Part 3 Strategy Implementation Tools

Wave Your Hand, Fan the Flame
Executing Strategy
Tools for Making Your Strategy Real
Over the decades of the expanding effort by our change
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:
● Our usual choice of 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 are also reducing the
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 an overview of potentially useful tools in
executing your strategy.

Part 3: Tools of Implementation
We can’t separate the implementation of a strategy from our two
missions, the core mission (1) to create change, and the second
mission (2) of keeping the organization or group going. Tools to
make any strategy real have to operate effectively in the interaction
of Mission 1 and 2. An example of the issues that can come up
would be a change focus on medication access issues while
accepting funding from a pharmaceutical foundation. The
implementation of a mission-critical change initiative might
sabotage the funding relationship or vice-versa.
More generally, it isn’t possible to implement a real strategy without
creating conflicts of various kinds across stakeholders in the
ecosystem. A core practice across all strategy implementation is
managing these conflicts, and modifying the strategy to account for
the impact of the conflicts.

Deep Strategy Patterns
The cover image in the slide is from one of the most fascinating
books I’ve ever read. The author, who went on to try to build a
machine that could translate between dolphin and human speech,
did research for the US Navy in the early 60’s that looked at
combining high dose LSD with a sensory deprivation tank. The
report (which was not accepted by the Navy for what I suppose are
obvious reasons) was published under the title “Programming and
Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer”, and is truly one of a
kind. The book discusses in mind blowing detail how belief
systems, even ones we don’t actually believe, organize our thought
and action.
Our Deep Strategy is a consequence of such beliefs, even if all we
are doing is assuming their truth without any faith that they are true.
There are many such possible assumed truths that we can use to
frame the creation of a deep strategy. One of my personal favorites
is a rendering of the belief system of the 19th century American
approach to life, one that is so different from our current

assumptions. I think we need to internalize Roberto Unger’s
“commanding beliefs of the American people":
1. Everything is possible.
2. Vast problems can be solved if broken up into pieces and
addressed one by one.
3. Ordinary people have the smarts and the energy to solve any
problem, as long as they work together.

Top-down vs. Bottom-up
I mentioned this distinction in strategy earlier, but I want to expand
on that basic description. I said earlier that top down strategies
were embedded in large scale struggles. As soon as you win, the
people or belief systems you defeated begin to counter your
victory. Bottom up strategies produce epiphany experiences which
change meaning for the individual who experiences them, often for
a lifetime. My earlier conclusion was to execute strategies that
have both top down and bottom up components.
The clipart image shows top down strategy as a hierarchy and
bottom up strategy as a context for that hierarchy. A reasonable
description of a top down hierarchy is change strategy implemented
at different levels (say, Federal, State, Local) drawn from an
ideology and focused on specific levers of change appropriate to
each level. The change effort is a struggle, carried out against
some opposing force, be it the status quo or some other ideological
force with its own change agenda. Victory tends to be over a
portion of the contested space. That contested space doesn’t stop
being contested just because one side had an advocacy victory.

The current national politics in the USA shows this very clearly.
Bottom up advocacy produces epiphany experiences that change
the framework of meaning for a specific individual. Sometimes
group experiences also produce epiphanies in many if not all of the
participants. But the change that occurs is a transformation of
meaning in an individual no matter how many people experience it.
Think of the earlier discussion of autopoiesis. The meaning of an
experience is determined by the person having that experience not
the creators of the event. These changes in meaning tend to last
for a long time and don’t produce the struggle in the larger
environment that follows a top-down victory.
To the extent that a change effort is successful in triggering
epiphanies, the people who change will be capable of supporting
top down victories for a long time. On the other hand, strategies
targeting top down victories tend to recruit people to the change
effort for the period of the initiative and don’t necessarily involve
even temporary change in those forces who would counter that
victory. In fact, exclusion of the defeated from change consideration
is the normal assumption of a top-down advocacy change effort.
The strategic consequences of this reality are deepened by the
common conclusion of those who participated in a top-down victory
that it was final at least in regard to the specific change issue
involved. When the countering begins, the immediate response is
to defend the victory. Such defense, however necessary it seems,
is a very weak strategy.

