Structure

Salimah Samji Welcome to the Leadership, Organizing and Action Podcast series. In this six part podcast series, Marshall Ganz walks you through the five key practices of people, power, and change and also provides practical strategies to learn this craft. Welcome to the sixth episode of the Leadership Organizing and Action podcast series with Marshall Ganz. Welcome, Marshall. 

Marshall Ganz Thanks, Salimah. It’s good to be here with you. 

Salimah Samji In today’s podcast, we will discuss the fifth key practice, which is structure. Marshall, Let’s start with why is structure important? 

Marshall Ganz It’s really just commitments we make to one another about how we’re going to work together. People tend to be very freaked out by structure because so much experience is being put into an oppressive structure which serves the interest of those who are trying to control things. And so then the reaction would be the opposite. We don’t want any structure. And then you get what Jo Freeman called the Tyranny of Structurelessness. The word comes from the Latin structura, which means to build. And so building is about the future. Because otherwise, you know, what are you doing? So building is about the future, and structure enables you to create a way to have a future in terms of working with other people. Now, there’s a whole lot, you know, different things. But I think, like so many of these things, it gets way overcomplexified and because of people’s negative whatever. So to me, it’s fundamental. And without that, you have no way to coordinate, no way to act together. Because organizing is about collective effort. And if you don’t have structure, then what is collective even mean? And so you do get a fair amount of resistance. These days, I’m thinking particularly in the US, where there’s no value greater than my individual autonomy. Well, if that’s your greatest value, then you’re not going to build anything collective because you build a collective by investing elements of your autonomy, your agency, in a collective process. And that’s what democracy is supposed to be. So this radical individualism that is so crazy here undermines a lot of efforts to create structure. And I’ve seen it with young people. On the other hand, we also see structures that are ossified, they’re stuck, they’re irrelevant. They inhibit change and adaptation. So the trick is to create a structure that facilitates both change and continuity, because those are two different rhythms of organizational life. Organize. And this really comes from Stephen J. Gould’s work. He wrote a book called Time’s Arrow where he explores different ways of organizing time. And one he calls Time is a cycle, and that’s the rhythm of continuity. It’s the rhythm of annual budget review. And it’s the predictable elements of organization. The other, he calls Time is an arrow, and time is an arrow is the rhythm of change. It’s episodic. It has a clear start, a clear end. It’s very intense. And the world is different when you finish than it was before. So you have these two core rhythms of change and continuity. Campaigns are all about rhythm of change. But organizations are about rhythm of continuity. Now, it’s not either or. It’s both and… And the big question is how you find the balance between those two ways of structuring things. One of the problems in the US in recent years has been so much campaign, campaign, campaign, campaign. Well, yeah, campaign. But then what did you build? Nothing. It’s like, oh we won our campaign. That’s why in organizing we talk about three outcomes, not just one. There’s winning the goal, but then there’s coming out of it stronger than we went into it and not the situation where you never want to see anybody ever again who worked on the project or the campaign even if you won. And believe me, that’s universal. I found that in India … I found that everywhere. And people know exactly what you’re talking about. Well, what you’ve done, you really haven’t built any power. You may have gotten a specific thing, but unless you’re building collective power, then it dissipates. And, you know, people commit to do things they don’t. You pass a law, but then by the time it gets around to being enforced, it doesn’t. So you can’t go away. You can’t disappear. So then how do you create a resilient and responsive organizational structure to accompany a very dynamic and change oriented campaign structure? And it’s not been thought of much. It’s like one or the other captures you. You get into continuity and then you just, you know, this is the way we’ve always done it. You see the ossification, stagnation. Or, we’re not going to have any of that in which case it’s kind of like continually trying to reinvent the wheel. So finding that balance is really critical. And I guess the other dimension of it is. If you build an organization that’s supposed to be a people’s organization and it’s not self-governing, well then what is it? I mean, who really owns it? Well, often it’s philanthropists or donors. Well, so then whose organization is it? And this is a very challenging question these days because in many ways, people have become so donor-dependent that the need to create a strong constituency on which you can depend because they elect you or because they fund what you’re doing goes by the wayside. And so then you have all these sort of big nonprofit firms and little nonprofit firms, but they’re not instruments of democracy. They’re not because nobody is learning how to govern themselves. And so this is a real challenge and this is what we started the project on here last spring to try to get at is how to combine self-governance and efficacy and what that looks like in this context or in others. It used to be that self-governing associations were typical. But that’s not been the case over the last forty years or so. Self-governing associations are far less typical than various forms of nonprofit. And they don’t empower, you know, they provide services. They do what wealthy people think should be done and they create dependency. And it becomes sort of another form of patron-client relationship, which is the opposite of democracy. 

