12 Steps to changing the world

I have this addiction to trying to change things, as you can gather from this blog, and it’s a bane theme of my life that I find myself dissatisfied with The World and feel compelled to do something about it.  By ‘The World’ I probably mean social injustice.  Why can’t I be one of those people who just mind their own business?

Anyway, as part of this quest to make some sort of impact I went along to The School of Life‘s event How to Make a Difference last week with Dominic Campbell.  He tweeted from the event so you can check out some of his tweets here, here and here.

I wasn’t sure what to expect but the whole thing was brilliant.  I came away with a step-by-step practical guide on how to change the world, complete with theory and case studies.  Amazing.

Maurice Glasman spoke about the Alinsky approach to community organising and showed how slavishly following the 12 rules Alinsky set out can actually work.  How does he know?  because that’s exactly what Obama did.  And whatever you think of Obama, you can’t deny that his campaign worked.  Glasman also gave us some personal examples of how it works from his experience of working with the London Living Wage campaign.

There are a few hang-ups I have to get over before I can totally make this approach work – for one I’m rubbish at conflict and have a tendency to want everyone to play nicely.  This is completely unrealistic but undoubtedly a product of my upbringing.  I can think of worse hang-ups to have, but the fact is that social change requires conflict.  So from now on I’ll be saying: Suck it up, Nerd.

As long as you can get over the discomfort of conflict and accept that there needs to be a leader, I think these 12 rules will do very nicely.  Alinsky is my new hero:

The Rulez

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have
2. Never go outside the expertise of your people
3. Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of your enemy
4. Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules
5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon
6. A good tactic is one your people enjoy
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag
8. Keep the pressure on.  Never let up.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself
10. If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive
11. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative
12. Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it and polarise it

Lots of these need more explanation than I’ve got space to give, but happily Alynski wrote a book called Rules for Radicals, which I’ve already ordered Social change: sorted.

Twizzling a fork in the spaghetti of weirdness

Last week I went along to a workshop organised by the Carnegie UK Trust as part of their Inquiry into the future of civil society in the UK and Ireland.

The session focused on how ‘the future’ will change civil society organisations and what the impact will be on their use of social media.  I found it a bit of a mind-bending vortex because it was about trying to predict the future, which made me wish for a Delorean car from Back to the Future

In fact, our group found it much easier to think about what doesn’t change, rather than what will.  We talked about human nature and how contexts may change but patterns of behaviour endure.  That especially struck me because I’m reading a book about the 1920s at the moment, which makes clear the striking similarities between that era and our own.

What I really liked about the Carnegie UK Trust’s research is that they have identified three ‘fault lines’ that cut across the inquiry.  They are:

• The isolation of some groups
• The erosion of areas for public debate
• The marginalisation of dissent

The last of these is particularly important because we’re increasingly seeing the criminalisation of forms of protest (e.g. the ridiculous bureaucracy of protesting on Parliament Square) and the erosion of free speech (e.g. the use of the pejorative label ‘climate change denier‘ for anyone who expresses doubt about the evidence or plans for addressing global warming).  Regardless of the views expressed, freedom to express them is so important but increasingly disregarded.

The last thing we discussed in the session was what civil society organisations can do to prepare for the future.  My thoughts are that they can’t prepare for anything specific (after all, no one is Marty Mcfly)

but they can change their models to become more agile and adaptable, so that they’re ready for anything.  Alas it’s easier said than done because the current funding models are constraining and often force charities to become mirrors of the lacklustre institutions that fund them.  Finding a way to be self-sustaining with less of a dependency on grants is one way to adapt (though a good point was made by Nathalie McDermott that there are dangers in charities trying to ‘productize’ their work) and there was an interesting suggestion of adopting a mutual model from Andy Gibson.

We were also asked what the government can do from a policy or legal perspective to allow civil society organisations to adapt, which leads me to the title of this post.  The legal landscape around civil society organisations is so ridiculously complex that it’s not really worth bothering.  The structures and requirements are from a time gone by and to try to unpick the spaghetti of legislation and governnace would be futile.  Instead, let’s just get on with doing what we need to do to make these organisations adaptable – twizzle a fork in the spaghetti so to speak – if anyone challenges our actions then we can use it as an opportunity to have a public debate about the need to modernise.  If we start with that debate we’ll never get anything done.

There was plenty more discussion and it was a good mix of people (astonishingly more women than men in the room – not sure what cosmic forces were at play there).  Suw Charman-Anderson facilitated the session and has done an overview here; David Wilcox has blogged his thoughts here; and you can see some tweets from the day here.  I’m looking forward to reading the final report.