Offense vs. Defense
In military theory, the offense and defense are very different
animals. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use some combination of
the two in the real world, just that different skills, logistics, and
planning are required to implement them. These differences alter
the character of an advocacy organization when it shifts from
offense to defense and the organizational beliefs of its staff. Such
changes are usually articulated as, “We have lost our passion for
advocacy”.
In social justice change efforts, offense is equivalent to innovation,
and defense is equivalent to resistance to change or constraint of
opposing forces.
If a change initiative doesn’t innovate in its approach to targets, the
targets will adapt and the change effort will gradually have reduced
impact. The target’s efforts to constrain change are, usually,
reactive rather than strategic. Since the goal of the target in a
change environment is usually to maintain the status quo, the
target typically uses its already existing tool set to counter the

change. However, the target will adapt over time,trying to build
capabilities that don’t require it to change core reproductive
processes.
For example, when special education was first being implemented,
the response to individual advocacy was to use the school’s
individual administrative assets to counter the advocacy. Then,
education response moved to district assets, the hiring of individual
attorneys for specific issues, and finally legal retainers for ongoing
representation and advice. None of these steps required any basic
change in the way special education services were provided,
though there was some modification due to attorney advice about
preventable systemic risks. The goal was to make as few changes
as possible, and to define the existing education requirements as
the ceiling (the most that had to legally be provided).
There have also been ongoing efforts to change special education
law to make it easier for targets to fend off change efforts (i.e., rule
waivers), but again these efforts require no particular change from
the systems actually providing educational supports.
As an abstract model of how change advocates and targets
interact, the description of special education response to change is
a good one for any social justice change ecosystem regardless of
the specific system or the issues of focus.
The different dynamics between an innovation-based (offensive)
and a constraint-based (defense) strategy are very general. For
example, let's suppose that person slowly gains weight over a
period of decades, and discovers in their annual physical that they
are now in a pre-Type-II diabetic state. They will have to lose the
weight they have gained to avoid Type II diabetes.
To do that, the person will have to use an novel innovative
(offense) eating framework, one they haven’t used before to lose
the weight. Let’s say they are successful. The person can’t keep
using the weight loss strategy or they will die from starvation, or

alternatively the strategy will become ineffective. So they have to
use a new strategy to maintain a steady weight at the new level.
This strategy is one of constraint (defense) and is very different
from the strategy they used to lose the weight. I suspect this shift
from innovation to constraint is a fundamental reason why
maintaining weight is so much harder than losing it.

The Strategic Burden of Policy
As I have described earlier, change organizations have two
missions; one is their core purpose, and the other is to keep their
doors open. I have also described how these two missions can
support one another, interfere with one another, or alter the
integrity of each other. This ongoing dynamic relationship between
the two missions can systematically alter the ability to create useful
strategies, regardless of the change organization’s funding level or
other infrastructure characteristics.
The evolution of policy plays a special role in this relationship
between core mission and reproduction mission because the
creation, maintenance, interpretation, and modification of policy
commonly occupies a significant amount of organizational
management time. The policies that trigger all this effort are far
more likely to concern reproduction than core mission . This has
the cognitive effect of privileging reproduction processes over core,
and biasing management to act as though reproduction was their
central task, regardless of how much marketing effort is used to
convince themselves and the outside world that their core mission

is the most important task they do.
This impacts the creation of change strategies. The development of
any change strategy is partially a task of constraint. There are
natural constraints on any change strategy, natural in the sense
that they arise out of the context of change and aren’t forces
change agents have much control over. But internal constraints,
such as HR policy or choices about health insurance that limit
possibilities for persons with particular kinds of disabilities, or non-
mission-related constraints on behavior, can undermine or defeat
an otherwise usable change strategy. Because these Mission 2
constraints tend to be long-lived, they can bias a generation of
change strategies toward failure or relative ineffectiveness.