Salimah Samji I think this point of yours that you make about the shift from self-governance to donor-driven, right where in a way, it’s more of the donor’s agenda. And without this idea of self-governance, without this idea of why are we here together and what it is that we want to do, not what a donor, whoever they may be, gets to decide. And we just all toe the line because that’s the money that we’re going to get, as opposed to this is something that we really believe in. This is something that we really want to do, and that’s why we are self-governed, because there is something that’s really holding us together. 

Marshall Ganz Yes. When de Tocqueville talked about the foundation of association, that’s what he was talking about. He wasn’t talking about NGOs. He was talking about associations, self-governing associations. And that was the typical pattern of large scale organization in the US up until the 60s. We identified 65 organizations that ever had 1% or more of the U.S. population in it, from the American Revolution to the 60s. And the typical structure was a three tiered structure of local self-governing, feeding into state self-governing, feeding into national self-governing. And today, one of the biggest problems is the nationals think the locals don’t know anything. Locals think the nationals don’t know anything and they fight each other because there’s no integrative mechanism, there’s no integrative space. In a way, it’s sort of the worst of bureaucracy. And confusing that with what representative organization is. It’s not bureaucracy. You know, these organizations were multi-tiered and still like a union and still are. But authority comes from the bottom up. I mean, the members are the ones who choose the leaders and who pay for the thing. And so it’s the opposite of a bureaucracy that runs from the top down. You know, there’s a top which is a board of directors, and it’s capital that determines power there. For associations, it’s people that do because it constitutes people power. They’re running, their owning. But the NGOs it’s just the opposite. Power gets pushed down to some extent that they want to. It’s interesting debating how to structure the European Union. This principle of subsidiarity, which is a Catholic principle. It is about pushing authority down. You want it as proximate to the real thing, but the source of authority is still up top. It’s not the people. So there you have an organization that is highly participatory. But it’s not democratic. It’s not self-governing. It’s not authoritative. And that’s the other thing, which you have a whole lot of.  Oh, let’s get people to participate. Let’s get her input. Let’s engage with citizens. But all of that is various forms of sampling. It’s not representation. They use the word representation, but they use it to describe a demographic category, which is really kind of symbolic but not real representation. Like what this country’s revolution was fought about.  No taxation without representation. Well, there’s a whole lot of decision making that goes on absent representation of the people that are those who really are thought to be the object. But they remain objects. They don’t become agents. And that’s a huge difference. And that’s what Elizabeth Anderson writes about in her Private Government work. And you see it all over. It’s like a hollowing out. So that I think that’s an area in which, yes, there’s work to do in winning campaigns, but there’s a huge amount of work to do in creating organizations that can sustain power. One of the few places that you find that still exists like that are unions. Now, some are very ossified, but the UAW is a great example of what’s possible because UAW was a great union back in its day. Walter Reuther. It was like, but then it went down the tubes and part of it was also the closing of factories in the 80s and, you know, losing their base. It became very corrupt. But then the auto industry started making a lot of money. And workers were stuck in the same place they were stuck during the lean times. So this group of guys, Shawn Fain and some others, they decided that they were going to sort of redemocratize, recapture the UAW. And they took advantage of a court procedure which allowed them to change the way leaders were elected nationally from at a convention to everybody votes, all members vote. And they won. And based on that, then, they revitalized the union and won this extraordinary strike, which was very successful. So the potential for revitalization is there in that kind of a structure. But how you revitalize an NGO is a mystery to me. 

