Welcome to SWOT Sunday!
One of our key weaknesses, as defined by Deepak Bhargava in 2005, is that "progressives are not...clear about what we want in terms of a role for government, a just economy or rights for individuals and groups.” Nearly twenty years later, this is still true. We have hundreds of progressive organizations (at least) and many elected officials around the country, but if you asked anybody what we are fighting for, they wouldn’t be able to tell you.
Without defining A (where you are now) and B (your vision, your values, where you want to go, what success looks like), it’s as if you’re trying to hire an Uber, but you can’t tell them where to pick you up, or where you want to be dropped off.
When we talk about “vision” for progressives, we mean a long-term, transformative vision of how the society of our wildest dreams would look and – most important - feel.
Today we’ll talk about defining the “B.” Next week I’ll talk about “A”, and how to keep up with changes that can affect your plans.
Words To Win By: Say What You’re For: Anant Shenker-Osorio
Recently I discovered a wonderful book called The Persuaders: At The Front Lines Of The Fight For Hearts, Minds, And Democracy, by Anand Giridharadas. It features a chapter about Anant Shenker-Osorio. She is a brilliant and increasingly influential communications researcher and campaign advisor, and has a podcast called Words To Win By.
Shenker-Osorio does communications, not strategic planning. But the way she captures the problem with how progressives communicate – in a way that shows her roots in stand-up comedy - lays bare the fundamental changes required to get progressives to broadly and consistently develop their vision.
What I will attempt to address is: What needs to happen to truly move the needle on vision?
The Problem With Problems
Shenker-Osorio says, “Most [progressive/Democratic] messages boil down to ‘Boy, have I got a problem for you!’…Americans got 99 problems and they don’t want yours. The desire to sound the alarm about…harms is understandable. But it’s not compelling…MLK didn’t say ‘I have a complaint.’ There has to be a dream…
The entire premise of my work is ‘Say what you’re for.’ The rest is commentary.” Another way she says it is, “Paint the beautiful picture.” Also, and just as important, "Sell the brownie, not the recipe." Far too often, progressives talk in policy nerd jargon about what certain bills contain and all the legalese and ridiculous bill names - instead of talking about OUTCOMES. That is, what will the bill do for me? Lower my costs, raise my income...?
Shenker-Osorio provides a template on her website with the optimal narrative structure: Values, Villain, Vision & Victory.
Brief examples she gives of vision: “If your policy is affordable housing and your values are home and belonging, your vision might be a country where ‘everybody has a place to call home.’ If you’re working to stop police brutality and your values are family, safety, and community, your vision might be ‘living in communities where every family can thrive and trust that our loved ones will make it home safe at the end of the day.’"
I think that as a movement, we could come up with some general pictures like the above that we agree on, which would leave plenty of room for different tactics, policies and intermediate goals to get us to the Promised Land.
"No Vision" Isn't Just A Progressive Problem
As it happens, failure to define a vision happens in many other types of organizations, too. But progressive organizations, from what I've seen, tend to be particularly weak on management and processes for organizational development. I believe this stems partly from the fact that the business sector is often seen as the enemy, and not a place to look for advice on how to run an organization.
Progressive organizations need to address this if they want to win. There are also academic and nonprofit sources of management advice and training that could be helpful. A great place to start, which features a great section on strategic planning, mission and values, is Grassroots and Nonprofit Leadership.
Why Don’t Progressives Define Visions?
People, especially leaders and managers, fear that they’ll be blamed if the vision is not fulfilled, or sufficient progress isn’t made by a certain point.
Making choices about goals can involve conflict, and many organizations aren’t well equipped to handle conflict productively. Too many leaders and managers believe they are the only ones who have any useful information or perspectives about vision, and don't want to invite comment from the peanut gallery.
People, including leaders, often really don’t see why they should take time and resources from their day-to-day work to think about pie-in-the-sky 10, 20, 50 years down the road. Their days tend to be really long as it is.
Any given organization thus has lots of reasons why it hasn't dealt with the vision thing just yet. The fact that we have so many different progressive organizations at all levels - local, statewide, and national - makes it that much harder to create a vision, a story, a dream, that speaks for all.
Say What You’re For - Again
We who believe that vision is mission-critical have to sell it. We can’t even get to discussing what the vision should look like, without convincing progressives we need to have one.
In another great book, How Big Things Get Done, the authors say that you have to get people to understand that planning IS part of the work. They show how projects that had a robust planning process are far more likely to come in on time, under budget, and fulfilling expectations – and projects that didn’t usually fail spectacularly. (Read the book to find out just HOW widespread and spectacular the failures in both private and public sectors are: it will blow your mind.) The Empire State Building is an example of a project that was planned well and went off without a hitch. I have a small model on my desk for inspiration.
So we are FOR SUCCESS. We are FOR progressive organizations winning their campaigns, and building power to win a better world down the road. That’s why we want people to do planning and name their Point B.
Who Can Help Establish Vision?
There are some leaders and influencers who can help sell this - more, I'm sure, than I am aware of. Shenker-Osorio seems to be doing a bang-up job, but even for her it's one step forward, two steps back,
We need to be out more in the political media and online, talking about how campaigns are being WON with painting the beautiful picture. The Persuaders mentions some impressive success stories. This can not only bring converts, it gives ammunition to people trying to move their own organizations in this direction. Success breeds success.
Funders could do a lot to encourage organizations and networks to move in this direction. The Democracy Alliance, a funding network, has its own ten-year plan, and they say, "If the far right is operating on a decades-long plan to subvert our democracy, we will execute a decades-long plan to strengthen it—together." Importantly, they talk about how important it is to make long-term investments in organizations, as the right always has, but our side has not.
It's disheartening for me to go through my inbox, media, and social media, and see just how many more negative, problem-driven messages than positive, vision-driven messages there are. Collecting data on a baseline, how much and where this is changing, and the win rate, could help make the case to people who don't get it.
Training young leaders on strategic planning and visioning is very important. They will be less invested in the old ways of doing things.
Leading organizations ultimately should form a network and work on developing and communicating the vision out in the world, just like the Mont Pelerin Society and ALEC do with theirs.
It's a fact that for Democratic leadership, getting too specific and radical with vision and goals can conflict with their fundraising and corporate relationships. We can walk the same road for a while, as we're pursuing limited and intermediate goals, but maybe not forever. That's why part of our vision must be electoral reform, and we'll have to keep asking ourselves about a radically different, multi-party political system.
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