Strong and Weak Links
Both change organizations and targets can be viewed as networks.
Any system-as-network is a combination of very strong links
between the internal elements of the system and weak
relationships with a wide range of others, variously called forces or
stakeholders. Our emphasis is always on the strong links because
it seems superficially that it is the strong links that determine all the
important outcomes.
While it is true that the strong links exist to support the evolution of
the target’s purpose, by themselves, strong links drive volatility and
unpredictability. Weak links buffer systems so that the volatility of
the strong links is less. Weak links stabilize a powerful system so
that it doesn’t fly off the rails.
Two communities that typically have strong links without weak links
are homeless individuals and the 1%, both of which reject weak
relationships with others, although superficially for very different
reasons. Homeless persons tend to reject weak links with others
because they don’t trust people they don’t know well to preserve

their personal priority for safety and protection. Very rich people
tend to believe that most people are after their money, and advice
from such people can’t be trusted because of the inherent bias of
weak link self interest.
One way of thinking about weak links involves the use of
community wide collaboration for the development of policy and
change initiatives. Also, a tactic for dealing with bureaucratic
targets is to work to isolate the target from their natural
stakeholders (weak links) and then opportunistically force volatility
for change.

Create, Engineer, or Trigger Change?
Although we don’t normally think about such conceptual issues as
whether we create, engineer, or trigger change, our unconscious
beliefs about which of these three is the basis of real change
constrain and format our change strategies.
(An example that distinguishes cause as creation from cause as
triggering:)
If I accidentally stick myself with a pin, I might say, “The pin hurt
me”. Now I don’t believe intellectually that the pin contains the
essence of pain and it transferred some of that essence to me
when it stuck me. That is, I don’t believe that the pin created the
pain. I know that the brain creates the pain and that the pin triggers
it.
Engineering change as a metaphor for action is akin to building a
plane. To pull it off, you have to very carefully and specifically
design, manufacture, assemble, and test the components of the
plane to be successful.

In complicated systems, creating change and engineering change
become the same thing. But for complex advocacy change, only
triggering of change is effective in the long term. Except for
accidental change, you need to know a lot about how your target
works to build an effective triggering strategy.

Data/Rule vs. Meaning/Guide
One of the results of using closed system thinking is the
mechanical notion that you can use data to set up rules and trigger
actions with the rules, not needing conscious reflection to carry out
plans. This automation of decision making works well for simple
systems and well enough for complicated systems, but fails with
complex systems like change advocacy. In complex systems,
meaning takes the stage and guidance replaces rules. Actual
decisions must be made through some struggle, using the meaning
of strategy as a guide to making those decisions.
Guidance is called “heuristics” or rules of thumb (RoT, ha ha!) in
systems theory. In advocacy, heuristics are developed through
personal and group change advocacy, and are shared by
advocates with one another. Rules of thumb don’t create liabilities
like, say, HR policy. Everyone accepts that RoT weren’t meant to
be engraved in stone. They are suggestions and we interpret their
usefulness in light of the context of our change effort. Since
flexibility is a required basis for successful implementation of a
change strategy, RoTs are a critical part of our change toolbox.

Poking the Abyss
Poking an unknown system (target) means trying to trigger a
response from it when you don’t know much about the target.
We ask the target some kind of question, and we see what we get
for an answer:
● We hold a press conference about a target action
● We send a letter to the controlling authority of the target to
see who responds to us
● We protest
● We assemble a boycott
● We attend all the target's public hearings
And so on.
We map the way the target responds.
Sometimes the target ignores us. If this happens, we escalate.

Sometimes it tries to destroy us.
Most of the time it tries to make us go away.
We build our strategy from the our evolving map of target
responses. The big responses will show us the threats that scare
the target.

