The DNA of successful campaigns

A mass movement needs unity to achieve its purpose, but its members need autonomy to leverage their specific talents and skills and also to engage in activism wholeheartedly. The hybrid model of organising promises to retain the unity of the structure organisation while capturing the creativity and freedom of the momentum tradition.

The aim of the hybrid model is to balance “high levels of autonomy with high levels of unity” around a common purpose. The resolution of the paradox (or contradiction) between freedom and collective action is no simple matter. Paul Engler and Carlos Saavedra, in a series of training videos published on YouTube, describe a very specific and structured “metastrategy” for campaigning that increases the potential to achieve this feat – while also winning significant social change. 

This is the third article in the Movement Power series from The Ecologist. 

Engler and Saavedra state: “Decentralised organisation needs more structure, but a different way of structure. A structure that allows for the most amount of autonomy within its boundaries. The boundaries are very well defined so that people don’t interfere with the movement. Rules, procedure, vision established at the beginning of the process to establish so it can escalate up and operate with as much unity and autonomy.”

Autonomy

The metastrategy is an abstract template or outline that can be used by activists to develop a concrete, specific strategy for any mass campaign. The metastrategy includes a series of tools that have been developed over decades to ensure that the institution or group carrying the campaign can remain coherent and effective while also providing the space for its activists to actualise their own ideas and initiatives. The success of the organic whole is dependent on the inclusion of the necessary parts.

This metastrategy was adopted wholesale by Extinction Rebellion with significant results, and has also been used and developed by a variety of environmental and social justice campaigns in the UK. The same model is presented clearly and economically in Movement Power: A Toolkit for Building People Power in a Time of Crisis, published by Tipping Point UK. As Saavedra puts it: “That’s breaking out all over the place.”

The quintessential hybrid model requires a high level of decentralisation and autonomy. In an apparent contradiction, the way to achieve this is to have a predetermined and highly structured “constitution”. The axioms or founding rules of the campaign group are described as the “DNA”. The DNA is designed before activists are recruited, and is non-negotiable and permanent. Those activists who do not agree with the DNA are invited to design their own campaigns, or join ‘rival’ organisations operating in the same space. 

The term DNA is used deliberately both as a useful metaphor but also because the philosophy that grounds the hybrid model is explicitly based on the idea that biological processes inform and can be utilised in social spaces. The ecological metaphor has been adopted from systems theory as practised within biology, and the natural sciences more generally. This is a form of biomimicry. “That’s how nature works,” Engler states.

Organic systems have structure and autonomy. Animals are born with DNA that has evolutionary intelligence that is embedded in the individual and allows them to survive, and that prepares them from birth. This DNA is the product of generations of learning and adaptation.

Survive

This includes the idea that activists should establish a plethora of organisations each with different DNA so that the campaign process itself can ‘select’ the most efficacious, those that ‘fit’ the aim and process best. It also means that the newly born animal is already equipped with physical and mental capacities, a body, sense organs, consciousness, and can survive in its specific environment.

However, once the animal is born it experiences a high level of autonomy to use these faculties in different ways, including learning new behaviours and modifying its own body. Autonomy does not mean doing whatever you want: the animal is born with a survival instinct, and other predetermined needs and behaviours. It is possible to reject this naturalism while also seeing the value of the metastrategy for frontline campaigning.

The campaign begins when a person, or team of people coming together, use the metastrategy to design the actual strategy for the campaign. This first phase is called “frontloading”. The members of the group are known as the founders of the new group, and should use this social cachet to convince new recruits to adopt the DNA strategy and retain its structure. “The founding committee is then tasked with keeping the DNA of the organisation intact for as long as possible, knowing that ultimately it will be distorted and even destroyed.” 

The DNA of the organisation is its structural core and is articulated through very specific elements. This is an organic whole that requires each of its parts to be functional to survive and to effect change on its environment. These parts are the grand strategy and the theory of change; the meta-narrative and the meta-brand; the principles, including nonviolence discipline; the team structure and mass training programme; the action format; and finally the online infrastructure. 

FOUNDERS & FRONTLOADING

Frontloading is necessary to manage the contradiction that more decentralised and autonomy based organisations actually need more structure, albeit a different kind of structure. The activists have autonomy within boundaries, and these boundaries in turn need to be negotiated, adopted, well defined, and resilient.

The founders, or the first generation of core leadership, develop the frontloading. They are the stewards of the movement. But they are not in control and they are not the vanguard. “A lot of people don’t even know who they are.” People vote with their feet and join a movement. A thousand flowers can bloom. But within each movement there are certain things that need to be agreed upon or it will collapse in on itself.