Salimah Samji In your book, Marshall, you talk about the four structural tensions. Can you share more about what that means? 

Marshall Ganz Yeah, it’s like inherent tensions in organizational structure. And the first we’ve been talking about – change in continuity. You know, in the Navy, they have your regular assignment and then they have battle stations. It’s one way they’ve come up with to recognize, oh there’s this and then there’s that. And we need different structure to do those two things. But the change in continuity is one tension. The second one is about inclusion and exclusion. Who do you include? Who do you exclude? Or having a voice and vote in the thing. I mean, there’s operations out there that say: anybody shows up to the meeting, they get the vote. Well, what is that? Because, you know, voice requires some commitment of loyalty. This is what the Albert Hirschman’s study is about, that there’s no there there if there isn’t obligation, not just rights. I was at MIT where they were talking about online communities. And I asked, I said, well, what do you have to do to be part of the community? Oh, you just show up. Well, that’s not a community. That’s a gathering. It’s like whoever shows up, it’s like a marketplace. It’s not an organization. It’s not a community. So being clear what the terms are of exclusion, inclusion. Who gets to decide, who has a voice, who doesn’t and how you craft that is a second dimension because you’re pulled often into “We want to include everybody.” Yeah, but doesn’t work. And so that’s the second one. The third one is about unity in diversity. Now, when it comes to making decisions, it’s really good to have many perspectives, many different points of view because you’ll make better decisions. Sometimes it’s been said deciding whether or not to take the hill. Diversity is good. But when it comes to taking the hill, you’ve got to be unified. We’re not brainstorming as we’re trying to take the hill. So there is this tension between the kinds of focus needed to get stuff done. But the kind of rich diversity of perspective that’s needed in order to really be an organization that’s real, that’s creative, that does stuff. And so it is a real tension and it’s another one. You know, there’s these two scholars, Smith and Byrd, who wrote a book about organizational paradox. And this is what it is. It’s a paradox. Well, are we going to be all united? Well, we love that. But wait a second. Then we can’t debate. Then who decides? Dissent is then disloyalty? Well, we don’t want that. But then on the other hand, what, are we going to elect our picket captain? I mean, you know, we have this organization. We’re trying to win this fight with an opponent. So we’re going to elect everybody at all levels of it and nobody’s accountable to a central strategy. That’s not going to work. So it really is one of those paradoxes. And the last one is we often think about diversity in terms of demographics. This is much broader than that. It’s diversity in terms of perspectives. You know, the classic book that Graham Allison wrote about the Bay of Pigs versus the nuclear crisis with Kennedy. And the first one was all groupthink. And they did poorly. In the second one, they had the sense to have people like Schlesinger involved who would challenge and make much better decisions. So you need dissent within an organization to be creative and move forward. But, then where does that stop and where does it start. Anyway, that’s a big tension. Well, the last one is about parts and holes. This is about we are the local chapter of X. Therefore, we know everything that we need to know in order to do our thing. Now then, there’s the national office. We are the national office. We have the overview. We see the big picture. And so those local groups should do what we say. And the local group is saying, well, you don’t know anything. Well, again, it’s these polarizations of what is simply tension. And I guess our capacity to sustain tension is limited. And so we always want, oh it’s this or it’s that or this or it’s that. But effective organizational leadership requires embracing the tensions and accepting, no, they do not get resolved. They get managed. They get dealt with. Because if you go to one extreme or the other, you’re dead one way or the other. And so it has a lot to do with the capacity to manage ambiguity, to manage paradox. Because that’s kind of what human life is, it’s full of that. But in organizations, you can see it’s so sharp. So, the question then of how do you integrate local in strategy? I use that cartoon, you know, strata, the Greek word for field is the word for army and the general is the strategos and he’s up on the hill there overlooking the whole deal. And he’s got the overview, the theory of change. And then down the valley are the soldiers, and they’re the taktikas, because that’s where we get strategy and tactics. The problem is when a cloud gets between those two. And see, we have a lot of that, the cloud, because then each one thinks they see the whole and they don’t. And so creating structure that facilitates the integration of parts and holes is really, really important. I’m sure there’s other. But those four really, really jump out as sort of key tensions. 