Bricolage
You have a problem sitting at your feet. Or dumped in your lap. You
need to do something about it now with what is immediately
available. There is no time for months of planning.
Bricolage is a french term for creating a solution out of the objects
in your immediate vicinity.
Tinkering is what we all do when we aren't happy with the solution
we are presented with.
Examples:
● Personal Modification of the "NEW" software system at work
that is guaranteed to "solve all your problems"
● All the steps we take in furthering our development second by
second every day of our life
Nothing is ever the way we want it. We always want to tinker with it
so it suits us better. A change target presents as just such an
opportunity for tinkering.

We also learn from tinkering. There is a whole philosophy of mind
called "embodiment" that is based on our ability to tinker and
actively use our "tinkerings" as ways of understanding the world.
Tinkering is one way to poke a change target. Advocates Tinker.

Collaborative Problem Solving
The keys to truly collaborative problem solving are diversity of
thinking and mutual commitment to outcomes.
“The evidence speaks clearly: diversity produces benefits
(cognitively diverse societies. cities, and teams perform better than
more homogenous ones), fundamental preference diversity creates
problems (public goods are underprovided and people don’t get
along), and, finally, collections of people with diverse cognitive
toolboxes and diverse fundamental preferences have higher
variance performance (they locate better outcomes and produce
more conflict).”
-from The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates
Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies
If your potential collaboration has the same values and roughly the
same view of what those values could mean in the real world, then
the greater the diversity of cognitive tools (people’s thinking styles)
you assemble, the better the final outcome. Social justice

organizations can box themselves into a corner by believing that
rigid orthodoxy in regard to methods or rigid beliefs will allow better
control of change initiatives and produce better more predictable
outcomes. This is entirely wrong.
In fact, if there is a single underlying idea in these strategy
presentations, it is that flexibility and responsiveness are the only
“methods” to achieve high value outcomes. Variety is the driving
force of evolution and it is the driving force of successful change
advocacy.

Nucleation
Nucleation basically means implementing a change strategy in a
variety of locations. The strategy is to make each nucleus operate
roughly on its own, independent of the others.
One thing such an approach does is to isolate target response to
your change initiative to each nucleus. All responses by a target, at
least until your effort is beginning to be threateningly successful,
will be the minimum the target believes is necessary to dilute or
stop your change initiative. The reason for this minimal response is
because anything more will use up resources meant for the
perpetuation of the target (and the interests of the target’s staff).
In effect this means that each target response to each nucleus will
move toward the minimum required to defend the status quo.
Because the local response to a particular nucleus reflects this
minimal response, there is no comprehensive response to all the
nuclei. This allows two advantages to the advocacy strategy:
● One is that some of the nuclei will do better than others, and

● there will be clues to improved implementation of the
advocacy strategy
● The other is that successful outcomes will be more likely
because of the lack of a comprehensive response by the
target to the nucleation strategy.

A Hundred Flowers
Our beliefs about the ways and means of intentional change
separate us into "tactical" communities. We tend to think our ways
are the best and other ways are dangerous, a waste of time,
morally wrong, etc. This confounding of tactics and ideology is a
serious flaw in social justice change efforts.
Intentional change is more an art than a technique. There is no
guaranteed series of steps to automatically produce the change we
want. Sort of “The delusion of technique based effectiveness”.
Tactics are never strategy unless you simply don’t have a real
strategy.
Instead, we should assume that any of the current change efforts
focused on our target could produce what we want, or that some
combination of the current threads in the environment could also do
so. We should observe and learn, not criticize and bicker.
Instead, let a hundred flowers bloom:

