Thoughtful Campaigner

Today will mark the first day in the office for many after the Christmas break. In previous years, I’ve written posts on the resolutions that you can make to be a better campaigners this year (you can read them here) they’re full of useful advice that I’d stand by, but this year I’ve decided to share the 7 things that I’m going to try to do more of as a campaigner in 2017.
2017 feels like it’s going to be important. 2016 was a difficult year, and on many of the issues I care about their is real jeopardy about the progress we’ve made or could make, so now the Christmas break I’m asking myself what more can I be doing in 2017.
We’ve got work to do, so by sharing this I’m doing so for 2 reason – for accountability, in the hope that by writing this it’ll be harder to avoid doing it (please ask me if you see me) and to prompt other to think about what more they plan to do over the next 12 months.
1) Listen more – If I’m taking anything from 2016, it’s that I need to listen more. I’ve been sharing this quote from Sir Craig Oliver with everyone, because I think it’s at the essence of what we so often get wrong in campaigning.

So in 2017, I want to find ways to listen more – to understand what those outside my ‘bubble’ are thinking and to actively seek out different perspectives. There is a temptation to rush from listening to suggesting action or solutions – but I’m not sure that’s going to solve the challenges we face.
So 2017 is a year of listening – I’d welcome practical suggestions of how best to do that. One colleague suggested that we adopt the political party approach of surveying local resident, or perhaps it’s street stalls on High Streets, but whatever solution I come up with I want to be listening more.
2) Share more – I’m convinced that movement generosity is going to be vital if we want to win more. Movement generosity doesn’t mean that we all have to adopt the same approaches or tactics. Far from it, we need to recognise that we’re more effective thanks to campaigns taking insider and outsider approaches, but movement generosity for me is about actively asking how can we collaborate together, and taking time to learn and share from each other.
So in 2017, I want to share more. That’ll be by continuing to write on this blog (and thanks to everyone who has said encouraging things about the blog this year) and make a point of responding to at least one question a week on the E-Campaigning Forum, but I’m also really keen to get out and share with other campaigners – so if you’d like to invite me to speak to your team, department or conference please get in touch. In return, I want to learn from others who are leading and winning campaigns.
3) Read more – I’ve written before that ‘leaders are reader’, so inspired by this article I’m setting myself a goal of reading a few pages everyday,  I want to dive into learning more about the Civil Rights Movement something that has long fascinated me, but also learn more about unsung movement builders from history and . I know that reading isn’t for everyone, some people prefer audio books and podcasts (if that’s you here is a list of some podcasts you might want to subscribe to), but however you take in information, I think the principle of actively seeking out new information is a critical one.
4) Get out more – One of the books that I read over Christmas was Gillian Tett’s ‘The Silo Effect‘. I really enjoyed it (and I plan to write more about the lessons we can take from anthropology that she suggests). The book is full that we need to be proactive at getting out of our silos that often emerge in our organisations – perhaps that’s self evident but how often do we fail to do it, accepting that they just exist! This quote at the end of the book is a good challenge;

5) Build more – I’m super proud of what Campaign Bootcamp has become since I helped to found it back in 2012 – every few weeks I see a campaign agitating for change and winning from within the Bootcamp community. I believe its a vital part of the campaign infrastructure that we need to ensure we can train, equip and support campaigners to win.
I’ve no doubt that those on the ‘other’ side are reenergised and reinvesting in their infrastructure – so in 2017 I want to explore what I else I can contribute to building so that we’re better equipped to win. I’ve no idea what that is yet, get in touch if you’ve got a good idea.
6) Ask more questions – Campaigners always need to be asking questions (some suggestions here)- what does success look like, do we really need to campaign, who can deliver the change we want. We’ve got scare resources to allocate, and I know that those on the opposite side aren’t planning to take it easy in 2017 – read this for a slightly terrifying view on they think needs to be done in 2017. So I’m going to ask more questions, especially the ‘why’ question – ‘why will doing this help achieve the change we’re looking for’, ‘why do we think that’ – it’s a powerful question.
7) Rest more – with so much to do it’d be easy it’d be easy not to giver permission to rest, but as I’ve written before rest is vital if we’re going to be able to sustain this work for year. Rest doesn’t have to mean sitting around, but taking time to step out of our work to do things that recharge and reenergise us. I know for me that means running (I’m a big ParkRun fan) and tackling some new challenge (a Triathlon for me).
So that’s more of what I’m going to do in 2017 – do use the comments below to let me know what you’re thinking.