Salimah Samji You know, Marshall, your point on diversity and this need for especially in the current culture, environment that we have. I couldn’t agree more with you on the framing of diversity as being so narrow. It is not color, it is not race. It really is viewpoint. It is how you think it, is what you think. And this need for dissent, this need for disagreement, this need for more inquiry-based approaches where you want to understand why or understand another perspective is really missing and so necessary. So I really like this unity and diversity as one of the tensions that you raise. What about long term versus short term? How do you think of that as a tension? 

Marshall Ganz We’ve sort of ceded our identities to labels, and when we do that, we’re rejecting the complexity of the world, the complexity of our lives, the complexity of our identities and uniquely our identities. And we’re saying, now you’re an X, I can sum up your humanity in this word. Boy, talk about dehumanization, big time. And so then we’re throwing these labels at each other as opposed to actually seeing each other. And it is a real challenge. It’s like, I don’t know if we talked about the alignment problem, like all models are wrong. Yeah, because they’re abstractions and labels are wrong because they’re abstractions, they’re not humans. But in terms of long term, short term, well, it’s challenging on a couple of levels. One is the connection of immediate pain with structural inequity. In other words, you could take a look at the Montgomery bus boycott and say the problem is institutionalized racism. True. What do we do about it? Well, we write so in our papers. We do stuff like that. But then segregation, well, we can file some lawsuits. But when it became this abusive bus. People were angry. They were experiencing the pain every day and they could imagine a solution. Now the challenge is to connect the bus with the institutionalized racism. And that’s where continuity really matters. You come out of a bus boycott with just… you won through a lawsuit. Okay, great. You need lawyers. You come out of a bus boycott with the community boycotting, you come out with some more power. And so then the question is, how do you build on that and how do you just not treat it as separate phenomenon, but how do you build on it? So it means always having both a macro and micro perspective and a long term and short term perspective, because the challenge is to connect those, not to choose one or the other. And it’s too easy to choose one or the other. You know, you get a lot of seminar papers or you get a lot of stop sign campaigns, but they don’t go anywhere because they’re not building power. And you can’t have long term without building power. So they’re deeply interrelated. So short term, long term, structural, immediate. They’re both kind of questions. How do we take the circumstances we are in now and how do we turn those into the beginning of enough power that we can have a future, that we could build more power, that we can actually take on those structural challenges and not treat them as separate categories. So I think that’s a thing. Now, if you have a long term agenda, then the biggest challenge is building resilience into the organization so that it doesn’t get ossified. This was Michelle’s thing about the iron law of oligarchy. And there’s so much of a literature on this about unions. How do you sustain internal democracy? How do you sustain internal accountability? And again, UAW is a very good example of some people who dealt with that. So organizational structure, the processes, structural and local, long term, short term, they all go together I think. And, at least conceptually, it’s thinking about it in a different way. It also gives you a real interest in leadership development because you cannot be long-term, you can’t grow without that. And so it argues for building leadership development into everything you do. There’s too often this what they say in Spanish saying is entre menos burros, mas elotes. The fewer the donkeys, the more the corn. And you get into organization where the donkeys are quite happy with having all the corn and you come along developing leadership. Oh, we have enough donkeys. Thank you very much. I mean, this is another one of those human things. I can use that saying. I used in India. Everybody knew exactly what I was talking about. It’s really interesting, these sort of human dynamics, you know, that we don’t escape. 

Salimah Samji No, they’re definitely universal. We are all human. And that is something that we do have in common. So, you know, you’ve mentioned these four tensions. How do you embrace these tensions? How do you manage these tensions? 