● There are many efforts by different groups to change your
target system simultaneously
● What is the right approach?
● There isn't a pre-determined right approach. Think of the many
change efforts as different evolutionary efforts. Observe to see
which efforts work under what circumstances. Let a hundred
flowers bloom, but only choose the most effective. And
remember that what is effective today won't’ be effective
tomorrow.
The current US political party dynamics is a great and very
instructive example of what happens when you fail to respect the
principle of a hundred flowers
In any particular set of environmental circumstances, every species
creates a wide range of variety in individual characteristics.This
variety is not just to find the best set of characteristics to suit this
particular environment, but also to provide variety in case the
environment changes.
Anything that reduces this variety reduces the ability of the species
to respond quickly to changes in circumstances.
So important is this maintenance of variety that the human genome
has genes for increasing that variety.
When a species becomes too similar in genes (as is the case for
regional species of the white-tailed deer), the species becomes
susceptible to massive die off in case of a new bug (think about
Donald Trump, the right wing of politics in the US, and something
called Gene Drive (or CRISPR-Cas9).
In our work to change systems, we must be careful to learn the
lesson of requisite variety in dealing with the unpredictability of our
change environment. In advocacy systems, it is often the case that
one set of advocacy beliefs will expend energy, money and time
trying to undermine other sets of advocacy beliefs pointed toward

changing the same target.
But no one can know the “right” way to create change. No matter
how clear the path to change is to us, we can never be sure we are
right or that our vision is complete. Our change efforts are never
truly isolated. If an issue is important, others will be attempting
change as well.
We should cherish the different threads of effort. We should look to
ways of collaboration that support many change efforts.
And we should always watch carefully to see how our target
responds to any initiative by anyone.

Storytelling
You have an audience. How do you communicate most effectively?
Build a story (NOT a message) that explains the empathetic case
for your change. Use it as the basis for all your communication.
Refine the story and expand its impact.
Examples:
● The individual experience of emancipation
● The local impact of oppressive policy
● The positive feedback loop of interdependence
While all of us can tell and enjoy stories, we can also all get better
at telling stories.
In particular we can get better at telling the story of our effort to
change a target. That story will never be good enough. We can
always improve the story.
We can improve it by building several related stories that explain

the why of our change effort to different parts of our change
audience.
We can put our stories on social networks and market them to the
"wild whoever" out there.
We can build our storytelling skills.

Become A Change Ninja
The two forms of Change Jiu Jitsu for social justice advocacy are:
● Non-violent Strategies
● Paradoxical Response Logic
Non-violent Strategies are a special kind of paradoxical logic
strategies, because they can be used on a large scale with very
little in the way of resources.
Paradoxical logic is something we are all familiar with, but it is hard
to explain.
Typically when we draw up a plan to create change, we think of the
plan as a causal network. We do our first action; that action causes
a result; we do our second action; another result; and so on.
But we all know that in the real world, when we do an action to
cause a result with targets of change, they don't necessarily (or
ever) do what we wanted or expected.

The target's response is triggered by our action, but the actual
response the target does is based on their values, strengths,
weaknesses, and interests, and the extent to which they perceive
us as a threat.
This is called paradoxical because the response isn't obviously
connected to our purpose in trying to trigger change.
Non-violent strategies are used largely because those who want to
create change don't have the resources or the moral willingness to
engage in violent (not just physical, but also legal and
psychological) tactics that are the bread and butter of most large
scale target self-defense. As I said earlier, standard protest and
moral persuasion have become less and less effective over the
years since the civil rights struggles of the 1960's. Today,
nonviolent actions must go beyond those change tactics and
implement strategies of system disruption.
Every system has points in its reproduction that are the most critical
to maintaining the target's values, image, and interests. The
essence of an effective non-violent strategy is to target those points
with your tactics. This is the core of system disruption.
ADAPT has the best examples of the use of system disruption in
our community. By using the stereotypes of disability in America as
the tools of disruption, ADAPT gains not only local disruption, but
also media coverage, and the personal attention of policy targets to
an extent far greater than any standard protest would accomplish.
Some examples:
● The stereotype of inferiority makes it difficult for targets to use
violence to stop the protest.
● The stereotype of deviance makes media coverage very easy
to obtain.
● The stereotype of the wheelchair as a sign of weakness
enables ADAPT participants to use those heavy wheelchairs

● as the blockading tool par excellence.
● The overall effect of turning these stereotypes on their heads
is to create an event far more powerful in its impact than any
standard protest.

