the boundaries of
your struggle to achieve not just change, but meaningful change.
Jumping to tactics based on your intuition of the need for change,
which is the most common way advocacy organizations make
these choices, will fail to appreciate the struggle between the
opposites in our value systems and produce unintended
consequences, and the consequent useless effort to defend our
change effort despite those unintended consequences.
Because these values are more implicit than explicit, it takes effort,
both personal and in your advocacy community, to surface the
struggle around your ultimate values and learn something from that
dialogue. The best conceptual framework for surfacing and

struggling directly with those abstract contradictions is Scott Kelso’s
notion that abstract contradictions are real processes that can have
complementary relationships in addition to opposed ones. There is
nothing automatic about this change from opposition to
complement, and aphorisms like, “and, not or”, and similar attempts
to discard the complexity of our values, don’t cut it. It always
requires struggle to move an abstraction back into an actuality.
That unavoidable requirement for struggle is why people choose to
live as though their abstractions were reality.
In the wider world, there are four levels of framing, managing, and
executing strategy:
● Grand Strategy: What ultimate values you and your
organization bring to the development of change strategy,
operational plans, and tactics
● Strategy: The framework you use in advocating change to
deal with the unpredictability of the future and your scarcity of
resources
● Operations: The plans that you use to produce measurable
outcomes that are consistent with your strategy. Such plans
are only effective within some timeframe that reflects how
quickly your target (and your organization) change.
● Tactics: The concrete actions to alter your target; tactics
have a beginning and an end and can be judged in terms of
their success by reference to their projected outcomes.
Tactics are very short term.
The Art of Advocacy lies in integrating these frameworks, learning
from your errors and mistakes, and seeing your work through to
real change by adapting as you go.
The Grand Strategy To Cast Off the Corporate State
Strategic Thinking & Global Health: The Case of Agent Orange &
Public Health in Vietnam

Wayfinding and Sense Making
As we will discuss later, plans and procedures are useful in ordered
change environments. But, most of the time, our targets are
complex-we don’t know enough about them (and can’t know
enough about them) to be able to simply use operational plans to
produce automatic change. Instead, we have to learn as we
attempt to change our target, so that we can do a better job of
change with our next change effort (iteration). In other words, we
are finding the path of change as we travel it, and we are always
trying to make sense of the new and unexpected information we
get as we try to change our target. The alternative, which is to
ignore ongoing change until our plan has been implemented the
way it was written, is untenable as a change strategy.
The idea that we are gradually realizing what we need to do for
effective change by acting on our target is variously called
“wayfinding” and “sense-making”. I think these less specific notions
of how we go about change are more like everyone’s actual
experience of trying to make change, than the delusionally precise
descriptions in a logic model.

But, such a realistic view also means we have to value the foggy
path we follow to create change, and not tie ourselves to an
unrealistic notion of plan as deterministic ritual. One of the realities
of following the foggy path is the anxiety that attends not knowing.
Managing the anxiety rather than abandoning the foggy path is a
skill that is learned over time through engaging targets in
meaningful change. Working to find your way and to make sense of
an unclear world are the tools that teach you how to manage that
anxiety.
Path Finding and Way Finding
Pinterest View of wayfinding and sensemaking

The Indirect Approach
The indirect approach is commonly used in strategic thinking about
how to implement tactics and operational plans. It includes all those
things we do to hide our intentions and maintain secrecy, as well as
constituting a framework for how we iteratively approach a complex
outcome. In operations and tactics, it is the equivalent of trying to
surprise our target. In planning and execution, it is a way of
focusing on building a flexible ongoing base for achieving our
outcomes.
In strategy, the indirect approach has two faces:
● The Indirect Approach in Planning
● The Indirect Approach in Execution
Planning
A concrete way of thinking about the indirect approach is to
imagine that you are taking a trip with your children and that you
want to surprise them about where you are going (I don’t know,