Engler explains: “The core leadership needs to be a hardcore team. They set the terms of the movement, and enforce it. They can tell people they are breaking the DNA and this will undermine the health of the movement. When things start to go wrong the core leadership needs to step in and explain the DNA, and get things back onto the strategy. This can be difficult because the activists know themselves to be self-organised.”

The corollary of this is that the leadership team must not micromanage, must not expect to make or even be consulted on day to day plans and decisions. “The core leadership does not govern, and does not make all the decisions.”

The success of the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 can be attributed to the frontloading process that took place before the action even began, and equally its failure can be blamed on the incompleteness of this frontloading, Engler argues.

“That model had a lot of things that are frontloaded,” he observes. “We had a message that was already developed, we had an action plan, we had a concept of what we were doing in an action and a campaign. It was a concert. 

“That had been developed by a core leadership. A lot of times we didn’t even know who the core leadership was. We just joined with our feet. But they lacked a lot of the essential elements … there was not enough frontloading.” 

GRAND STRATEGY

The grand strategy is the most important part of the DNA. The grand strategy is necessary to ensure that everyone engaged in the movement has the same theory of change, the same basic objective, and the same basic method to achieve it. A lot of the colour revolution movements had a two to five year grand strategy. 

The aim of a campaign should provide the direction and scope of all the activity of that organisation. The aim can then be subdivided into a series of objectives. Each objective will be achieved through its own phases and campaigns, with the campaigns then being designed as a series of tactics such as protests – be they trigger events or the moment of the whirlwind. 

This familiar structure of an organisation can be understood as a pyramid. The pyramid has a specific and singular aim at the peak, cascading down to three phases at the next level, and then each phase in turn disrupting into three or more campaigns, and finally each of the campaigns separating into three or tactics at the base of the structure. The mass trainings need to ensure that people are “accountable to the grand strategy”. 

The first principle of this approach is, according to Engler: “The pyramid reveals that everything a movement does – from the smallest method of nonviolence to the most intense campaign – should support the grand strategic direction and move towards the final victory.” 

What follows from this is that the design of the campaign pyramid must fit with a clear theory of change, and finally the leadership will have to share the strategy with all the members. However, the strategy is not a detailed master plan of every action that will be taken, and does not include the details of the campaign or actions.

Engler explains: “You need to teach people how to be accountable to your grand strategy, and how to do that collectively. People need to understand strategic thinking, they need to understand how everything is correlated with the grand strategy.” 

There are four elements to the grand strategy, four tiers to the pyramid: objective, phases, campaigns, tactics. You need to understand what your movement is going to do in order to win, and then what the general phases are to get to that aim. Then in each phase different local groups have autonomy in terms of which campaigns they work on, and devise their own tactics. 

The structure of the grand strategy therefore allows for greater autonomy in tactics. Once you establish the aim, the grand strategic objective, most people will agree on the phases. Then people can do whatever they want for campaigns, and vote with their feet in deciding which campaigns and tactics to join and make happen. “There is a level of collective accountability to be strategic.”

Objective

The broadest conception of what the movement seeks to win. Achieving the strategic objective is the ultimate goal of the movement and is almost always the final victory to be won.

Phases

Major objective that serves as benchmark achievements as the movement approaches final victory. This is the primary timeline to access the movement's progress.

Campaigns

A plan of action designed to achieve phase objectives by making demands on power holders. Contains a series of nonviolent tactics used to apply pressure.

Tactics

Limited plans of direct action that contain methods of nonviolence. Usually involving engagement with a target and the presence of media.

As an example, Otpor! had the ultimate aim of overthrowing the Serbian dictatorship. When they developed the movement they were clear about the strategic objective. There were four specific phases before reaching that outcome. These were characterised as 1. individual resistance; 2. uniting the opposition; 3. general elections; 4. enforcing the elections through general strike. The strike did in fact topple the dictatorship. “They said this is what they would do from the beginning.”

META-NARRATIVE

The movement needs a core narrative through which to interpret the world. The founders and organisers can test all or part of this narrative through polling and focus groups to see what makes most sense to people, and what is most likely to inspire them to take action. The meta-narrative can contain multiple narratives. The meta-narrative cannot be complex and cannot be in language that most people would not understand. 

META-BRANDING

A single individual might find it hard to relate to hundreds of people personally, and conversely hundreds of people might struggle to identify with one specific individual. However, people can and do relate to brands, symbols and images. Someone might identify as a “Guardian reader” or a Spurs supporter. In both cases an emotional bond has been developed to the masthead or badge. Allow people to openly affiliate and share your brand. If you go to McDonald’s you have a relationship with a single entity, but you would not form the same loyalty to hundreds of different burger stores. 