Agenda Setting
Agenda setting is a time-honored way to control and prevent
change. The most basic use of agenda setting is the first public
speaking of an issue and a point of view (POV) on that issue. Since
targets are often loath to speak of an issue in order to avoid an
uncontrolled dynamic of public scrutiny, initiation is a system
advantage of advocacy organizations. Such use is an example of
priming the public discussion through the first articulation of what
matters most.
We often don’t use this advantage well. We tend to frame this initial
public voicing through the use of “inside baseball” terminology and
concepts which mean little to the larger public. These concepts and
terms are the end result of our personal and community
development, and are difficult to grasp without experience of that
historical evolution.
An example arose as part of the initial efforts by environmental
activists to communicate the meaning of climate change. Two
examples from this are the use of “global warming” as the

descriptive frame for climate change, focused on mean
temperature as the most important indicator of that trend, and the
persistent use of Celsius measures instead of Fahrenheit ones in
public articles in the USA focused on the importance of climate
change. As normal as these concepts are within the academic
research community, they communicate entirely the wrong frame to
people not familiar with research practice.
I think this complexity in choosing how to communicate meaning
based on personal and community evolution to be the reason why
the larger public retains disability stigma concepts from the 1950’s.
The initial choices of POV initiate an path of how the issue is to be
framed and reframed over time. As obvious as this might be, our
tactical (i.e., not strategic) approach to messaging seems to
operate on voice and response without reference to strategy.
Operating as though our communication in advocacy need only
depend on the current efforts by a target to counter our current
message gives power to the target that is avoidable.
As part of a strategic approach to setting agendas over a long
advocacy initiative, we need to address target beliefs that are
barriers to our change initiative and social, political, and financial
elite beliefs that affect decision-making in our society. That won’t
happen unless we put real effort into a strategic framework.

The Forever Fountain
Let's take some time to superficially overview the development and
evolution of modern music as an example of a long and very
fruitful system:
● The inventions of radio and recording allowed many separate
culturally and geographically embedded musical traditions to
be experienced by many musicians and children/teenagers.
● Musicians became comfortable meshing snippets of different
traditions and children/teenagers became comfortable
listening to same.
● Incredibly cheap and universally widespread music
distribution through radio allowed the emergence of rock and
roll and Elvis Presley as a national cultural institution
● The Beatles took this institution globally
● The dramatic drop in the cost of creating and producing high-
quality music lead to an explosion of, and reintegration of, a
boatload of musical styles (a second level integration) in
recent decades.

Try to think of what could possibly replace this existing worldwide
system of musical experience and creation. It would be like trying to
replace a community's primary language.
So... A cultural dynamic of immense scope and power is playing
out in your target's environment. How can you possibly make use
of this to impact your target? Align your change efforts with the
natural dynamic of this larger cultural force.
The Forever Fountain: Generative Ecologies
A generative ecology is a network that continues to create novelty
over a long period of time in a self-sustaining manner. That’s why I
refer to them as “Forever Fountains”. Such an ecology continues to
create newness without a specific director or a controlling force.
The entire evolution of life on earth is the most long-standing and
productive generative ecology and the one within which all our
other Forever Fountains arise.
The popular music ecology is one with which we are all familiar,
and it demonstrates the independence of the ecological creation
process from changes in technology, musicians, audiences,
geography, culture, distribution methods, or anything else that is
ordinarily considered important in the production of products,
services, supports, events, or whatever.
A generative ecology represents a more or less constantly evolving
force in our environment. We can either align our change efforts
with that force, or against that force, but we can’t avoid it.
One of the most basic strategic decisions we can make is how we
will manage these ecosystemic forces.
At any given time, there are a variety of generative ecologies
operating in the change target’s environment. Whether we intend to
or not, when we act to change a target, we are aligning and
opposing all the relevant generative ecologies that affect the target

system (and us as well). Better to decide how we want to integrate
our change effort into those ecologies than to stumble across them
as we try to implement our change plan.
One ecology of critical and expanding importance in our change
plans is social networking (SN). Because SN is becoming a part of
more and more people’s lives across the globe and most especially
the disability community, a SN strategy must be part of most of our
change plans. Since the people we affect with our change plan will,
in all likelihood, be using SN, we don’t have the option of
“excluding” SN from our strategy. It will become part of our strategy
whether we like it or not. Again, better to get good at it. SN is now a
basic way that generative ecosystems build and expand.
Since SN technology, reach, software, and basic importance in
most lives is constantly expanding and changing, we must invest
time and energy in understanding and using SN if we expect to
competently include it in our change plans.

