Thoughtful Campaigner

Steven Johnson asks a simple question – where do good ideas come from? Looking across the history of innovation and the development of some of the most important breakthroughs in history, his book by the same name explores what are the lessons that we can learn from them, and apply in our own work.
The themes of the book really resonated with me. As a campaigner, I’m constantly on the lookout for the latest idea and approach that will help my campaign to gain the traction needed to secure change.
A campaigners work is often about doing the most with the scarce resources that exist so any edge we can get needs to be explored.
So what are simple steps that we can take as campaigners to come up with better ideas?
1 – Go for a walk – Getting away from our desks is one of the simplest actions you can take. It draws you away from the every day tasks that you get focused on when sitting at your desk. It gives your mind space to make connections between ideas you’d previously had. Try it. I know that I often find some of the best campaign ideas I have come to me on my cycle ride to and from work – which then presents the challenge of how to remember them before I get into the office.
2 – Read a newspaper – in the days of social media we get specific and curated information in front of us, but we’re losing out by not reading a newspaper where you browse across articles on a range of subjects, some of which might peak our curiosity, even those not linked to a topic we might naturally be interested in. Johnson is also a big advocate of reading more in general, he points to the examples of innovators like Bill Gates who take a whole week out a year to read – now most of us can’t devote that much time to reading, but we can all increase the breadth of the content we’re reading.
3 – Chronicle everything – During the Enlightenment, keeping a ‘Commonplace Book’ was well common place! These book are collections for ideas, quotes, anecdotes, observations and information you come across, and help you to review them to make connections or new ideas. Johnson encourages us to create our own 21st century version of these books, a collection of quotes, ideas, thoughts but through a digital medium. More on how to create them here.
4 – Connect with others in coffee shops – Johnson is an advocate of the inhabiting spaces where you’ll find ‘liquid networks’ – groups of people working on different challenges and topics. In those space he argues that ‘different people with different perspectives coming together’. The 21st coffee house might be very different from those from a few hundred years ago, but the principle of proactively taking time to meet with, learn from and debate with those working on very different challenges from yours seems to me to be a good one. One practical way I’ve thought about doing this is looking to go along to talks and conferences on topics that aren’t immediately related to what I’m working on.
5 – Make a mistake – that might sound counter intuitive but Johnson argues that ‘being right keeps you in your place, being wrong forces you to explore’. Some of the most important innovations come about because of mistakes. For me this is about how we continue to embrace a culture that allows us to interrogate the mistakes we make, rather than looking to hide them or not make them for fear that in some way we’ll be penalised. It’s a theme I’ve explored more here.
6 – Take up a hobby – Individuals like Benjamin Franklin, the American inventor, or John Snow who is seen as the father of modern epidemiology, because of his work in tracing the source of a cholera outbreak in London, have a number of things in common, including the fact that they both had lots of hobbies. In an era when we’re told to focus our efforts on one thing, Johnson argues that having hobbies can be an invaluable way in helping our minds to make new connections, and to bring the approach we might take from on hobby into thinking about another area of our work.
7 – Have lunch together with colleagues – Psychologist, Kevin Dunbar set up cameras in a biology lab and look to study where most of the research breakthroughs came from. Now you might expect it’d be at the scientist’s desk, but it turned out to be a conference table in the middle of the room during breaks. Dunbar suggests that this was because it was the space where researchers could challenge assumptions or blend together ideas or hunches they were having. So while we might think we’re doing our best work at our desks, sometimes the questions that we need to be asking across the table from colleagues during a coffee break or lunch.
If you want to learn more about Johnson book I’d recommend this and this. He’s also done an excellent TED Talk on the themes in his book.

After the last few years we’ve had, it seems foolish to make any predictions about what might happen in 2018. So as we start a new year for campaigning, I’ve decided not to make some predictions, but as I head back to work for the new yearm to make some suggestions of conversations that I hope we can have to make us more effective campaigners in the next 12 months.
1 – Are the tactics we’re using working? The end of the email your MP actions have long been predicted, with MPs repeatedly telling us that they don’ find them effective, and others using software to filter them out before they land in their inboxes. As the Social Change Agency have written recently ‘digital campaigning can feel a little stale’, while organisations like 38 Degrees are also looking to overhaul their tools that let you contact your MP. But as a few innovate out of the problem, the declining impact of these approaches impacts us all so I hope we can have a conversation about how we use digital tools to maximise their impact.
2 – Ask each other why aren’t we winning – Call me old-fashioned, but for me campaigning is about winning change. It means that I can get frustrated when I get a request to join a campaign where I can’t see how my action will contribute to the desired change. At the heart of good campaigning is a clear theory of change, which has had the assumptions challenged and stretched before a path of action is reached. With limited resources, we need robust theories of change to win, so in 2018 I hope we can go back to resources like Pathways for Change to make sure we’re asking difficult questions when we’re not winning.
3 – What does the changing media landscape mean for our campaigning? Nine of the top 20 news articles shared during the election were from non-traditional outlets, while a story on animal sentience became the most viral politics article of 2017, and was started on a small agricultural news website. More and more people are getting their news from hyper partisan sites, with content designed to be shared on social media, and with Facebook. If campaigning is about shaping a news agenda, how do we do that in what feels like an increasingly polarised and fragmented media landscape?
4 – Can we do more to share what’s working? I was really excited to see 38 Degrees publish a comprehensive study into their turnout campaigning they’d done around the General Election, and Engaging Networks have shared some useful benchmarks, and this is great by Forward Action. All examples of people sharing what’s working without needing to. But it feels like there is so much we could be doing, and in a more comprehensive way. I’m a member of the US based Analyst Institute which looks to share academic and practioner studies about what’s working, but that’s very focused on American electoral politics. So how do we encourage more of this among campaigners, including making our evaluations, including the not so good parts, more accessible and available to others?
5 – How to take GDPR seriously, but not become overwhelmed by it – As I wrote back in the summer, GDRP is coming and it’s something we do need to take seriously. Given the battering, the reputation of many charities have taken over the last few years, but I’m concerned that many of us will end up being paralysed by the regulation, some of the questions I’ve seen circulating on the ECF list indicate a nervousness about it. How do we make sure that we’re following the regulations, but also not further using this to hamper our effectiveness to campaign and mobilise our supporters who want to be engaged in our campaigns.