maybe Disneyland). Because your children are smart, you have to
take steps to keep them unsure about your final location. Maybe
you leave flyers around the house and in the car during the trip for
tourist spots like “Alligator Wrestling” or the “Get Eaten Alive”
mosquito ranch. Maybe you talk up getting eaten alive while you
are driving. Your path to your real destination goes way off the
standard approach to Disneyland, and by dirt roads that don’t
advertise Disneyland. Your effort is to give your children many
(unpleasant) possibilities while postponing their discovery of your
actual destination as long as possible.
In planning, you will identify your ultimate goal, but you will also
build in communications and disclosures that point to other
plausible options so that your target will be unsure of your intent.
Execution
In executing the plan you develop for your change strategy, your
“bait and switch” messages will provoke some reaction from your
target. If you can discern the target’s response, you can do small
things to reinforce their mistaken beliefs about your ultimate goal.
When you finally reveal your ultimate goal, your target will have to
spend time readjusting to the new reality. (See the OODA loop later
in the presentation for a framework to allow you to capitalize on
your target’s confusion.)
The Indirect Approach is a meta-strategy. Especially when you are
focusing on a target over and over again, you will have many
interactions with the target and you will exchange many messages.
Your overall approach will be to to communicate with care, to be
open about things that don’t affect your ability to achieve your
change outcomes, and circumspect about those that do.
Another way to think about indirectness is to examine the role of
politeness in human networks. The point of being polite is to allow
communication without forcing personal or intimate disclosure.
Politeness allows us to carefully expand the closeness of our

interactions with people based on what we learn about them, i.e.,
how much we can trust them and in what ways we can trust them.
Adapting to change in our target, the larger environment, and
ourselves produces similar expanding information and increased
trust.
Indirect Techniques
The Indirect Approach

The OODA Loop
John Boyd was a fighter pilot who asked himself why it was that
some pilots were generally better than others in aerial dogfights.
His conclusion was that the better pilots made accurate decisions
faster than their opponents rather than the more obvious
conclusion that the better pilots had better planes. This faster
decision making process is referred to as getting inside the
decision loop of your opponent. If you can succeed in doing this,
you disrupt your opponent’s ability to make good decisions, and
their defense falls apart.
Because advocacy for target change has the same kind of abstract
back and forth character to its process, there are many lessons for
us in Boyd’s simple and easy to understand model:
● One of our great advantages as small advocacy
organizations or groups is that we can move faster than our
target. But, we don’t typically use this important capability.
For example, a common behavior is to file a complaint, and
then wait for a response from the target. Time is a valuable

● resource, and waiting for a response from our target is
wasting that resource. In fact, targets often use slow
responses to wear out disturbers of the status quo. We can
use the slowness of our target’s responses to pile on
additional disturbances that will require some response from
the target. Each disturbance is a new challenge and requires
a new response. When a target feels overwhelmed by
disturbances, the target will tend to negotiate rather than
stonewall.
● “Orient” is the phase in the OODA loop that is often the
hardest to understand. The part we often miss is the
orientation of the target. How does the target think about this
advocacy situation, and what does the target believe are their
distinct advantages? It is those advantages that we want to
undermine by quick accurate responses. It is the target’s
beliefs about their strengths that we want to disrupt. If we
succeed in our effort to disrupt, we will maximize confusion in
the response of the target.
Boyd Resources

The Bow Tie Model
The bow tie model wasn’t developed for use in successful social
justice advocacy, but it is a good reminder that change targets are
composed of many different processes, and that changing some is
more effective than changing others. The big picture lesson in the
Bow Tie model is that the parts of a target that are at the core are
more “specialized, fragile, rigid, and efficient” than those parts
which interact with the external world as input or output. Yet, as I
have mentioned before, we tend to focus our change efforts on the
superficial parts (the input and output parts) with which we can
easily engage.
While it is harder to interact with the core, change in the core
affects every aspect of the target now and in the future. A typical
method for exploiting this difference between core and periphery
would be to have a small number of superficial tweaks as part of
your change effort, and a small number of efforts to undermine the
current status quo of the core. Altering the core alters the way that
the target reproduces itself from day to day. Such changes in the
core are much more resilient to backsliding than superficial

alterations of rules and externally imposed policies.
Bow Tie models are often used to illustrate risk management from
unexpected disturbances (read advocacy efforts). My use of it here
will require you to view the disturbance as a good thing and the
changes that result as part of your overall change strategy, rather
than a disaster. A “safety” analysis (read protecting our status quo)
details the processes that maintain current reality.
Ten rules for smart bowtie analysis: Just substitute “change
initiative” for “hazard” and you should be able to begin to see the
use of bow-tie thinking in your development of a change strategy.