Last Thoughts
The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” —Michael
Porter
“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out” —
Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles 1962
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, tactics
without strategy is the noise before defeat.” —Sun Tsu
“Persistence is what makes the impossible possible, the possible
likely, and the likely definite” —Robert Half
“You cannot be everything to everyone. If you decide to go north,
you cannot go south at the same time.”
“Don’t go for small commitments on big things, but aim for big
commitments on small things”
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should

not be done at all” —Peter Drucker
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It
takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the
opposite direction”—Albert Einstein

Your Presenter
I am Norm DeLisle:
Short Bio: hubby2jill, 2dogs, advocatefor45+yrs, 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.

Further Along The Road...
The most difficult part of enhancing strategic depth in social justice
change organizations is the absolute domination of mechanical
thinking that we use in dealing with day to day problems. This is not
something that is peculiar to advocacy organizations, but has been
a human habit at least since our days as hunter-gatherers. Given
the sheer number of challenges that face anyone in life, it is hardly
surprising that habits which reduce cognitive load would be
commonly and compulsively used.
In the old days, the usefulness of mechanical thinking was that it
matched the actual ability of a human community to change the
world around them. The things that could be changed at all could
be changed through mechanical thinking; the rest of the world’s
problems seemed always beyond our reach (volcanic eruptions,
plagues, droughts, etc.).
The world we live in is much more complex, and we are gradually
beginning to realize that problems of oppression and social justice
can actually be changed, if with difficulty. In systems advocacy,

these problems are complex; that is, they are amenable to change,
but obscurely so. Because our advocacy with complex targets
produces both change in the target (through its responses to our
change initiatives) and change in us as advocacy agents (as we
adapt our change initiatives to the evolution of the target), our
mechanically organized planning and execution techniques and
planning aren’t up to the challenge.
We need a more sophisticated way of approaching such
complexity, one that reflects the greater subtlety of the current
world. Over these four presentations, I have tried to offer
techniques and ways of thinking that would help point to this new
way of appreciating the task of social justice change. All of these
components I have discussed are like cognitive prostheses that I
hope will support this shift in the way we think about advocacy and
targets, in addition to being practical. But, I am sure that the
sophisticated approach I point to still seems obscure. In this last set
of supplemental slides, I hope to make that way of thinking about
advocacy more transparent and accessible.

Improvisation as Strategy
"Bricolage is a French loanword that means the process of
improvisation in a human endeavor. The word is derived from the
French verb bricoler ("to tinker"), with the English term DIY ("Do-it-
yourself") being the closest equivalent of the contemporary French
usage. In both languages, bricolage also denotes any works or
products of DIY endeavors."
One of the myths of modernity is that anything can be
accomplished through the mechanical use of some technique. This
is reasonably true for complicated systems like building an airplane
(though even there, good design requires more than just the steps
necessary to build), but it is not true for complex systems such as
advocacy in which both advocate and target are evolving during
their change relationship. In particular, no matter how well planned
a change initiative is, like the proverbial military strategy, it will only
last until the first response from the target.
To deal with this reality, we have to embrace improvisation. Jazz is
improvisation with music, and bricolage is the art of solving