The public needs to relate to the movement as a single identity rather than as the multiple members of that organisation. However, some caution is necessary. You have to instil the importance of protecting the brand in the training, otherwise actions such as violent acts will alienate the public from the brand. “Everyone who uses the brand needs to agree to the DNA or else they damage the brand.”

PRINCIPLES

A fundamental part of the front-loaded DNA is a list of principles for the movement. The founders and future trainers have a responsibility to ensure that the members of the organisation are able and willing to embody these principles, which are non-negotiable. 

This also means that the founders must develop principles that are self-evidently necessary and acceptable to new recruits to the movement. They must be as narrow in scope as possible because they will in effect limit the autonomy of those who choose to participate. 

At the same time, the hybrid model has no permanent centralised leadership that is forcing people to do things. Therefore you have to train people so that they understand and adopt the principles in the mass training from the beginning, even before taking part in the tactical events.

The Momentum Community organisers are committed to the principle of nonviolent (NV) action. This is non-negotiable. Engler states: “I am very emotional about this.” They argue that this must form part of the DNA, and indeed the grand strategy, when they decide to take part in any movement. 

One reason given is that the aim of gaining the support of 3.5 per cent of the general population will be undermined if the movement becomes violent. “Once your movement becomes violent, grandma is not going to participate,” Engler argues. “We need to engage with the spectrum of support: you have to let everyone into your movement.” 

The founders need to initiate the conversation about violence, to ensure a nonviolent policy for the campaign. When the police and the army are violent, including when activists are killed, it is very difficult to maintain NV principles. “You need to do it from the beginning, even when no-one is talking about violence.” The “pillars of support” approach, which forms another tool in the hybrid method, means that “you need the police and the military, not at the beginning but at the end of the movement, to come over to your side.”

TEAM STRUCTURE

The whole organisation operates within the scope set by the DNA and the grand strategy, but simultaneously there is almost complete autonomy at the levels of campaigns and tactics. The leaders can design the campaigns, and must also ensure accountability to the strategy. The campaigns will therefore both require and inspire leadership. 

As outlined in Rick Falkvinge’s tactical manual Swarmwise, the leaders should support but not direct or dictate to the activists. In turn, the activists can “vote with their feet” and join any leader in any campaign. Any activist can form a group and initiate a campaign. They provide the DNA and the grand strategy to any activists they can recruit. They will also design the structure of the campaign, including creating and delegating roles. An important role in every campaign is the education of team coordinators.

MASS TRAINING

Mass training is fundamentally important for the hybrid organisation. It allows the founders to disseminate the organisational DNA to the membership. The founders, or core leadership, will by necessity manage the first training. 

Training is necessary before members can participate fully in the organisation, especially when it comes to decision making and voting. People attending mass training should be given the DNA, the “full package”: this includes all the strategy documents, the constitution and the action plans. 

The time invested in such extensive training will be rewarded as new members are less likely to “disrupt” the organisation by challenging or working against previously developed decisions and plans. Engler stated: “When you have a lot of momentum it allows people to get off and do their own thing because you give them the whole package.” 

Mass training is only scalable at speed if the founders begin early to “train the trainers”, quickly creating a cadre of members who are trusted and have the resources to train newer members in turn. 

The Otpor! network would provide deep and extensive training for every single new member, with three hours of training for five consecutive days for new members. Ivan Marovic, as a founder, trained the first 150 people, but then trained none after that. 

This is because he trained those 150 people to immediately become trainers themselves. “Because of the training the trainers model, in the end, they trained 40,000 to 70,000 people,” Saavedra states. 

The training must disseminate the DNA or culture of the organisation. Saavedra explains that when you go to a DREAM movement organisation everyone does the same process across the country: “They snap the same way, they clap the same way, they use the same words, they use the same way of doing meetings, they tell the same story – we have it down.” 

The mass training provides the appropriate behaviours and culture for the membership. “The movement can expand as quickly as you can train the trainers.”

ACTION FORMAT

The campaign should be manifested on the streets with a series of actions, with trigger events building towards a moment of the whirlwind. In time, each campaign will develop “ritualised, formalised processes of organisation for an action”. The training should ensure that people can replicate actions, and especially those actions that inculcate team formation and efficacy. This will allow the activists to develop their own actions, having learned from the leadership, even when they might require a “little push”. 

ONLINE

The campaign will need an online presence, not simply as “clicktivism” but more importantly to support the real world actions. Social media and websites can raise funds. This includes asking for donations, and sharing resources and documents. This can include hosting aspects of the mass training through video and other enriched content. The newsletter and membership forms are vital parts of the work of absorption. 

Campaigners beware: if you put all your reserves into building for your event, and none into building from your event, other organisations with different and even conflicting aims might reap the benefit. Saavedra recalled: “Another organisation took the momentum from us because they understood absorption.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is the editor of The Ecologist.