Top Down vs. Bottom Up Change
Most of our individual and systems advocacy is what I call top
down. We threaten the ability of some existing hierarchy to carry on
its business unless it accommodates our change agenda. If our
threat is feasible, we can negotiate a solution. The solution
continues to exist after a successful negotiation, but is embedded
in the larger evolution of the whole system (including us, the target,
and their environment). This evolution is characterized by struggle
over the target system’s constraints, whether they be money,
politics, professional ideology, etc. Thus, our top down victory is
immediately and relentlessly subjected to various attempts at
modification or rollback. This is typical of any gain in social justice.
It will be attacked by the same forces that we defeated with our top
down victory.
Bottom up advocacy is a different animal, more subtle, but longer
lasting. Bottom up advocacy is not sending out emails to our
constituents to have them share our talking points with some
legislator or policy-maker. Bottom up advocacy produces
epiphanies (life changing realizations) in the people with whom we

interact. Epiphanies change the heart of meaning for an individual
when successful, and can last a lifetime. Even if the person
affected never pursues a social justice change vocation, they
remain more receptive to social justice messages. This is true even
if the person changes their political ideology to one that is
superficially antagonistic to our goals. An epiphany is not a change
in political beliefs. Such belief systems are a dime a dozen, useful
for tactics or as part of some operational plan, but with no lasting
impact. They are more like membership cards in a community than
a reflection of our deepest experiences of meaning.
You can think of an epiphany as part of the developing Grand
Strategy of the person who experiences it.
The big problem with epiphanies is scaling them. Theater, cults,
political parties-all produce excitement through the use of well
managed entertainment, spectacle, and a sense of belonging to
large groups of people. I view these as faux epiphanies. A real
epiphany requires a change of heart that lasts far longer than the
originating experience. It can occur in the common experience of
some spectacle, but it only occurs in a single person.
We need to have both a top down and a bottom up integrated
strategy. If we forget the bottom up part, we find ourselves in
endless struggle with the forces that fight change. The current
battle by conservative forces to fight back against the civil rights era
changes in law and practice has been going on since the mid 60s,
and it is far from over. Burnout from having to constantly defend
(expending energy, money, time, and meaning) what seemed like a
real victory is a significant problem in social justice advocacy. Even
though funders typically (and accurately) believe that bottom up
change doesn’t scale well, always devote a part of your change
effort to changing individual hearts.
Her Power
Epiphanies: Life-changing Encounters With Music ed. Tony
Herrington

Advocate As Entrepreneur
Advocacy at its best is the social justice equivalent of
entrepreneurial activity. Entrepreneurial actions in advocacy are
often called social entrepreneurship, and are focused on the use of
the nonprofit as a social change tool. But, entrepreneurial principles
and habits are useful generally in developing change strategies.
Social entrepreneurship is:
● About applying practical, innovative and sustainable
approaches to benefit society in general, with an emphasis
on those who are marginalized and poor.
● A term that captures a unique approach to economic and
social problems, an approach that cuts across sectors and
disciplines grounded in certain values and processes that are
common to each social entrepreneur, independent of whether
his/ her area of focus has been education, health, welfare
reform, human rights, workers' rights, environment, economic
development, agriculture, etc., or whether the organizations
they set up are nonprofit or for-profit entities.

Social entrepreneurs share some come common traits including:
● An unwavering belief in the innate capacity of all people to
contribute meaningfully to economic and social development
● A driving passion to make that happen.
● A practical but innovative stance to a social problem, often
using market principles and forces, coupled with dogged
determination, that allows them to break away from
constraints imposed by ideology or field of discipline, and
pushes them to take risks that others wouldn't.
● A zeal to measure and monitor their impact. Entrepreneurs
have high standards, particularly in relation to their own
organization’s efforts and in response to the communities
with which they engage. Data, both quantitative and
qualitative, are their key tools, guiding continuous feedback
and improvement.
● A healthy impatience. Social Entrepreneurs cannot sit back
and wait for change to happen – they are the change drivers.
There is a sizable internet base of every kind of information about
social entrepreneurship, and I would suggest a scanning approach
until you find something that perks your interest. The link below
perked mine.
Mining Social Entrepreneurship Strategies Using Topic Modeling