problems with whatever happens to be sitting around. You can
think of jazz as a collaborative sound art, with bricolage being its
craft-like brother from a different mother.
In the US, this is often referred to as tinkering and has become a
staple of DIY media channels. You have a problem sitting at your
feet. Or dumped in your lap. You need to do something about it
now with what is immediately available, or you don't have the time
or money to use a prefabricated solution.
Tinkering is what we all do when we aren't happy with the solution
we are presented with or forced to use.
Systems continue to think that they can devise perfect solutions for
us (current policy, current practice, status quo), and they go to
great lengths to impose those solutions on us, to make us invoke
their solutions and live with the limits of the way they were
designed. And as advocates we keep twiddling the dials, looking for
gaps, trying out change techniques that the designers didn’t think
of.
Tinkering is always a valuable thing to do, even when you believe
that tinkering will not produce the change you want. Tinkering will
teach you about the imposed solution and the system that imposed
it, about its strengths and weaknesses, about the things the
designers didn’t take into account.
People who must use any solution regularly have been tinkering
with it and know a great deal about how it can be subverted. Talk to
those people. Work to get them to open up about what they have
learned in their quest to make the imposed solution suit their
needs.
A great book about these issues is The Labyrinths of Information:
Challenging the Wisdom of Systems, though it has become much
more expensive over the years.

Evolutionary Flow
Social Justice change efforts are more like the evolution of a rain
forest than they are like the building of a plane. When we try to
make our change efforts work like building a plane, we introduce
strategic errors and unintended consequences in our change
outcomes:
● Our change efforts become short term because mechanical
change only works in the short term (and only by ignoring
unintended consequences)
● When the target doesn’t respond the way we would like, we
often assume that this was because our technique wasn’t
specific and accurate in its implementation. A more likely
reason for the unexpected outcome is that we triggered the
response and we don’t understand the target’s system of
meaning well enough to capture why it did what it did.
Evolutionary systems evolve through specific environmental and
internal dynamics which increase variation. The outcome of
evolution is not the perfect organism; The results of evolution don’t

correspond to any idea we have of progress. In Taleb’s work on the
Antifragile characteristics of systems, it is systems that benefit from
variation and disorder that endure, the global process of evolution
being one of those, albeit the most universal.
Our advocacy can’t just be robust or resilient. If it is just those, it will
become irrelevant at some point due to changes in the larger world
we can’t control. At the microlevel, our approaches will become
less and less effective a little bit at a time, so slowly that we don’t
really notice, like the proverbial frog in boiling water.

Ecosystem Flow
Food webs (diagrams of how species and physical forces depend
on one another in a coherent part of biological geography),
regardless of where or even when (i.e., fossilized), share many
important similarities that define how the networks on which they
depend are sustained.
I wish I could tell you that we understand these ecosystemic
parameters in advocacy systems as well as those described in the
linked video. But we don’t. Mostly, this is because we really haven’t
tried to understand them. In many ways, this is the greatest
problem in our long effort to enlarge our lives and make freedom
and personal autonomy a universal expectation for ourselves and
all our descendants who will become members of our disability
community.
If we could do a better job of sensing these underlying flows, it
would be easier to map our choices in a dynamic change
environment. Bur that will only happen when we can more easily
think about the relationship between long term changes in large

scale forces and short term changes in our target focused tactics.
I know personally that it is possible to get better at seeing these
more strategic elements of change, but it takes a great deal of
practice and reflection to do so (at least it took me a lot of practice
and reflection). I hope to do a presentation of such practice and
reflection eventually, but not here. For the time being, I want to
offer you the challenge of expanding your understanding of our
common change struggle by using observation, practice, and
reflection to build your own vision of how the larger world might
become a tool for genuine rights and real freedom.

Part 3 Strategy Implementation Tools

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Was ist angesagt?

Was ist angesagt? (20)

Andere mochten auch

Andere mochten auch (9)

Ähnlich wie Part 3 Strategy Implementation Tools

Ähnlich wie Part 3 Strategy Implementation Tools (20)

Mehr von Norman DeLisle

Mehr von Norman DeLisle (14)

Kürzlich hochgeladen

Kürzlich hochgeladen (16)

Part 3 Strategy Implementation Tools