The further I’ve gone in my career the more I’ve been thinking about what leadership in campaigning looks like and the more I’ve found that there aren’t easy answers out there.
So it was great to be asked by Jim Coe to chat with him about some of my thoughts about leadership and campaigning a few months ago. You can listen to the whole podcast here, but preparing to speak with Jim and thinking about the topic has got me thinking.
There is of course a legal and project management element to campaign leadership – it’s important to know about the latest regulations from the Charity Commission, or how to manage a budget, or ensure good external stakeholder relations. But what I don’t find is writing about how to lead teams of campaigners or campaigns.
On leadership, I’ve been really inspired and informed by the writing of Margaret Wheatley, who wrote this excellent and very accessible paper (it’s only 6 pages long) on ‘host leadership’ a few years ago.
Most of us aren’t going to the be the ‘heroes’ who are the ‘face’ of a campaign or a cause – indeed I think there is a whole post to write about if the model of campaigns with a ‘figurehead’ leader is largely redundant.
But for those of us in leadership roles in campaigning it’s a really important paper to read, because it speaks to the challenge of managing and leading talented individuals who are hungry to change the world, working in complex (and often changing) situations where plans evolve and the external environment can shift at a moments notice.
So I’m really putting some thoughts out here, not to present them as a ‘blueprint’ but to spark a conversation amongst others in leadership roles in campaigning.
As a campaign leader I’ve found the following important;
1 – Help those around you make sense of the story – Helping others to step back from the now and understand how does a specific win or campaign fit into the bigger picture of the change that you’re going to achieve, how does that win further the cause that you’re all working for.
2 – Intentionally invest in others – This isn’t unique to leading campaigners, but there can be so much ‘doing’ in campaigning that it’s hard to find the time to pause and make sure people are investing in their personal development. What that looks like will be different for different people – some will appreciate being encouraged to find a mentor, others will need a recommendation of a good book to read, but holding the space for others to flourish by investing time in them means we continue to cultivate generations of campaigners.
3 – Model what you’d expect from others – Let’s be honest, burnout is a huge problem for campaigners. One of the hardest things that I find about leading a team is trying to model what the right balance looks like – I’m a workaholic. I know I don’t expect others to be ‘always on’ but often in campaigning its hard to switch off. It’s easy to tell others to do it, but as I’ve stepped into leadership I’ve become more and more aware that unless you ‘walk the walk’ you can’t expect to ‘talk the talk’.
4 – Understand my privilege – I was fortunate to spend a day thinking about power and privilege early in my career – it was insightful in helping me to think about this and challenge my approaches. I’ve still a lot to learn, but those of us in leadership need to be aware of our privilege. This from NEON is a really helpful resource to start to think about this.
5 – Recognise weaknesses – None of us are good at everything – so as much as we might not like to admit it – we need to be vulnerable to others including those we lead about what we’re not good at. I’ve found that people respect you for it.
6 – Assemble a team around you – Some of those I most admire in campaigning are individuals like Ralph Abernathy and Bayard Rustin they’re not household names, but they’re those who stood around Martin Luther King as he ‘led’ the civil rights movement. The one question I often encourage people to ask when they’re applying for another job is to ask their potential future line manager ‘who do they go to when they don’t have the answer’. Why? Because the best leaders I’ve ever worked with have had people around them to council and challenge them – leaders who think they know it all invariably fail.
7 – Create the space to be curious and ask ‘why’ – Like taking time out or investing in development, the space for evaluation is often lost in our busyness. Evaluation is more than just completing the indicators form at the end of a project. Campaign leaders need to be hosting those around them to ask some of the questions that Duncan Green was encouraging us to think about – to be curious about why change is happening or share rumours.
8 – Pass it on – I’ve written before about the importance of mentoring and coaching – which means those of us in leadership need to be generous in offering to do just that to those who are a step or two back in their campaign leadership journey. Not sure where to start Campaign Bootcamp has a mentoring scheme that’s always looking for people.
I’ve very much written this to start to kick off a conversation about leadership in campaigning, so please do comment below on what else I’ve missed.