Disruptive Innovation
Disruptive innovation is an abstract process that describes how
new businesses replace old ones, as in the replacement of large
computers by personal ones in the 80’s. The general way it works
goes like this:
When current public or services systems do innovation, they create
what are called “sustaining” innovations, ones that build on their
already existing model, using their already existing investments and
skills. Because of this, these innovations support the status quo
and cost more, and are more complex and harder to use by the
public. Disruptive Innovations, on the other hand:
● Are seldom created by current systems. Instead, they are
created by outsiders.
● Target an underserved or unserved market
● Are initially inferior to existing services, but satisfy a need
current systems don’t address
● Are less expensive, and less trouble than current services
● Typically use a new more advanced technology or method of

● service.
In designing a change strategy around a disruption, you need to
understand that you are not replacing the entire target, or even a
large part of it. Remember that public services, although
theoretically serving an entire community, do not in fact do this.
They prioritize easy to serve people who require no flexibility from
the system and who don’t cost a lot within the current framework of
services. This means that in every public service recipient
community, there are smaller communities of people who get no
service, lousy service, or who are required to jump through so
many hoops that it isn’t practical for them to use the service.
If you can figure out a way to provide a useful service to these
marginalized communities at lower cost and with high ease of
access, you have the beginnings of a disruption. The process of
implementing a disruption is to succeed at a small scale, learn how
to serve the target community best, and expand into the next best
target community. Because you are supporting groups of people
that the mainstream system really doesn’t wish to serve, you have
some leverage to stay this careful course of gradual expansion.
In designing the strategy for your disruption, you need to carefully
use a framework that fits disruptive strategies. This framework,
which draws from Michael Raynor’ s decade-long research into
disruptive innovation, has three principal components:
● Focus: Identify what needs to be accomplished in the short
and long term
● Shape: Decide how and where to start disrupting
● Grow: Protect and nurture the disruptive innovation
Focus: What do you want to accomplish?
1. What is the job that needs to be done?
2. What are the current trade-offs?
3. How can these trade-offs be broken, so that new ones more

1. favorable to your target subcommunity can be created?
These considerations will allow you to create a disruptive
hypothesis to guide your change effort.
Shape: How and When to start Disrupting?
1. Start the disruption in an unserved community
2. Use the ignoring of your target community as a catalyst for
driving your autonomy in your disruption change effort
Grow: Nurture and extend the disruptive innovation
1. Level the playing field through removal of subsidies and
guaranteed contracts
2. Change laws to allow your disruption
3. Sunset existing programs, especially where they focus on
your target community
4. Use private-public partnerships to increase your disruptive
leverage.
The resource links below will give you a lot more detail on how to
think about using disruption in social justice change efforts.
Public sector, disrupted
Anticipating Disruptive Strategies

Scenario Planning
Scenario Planning was originally developed at Shell Oil in the early
70’s, and it is still used mostly in large enterprises. But it is a useful
way of thinking about strategy for any organization and creating
scenarios doesn’t have to be as complicated as it seems in the
diagram.
The key idea is that you want to create a strategy for your
organization that won’t fall apart the first time something
unexpected happens. Since you can’t predict the future very well,
you want your strategy to be “resilient”, able to weather unexpected
disturbances. Scenario Planning is a way to do this.
The environment of our change efforts doesn’t remain stable very
long, so we don’t need to use scenario planning the way, say, Shell
Oil uses it. Instead we focus on the forces affecting ourselves and
our primary change target over a year or so.
A Micro-Scenario Approach