It’s a year since I started my role leading the Mobilisation Team at Save the Children UK, and over the last 12 months I’ve asked by others for advice about how to transition into well into a new campaigning job.
So I thought it might be useful to share a few reflections and lessons from what’s been a really exciting, varied and interesting 12 months, in the hope they might be useful for others moving into new advocacy and campaigning roles.
1 – Start by listening and then listening some more – The most useful book that I’ve found for thinking about the transition into a new role is ‘The First 90 Days’ by Michael Watkins. While the book is certainly focused on those making a transfer in the corporate world it’s a helpful primer for thinking.
And one of the things – they argue that too often new starters, especially new leaders or managers rush into a new role thinking they have all the answers, rather than actively listening to those they’re starting to working alongside or manage. The book encourages you to get comfortable with asking lots of listening conversations rather than feeling you need to contribute immediately without knowing the whole context.
2 – Plan to do your induction twice – thinking back to my first few weeks at the end of 2016, they were a bit of a whirlwind. Lots of short induction conversations, stacks of documents to read and the desire to be seen to be contributing to the organisation.
By Christmas, I was exhausted, so I found it really helpful to go back after the break with a plan to have a second round of induction meetings – creating a chance to ask some more questions, build better relationships with key colleagues and actually start to feel like I understood what was going on!
3 – What’s your ‘one or two big things’ – Sometimes the ‘one big thing’ is clearly set out for you by your new manager, but I found it really helpful to think about a small number of projects I wanted to get stuck into at the end of a phase of listening. It meant I could be focused, feel like I was contributing back to the organisation and having an impact. For example, one of the areas I wanted to focus on was increasing the variety of the campaign approaches we were using, as we’d become a little wedded to ‘email your MP actions’, the process of working with colleagues, and happily a year later we’ve done a real variety of actions which I’m really proud of the team making happen.
4 – Remember ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ – it’s one of those hideous management truisms that you see written on blogs like this from time to time, but it is in my experience true. So spending time understanding the culture of an organisation is so important. Obviously, you want to do a fair amount of that before you start in your new role, but so much of culture isn’t written down, so actively trying to understand it can really help to make sense of why decisions are being made. In saying this I’m not suggesting you have to completely accept the culture you encounter, sometimes things need to change, but understanding why things are approached in a particular way is an important first step.
5 – Keep outward focused – one of the first things that I found slipping out of my diary was external meetings or catch-ups with colleagues in similar roles across the sector. I soon came to appreciate that this wasn’t good move. It’s especially true in a big organisation where processes can consume lots of your time. If you’re someone who gets energy and ideas for seeing what others are doing make sure you protect that time and use it to bring new ideas to your organisation.
6 – Decide on your new habits and try to keep to them – Ahead of joining Bond back in 2014 I read Charles Duhigg book, ‘The Power of Habit’ and how new starts can be great opportunities to change your habits. For me that meant one area I thought a lot about was the management habits I wanted to employ, I took time to make sure I was clear on what I wanted them to be, and how I could go about creating habits that meant I stuck to them. I’ll be honest a few have fallen by the wayside, but many of them are now firmly embedded as habits. If you’d like to read more about leadership in campaigns, then this might be of interest.
7 – Write a ‘not to do yet’ list – I found in the first few month that it was easy to say ‘yes’ to everything, in part because I wanted to be seen to be doing a good job, but also because I had time and capacity because other projects were still taking off. It’s an easy temptation to get into, but a year later I’ve found having put together a ‘not to do yet’ list has been really helpful – for me it’s a list of projects or areas of work that I’m keen to get more involved in, but have held back from to ensure when I do I can do so confident in the capacity.
8 – Ask for feedback – One of the many things I really value about Save the Children is a culture of feedback. I’ve found it really useful to be able to get formal and informal feedback on what I’m doing, especially as I’m starting. I know it’s something that I still need to work on. And I know that some of my colleagues read this blog (hi!) so I hope they’ll be generous in providing feedback in the comments below or in-person if I’ve been inaccurate in what I’ve shared!