One of the joys of my job is I get to go off to talks to listen to interesting people. Last week I got to enjoy thought provoking hour with Duncan Green.
Duncan is Strategic Adviser at Oxfam GB – basically from what I can tell he employed to write + say interesting and proactive things to help make NGOs and others involved in international development better. If you’ve not come across his writing before I’d strongly recommend his website ‘From Poverty to Power’.
Duncan is about to release a new book ‘How Change Happens‘ and I’d recommend going along to one of the many lectures and talks he’s giving over the next few months – it’s full of lots of useful content.
This session was especially useful as it was focused on those those involved in running and leading global campaigns, as it was part of a fascinating workshop hosted by Save the Children International and World Vision International sharing what they’d learnt from campaigning on the MDGs (and on that topic this learning from Water Aid about there work on pushing on the post-2015 agenda is also excellent).
The session was also packed full of useful insight, and big credit to both organisations to actively looking to share what they’ve found has worked and not worked from the campaigning they’ve been involved in over the last 5+ years.
But here are a few things from Duncan that got me thinking about our approach to understanding change.
How change happens? It’s complicated.
Campaigning isn’t like making a cake – we can’t just repeatedly add the same ingredients, mix them together, put in the oven, and get the same cake time and time again. Instead change is complex, ‘non-linear’, messy and involves multiple actors. Frankly its complicated!
To reflect this campaigners need to grapple with what changes a system, to reflect on the role of critical junctures in driving change (see some of my thoughts on preparing for crisis’s here) and recognise that causality is uncertain. I was struck that some of the models in Pathways of Change are really helpful here.
But our traditional planning approaches don’t accommodate complexity.
It’s not often Mike Tyson gets quoted in a campaigning presentation but his quote ‘Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth’ is a 21st century take on the ‘No strategy survives first contact with the enemy’ quote. We need to accept that our strategies aren’t up to incorporating the complexity of the challenges we work on.
Instead Duncan suggests that when we to have two types of theories of change – Theories of Change which look at how we think the system is going to be changing even without our interventions, and a Theory of Action which focus on what we hope the impact will be of the interventions that we plan to make. (see more here)
So we need to start to think differently.
As change makers we need to start to think/feel/work in a different way. We need to nurture an inherent curiosity about how change happens, to listen to gossip which can often help us make sense of what’s happening, to learn to embrace uncertainty, and be reflective to recognise our own prejudices and power. In short, we need to ‘learn to dance with the system’ (this draws on the work of Donella Meadows who’s paper on this I’d recommend reading)
Open ourselves to unusual suspects and voices.
To dance with the system we need to look out for those who are already dancing in the system – that might be more ‘junior’ staff in our offices who are actually more ‘in touch’ with with new trends or approaches, to actively get ourselves out of the ‘thought bubbles’ that are so easily to inhabit, or through different ways of seeing he world, for example Duncan ask why do we draw so much from the scientific/econometric approaches in how we try to evaluate advocacy – could we learn as much from history, sociology or social anthropology?
Duncan’s book is published at the end of the month and available at all good bookshops – I’ve pre-ordered my copy.