Advocacy often requires a less complicated way to develop and
modify change efforts than a comprehensive enterprise approach
to scenario planning would require (typical months to years). Also,
when change efforts require quick turn-arounds, groupthink is an
ever present and virtually universal risk. The simplest way to avoid
groupthink is to ask each person that is part of the advocacy effort
or who has “skin in the (change) game” to develop their ideas
independently so that no possibilities will be lost due to peer
pressure. Only once ideas have been considered individually and
surfaced, can you avoid groupthink in building a plan that will
support your change initiative.
The first step is to identify the main forces affecting both your
organization and your target. These forces will only partly overlap.
These forces are ones that will change your environment and that
of your target, but about which you have little to say:
● National funding priorities
● Legal changes on the horizon that affect your core mission or
your daily organizational practice
● Mandated changes in rights, personnel certifications and
other infrastructure
● Changes that affect your ability to advocate (i.e., changes in
lobbying laws or political evolution of governance)
● Changes in the rights and missions of communities allied to
your mission
The second step is to create scenarios in which these forces
change in specific directions. Remember that these scenarios are
not what you think will happen. They represent the future only as a
model of how the forces you identified might produce outcomes. It
is typical to have 2 to 4 scenarios. Commonly, you will have one
scenario that represents the best you can possibly expect from the
current forces, and and one that represents the worst you can
expect from the current forces. One or two other scenarios might
be created to represent a sudden and unexpected increase in one
of the forces you identified.

The scenarios need to be made as intense and immediate as
possible so that discussion doesn’t ignore real possibilities because
of the abstract nature of the forces at which you are looking. This
means that deep discussion is needed to flesh them out and they
need to be visually and auditorily available to all those who
participate in the scenario work. They will need to be repeatedly
rethought as you learn more about the possibilities of a scenario
over time.
Once the scenarios have as much quality and reality as you can
muster, it will be time to consider strategies for your organization.
Remember that you are not after the “best” strategy. You are after
a strategy that allows you to pursue the change outcome that you
value regardless of how external forces (and your scenarios)
evolve. This strategy will be the resilient one, the one that will favor
your change effort the most regardless of how the future goes.
Think anew, Act anew: Scenario Planning
What If? The Art of Scenario Thinking for Nonprofits

The Cynefin Model
Review this video for a very funny view of management frameworks
(3 minutes): The Children’s Party
This is a “sense-making” framework developed by Dave Snowden
(not Ed Snowden, the NSA one). It is designed to illuminate how
we make sense of the outside environment, including the
organizations in which we work and live our lives, and how our
sense of that environment can guide our engagement with it.
The Disorder section in the middle is where we start before we
begin to try making sense of the environment.
In advocacy organization terms:
Simple: This is the area of efficient procedure. The tasks are
automatically done because no discretion is required. Think of
filling out unemployment system paperwork every so often.
Everything about that is predictable. You “sense” the pattern of
needing to automatically file (maybe a notice), you categorize the

pattern to fit the usual parts, you respond by filling out the forms
and submitting them. The constraints on how you respond are rigid
and unchanging.
Complicated: This is the area of operational plans. It includes such
tasks as managing HR and implementing the expectable work of an
organization. It is the area where planning and planning
frameworks are the most effective.
Complex: This is the area where a strategy is necessary for
effectiveness. Also, traditional planning is more or less ineffective
because the environment is changing in an unpredictable way.
Although I’ll be talking more about this later, the best approach to
the Complex is small experiments meant to probe the environment
for reactions, then revamping your approach to incrementally adapt
to a reality you can’t fully fathom.
Chaotic: If the world is genuinely new, you won’t be able to
usefully plan. Because a part of chaos is that change happens
quickly (no state sticks around for long) and the current state
doesn’t give you much useful information about the future, you
have to try things out and see what happens. Chaos never lasts for
long in human systems, but you can learn things by engaging. My
experience is that what you learn from engaging chaos is useful in
the future, often in situations you couldn’t have anticipated.
There is much more to this framework than I can convey here. The
resources below will introduce you to that larger set of possibilities.
The Cynefin Framework (Video)
A Simple Explanation of the Cynefin Framework (Video)
Powerpoints on Slideshare

Summary Slide
So, here is where we are:
There are many frameworks that we can use to facilitate the
creation of a real strategy for our change effort. The most important
criterion for picking one is that the framework resonate with our
intuition of its usefulness. If the framework fits our organization and
values, it will be useful.
The next presentation will look at tools you can use to implement
your chosen change strategy.

Last Thoughts
The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing
really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not
taking risks.
-Mark Zuckerberg
All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none
can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
-Sun Tzu
There's a certain logic to avoiding the haters, but as a strategy, it's
utterly flawed. When you turn off the feedback, you lose the
benefits as well as the drawbacks. It's like having a sore finger and
cutting off your arm.
-Rob Manuel
When a plan or strategy fails, people are tempted to assume it was
the wrong vision. Plans and strategies can always be changed and
improved. But vision doesn't change. Visions are simply refined
with time.

Your Presenter
I am Norm DeLisle:
Short Bio: hubby2jill, 2dogs, advocatefor45yrs, change strategist,
trainer, geezer, pa2Loree, gndpa2Nevin
Email: ndelisle@mymdrc.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mdrcngd
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/disability.norm
Blogs:
Change Strategy: https://changestrategy.net
Recovery Michigan: http://recoverymi.posthaven.com/
Disability Futures: http://normdelisle.posthaven.com/
Health and Disability: http://ltcreform.posthaven.com/
Economic Justice: http://economic-justice.posthaven.com/

Thank You!
I Appreciate Your
Time and Attention!
Thank You! I appreciate your time and attention.

Becoming Strategically Capable
There is a very old notion of how we get good at skills that I think is
more useful than the idea of 10,000 hours of practice. The
framework grew out of the apprenticeship relationships that have
been the primary way deep skill was conveyed from one person to
another over the history of our species. It goes like this:
1. Beginner: Learn patterns so well they become unconscious
2. Pro: Learn when and how to disregard the patterns
3. Master: Intuiting the right pattern
In change advocacy, building strategic skills certainly follows this
framework, but there is no real apprenticeship except working with
others who are committed to the same social justice goals you
have. You collaborate on real change initiatives over time, and your
skill grows from these experiences. In addition, at least now with
the broader availability of the internet, there are opportunities to
learn from other organizations and individuals, albeit in a more
abstract way than would typically be the case in a traditional
apprenticeship. In addition, building social justice strategic skills is

only an implicit goal, because the focus of our change
organizations is largely on tactics and operational planning.
On the other hand, it is possible over time to work on change
projects with a wide variety of targets, ranging from local individual
advocacy, local community organizing, and regional, state, or
national initiatives. In a decently resourced organization, you might
be working on change in several of these arenas at the same time,
across several related change issues.
In general, the more variety of change targets and change tasks
you experience, the broader the strategic model you are building in
your brain.

Mind of the Beginner
The beginner needs a framework of skills that are so deeply
automatic that they can serve as an unconscious reference point
for building other skills. This way of reference framing a skill set in
the brain as a foundation occurs across all skill acquisition. For
example, the acquisition of math skills uses embedded reference
systems as the basis for building calculation. An example is the use
of pointing by young children to build a reference system of discrete
numbers and numerical sequences.
The other aspect of the beginner’s mind that has been noted by the
quote in the slide is the idea that the we should retain as much of
the beginner’s orientation as we can by working to keep the
openness and lack of filtering even as we learn a skills framework.
One of the principles of human development is that every time we
perform an act, it becomes more automatic, we are less
consciously aware of what we are doing, and we have less
conscious control over the performance. For example, when
children first learn to write, they are really drawing the letters as an

artistic performance. Only when the drawing becomes writing
(automatic) can the child focus on writing words, sentences,
essays, dissertations, novels, etc.
Automatic performance is far more efficient that conscious
performance, and allows the creation of hierarchies of skills that
can be intentionally used for diverse purposes. At the same time,
more automaticity means less flexibility of those automated skills.
People with traumatic brain injury often have partial destruction of
automated skills, and can’t use conscious activity (as they did when
they were first learning the skills).
In Change Advocacy, the beginner's skill set needs to include the
sorts of learnings you get from advocating on behalf of an individual
and/or a family to enhance personal possibility and secure rights.
One of the problems with the modern instantiation of change
advocacy is that it focuses on political change for communities at
the expense of the struggle to secure individual solutions. Ethical
analysis, negotiation, supporting self-determination, and other
similar skills that can be developed and deepened by individual
advocacy are weakened, and change advocacy becomes more
politicized.
It isn’t that community level advocacy is bad or that individual
advocacy is good. Rather, community change advocacy can be
substantially and strategically deepened by broad experience in
supporting individuals. Additionally, individual advocacy helps to
create an internal reference system for the different levels of
system discrimination, oppression tactics, the various interests of
elites and bureaucratic systems, and other systemic
understandings of what it is that we struggle against in systems
change advocacy.

Going Pro
The second phase of acquiring skills is the standard of skills that
practitioners assume when they use those skills for fun and profit.
In social justice change, it is a level of skill that would be expected
in the hiring process for staff in an advocacy organization.
Pros build flexibility into the reference skills they developed as
beginners. The flexibility allows for better matching of skills to
purposes. This has the effect of expanding purpose possibilities.
This expansion is accomplished largely through first being able to
combine elements of the reference skills in new ways and add
novel components to existing elements (maybe by observation of
other professionals) to expand the field of possible skill
components. These enhancements are driven not just by new
experiences that the professional has while engaging in change
efforts, but also by the professional’s reflection on those
experiences, and the rewiring of cognitive frames that allows more
useful skill to be extracted from experience and used in the future.

Skill sets tend to stabilize at the Pro level because that level of skill
tends to be rewarded within organizations and systems, i.e., there
is little incentive to get better.
Getting better after the Pro level is reached requires a different
frame of mind from the skill development support that is ordinarily
available.

Mastery
Mastery of skill requires individual effort and a focus on learning
more from relatively standard situations of skill use than would
ordinarily occur in the social framework of typical skill use. Mastery
also must include the extraction of all that is worthwhile from novel
situations in which Pro skills may be barely adequate.
This combination of focus and reflection on experience allows the
brain to create a novel, deeper, and broader reference system for
the use of the skill set. Many aspects of skill will be made automatic
that can’t be adequately verbalized or demonstrated absent the
demands of a real situation. Because the pattern recognition which
is the first phase of using skill is automatic and unconscious, it is
not really possible to teach it.
It is also very hard for Pros to learn from observing a real life
example of Mastery because the details of skill use that match the
skill used to the details of the real world situation are not obvious.
Only the surface aspects of the skill used are obvious, and the user
can’t relate them to an observer.

So how do we approach building mastery in a collaborative social
justice change organization among a wide variety of people?

Supporting Mastery
The key to supporting the development of mastery in an
organizational environment is to build collaboration, focus, and
reflection into the normal course of change work. Although
historically mastery has been a largely solitary pursuit, it is possible
now to share experiences and the reflections that give them value
through the technologies of collaboration and the modern
undermining of the use of knowledge as a political or strategic tool
through secrecy.
Some ways:
● After Action Debriefing: Careful review of what can be
learned from experience
● Openness about mistakes: Advocacy as supported
innovation
● Openness about novel ideas and methods: Although the
article suggests that openness is a personality trait, it can be
learned by experiencing novelty repeatedly without
experiencing disaster

● Collaborative Workflows: Real collaboration involves building
personal relationships through reciprocal personal
storytelling. It is this relationship that makes collaboration
efficient and effective.
Nowhere is such collaboration, focus, and reflection more important
that in an ongoing “strategic conversation”. The old model of
developing strategy, the one that has degraded strategy into
operational planning, was to segregate strategic discussion into
hierarchical planning in secret. The output of this was a written plan
which had minor effects on the actual behavior of the organization.
Resource: Strategic Conversation as an organizational habit, used
by all members of the organization, is still a cutting edge notion.
The link is to a book that discusses strategic conversation at the
enterprise level.

Summary of Learning from Experience
One of the advantages of social justice advocacy as a calling is that
learning can go on for one’s entire life. The struggle for the fullness
of life’s possibilities includes that vast majority of people who are
alive, and the lessons of that struggle can be available to anyone
who is willing to participate in the vast and ancient effort for real
equity and collaborative community.
Although I broke down the building of skill into 3 stages, learning is
continuous if we focus on values, valued outcomes, advocacy
effort, and supportive relationships with friends and allies. There
are many skills that can be expanded and deepened if we make the
commitment to constant learning as much as specific advocacy
outcomes.
So the trouble with never graduating really is an advantage, and
one to remember when we run inevitably into barriers.

Part 2 strategic frameworks

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Part 2 strategic frameworks