Marshall Ganz Well, one way to think about it is and these are sort of three ways we’ve thought of. One is about figuring out how do you push responsibility out and down depending on what metaphor suits you. In other words, how do you push responsibility to the lowest? It’s like the most proximate level of leadership. You know, the first get out the vote that I learned to do was for Bobby Kennedy in East LA in 1968. And the deal was to canvass precinct until you found somebody who would take it over and be the precinct person. Then you train them and then you went on to the next one. Then you went on to the next one. In other words, you were creating a leadership structure in these precincts as you move through them, which then enabled you to actually do voter identification and have a mechanism to turn people out on Election Day. Typical campaigns these days have nothing. In the Obama campaign, it was one of the fights. It was like volunteers can’t do anything. What, you’re going leave it up to them. This whole professionalization and, you know, technologization, whatever you want to call it, it tries to turn everyone into an object. Everyone gets turned into an object and an object to be manipulated as opposed to a person to motivate and to engage and to train and to teach so they can do that. See, people talk about distributed leadership, but too often what they mean is, no leadership. And too often what they mean is, oh just, they’ll do it out there. Well, number one, that’s kind of crazy. But number two is, it’s structurally crippling because unless you think every problem to be solved at the local level and the advantage of having many local groups and numbers is not an advantage and there’s no centralized power that you have to deal with. Yeah, fine. Let everybody do whatever they want, but it doesn’t work. You can’t build power that way. So this whole thing of pushing responsibility out and down, but as part of a structure where there’s coaching, where there’s integration, great. Because otherwise it’s just an excuse to sort of, you know, and there are many well-intentioned organizations like some of the momentum organizations that they thought that if you designed a DNA of the movement, then once you taught people the DNA, then everybody would know what to do. Well, it didn’t work that way. You know, this dream of somehow eliminating the need for coaching, for structure, for integration, as opposed to just, you know, there’s the brain theory about integrated information theory. The synapses are sparking new information all the time, but it doesn’t go anywhere unless the other function of integration of new information into frameworks and categories and ways of looking at things, you need both. And the idea that you can just decentralize everything. Yeah, you have a lot of new information but not able to do much with it. Or the other one. You centralize everything. Well, that shuts off new information. So that’s one. And the second one is dissent is not disloyalty. In other words, that accepting that from my perspective, consensus is the worst form of decision making anybody’s ever come up with unless all of you are risking your lives. And so you need to all agree. But that’s typically not the situation. And, you know, I watch what happens with my students who are going to have consensus. Well, number one, it stops the action because we can’t agree. Number two, it marginalizes difference and marginalizes dissent because the pressure to not be a protruding nail, the pressure to not create tension, the pressure to go along is so great that differences don’t get engaged with. They just get pushed under the rug but they’re still there because you have no mechanism for actually acknowledging the differences and a process to learn from them and make decisions that don’t require unanimity. It’s one of the things that I appreciate about the tradition in which I grew up. In the Jewish tradition, the Talmud, all these studies, all these history of debates of rabbis, they preserved the dissenting views. In other words, the majority will vote. This is it. But they keep the dissenting views because they say later that dissenting view may be really important to acknowledge. It’s one of the few instances I know where dissent is actually treated with respect. Not to say that there aren’t going to be all kinds of political games or whatever. But there’s something about the legitimacy of difference that is so important in being able to adopt and learn and have any sense of internal accountability and so forth. This is one of the most basic ones we struggle with. Students who want to do consensus and that it makes them dysfunctional. So a decision making process that values difference and not being threatened by difference, I mean, in movements, it’s very easy to get differences, disloyalty. It’s been true in ideological groupings and cults and all sorts. If you disagree, then you’re the enemy and pretty soon you’re going to be dead as an organization or you’ll just turn into an autocracy. So that’s a second one. Dissent is not disloyalty pushing responsibility out and down. The third way of thinking about this is to recognize that how the work is organized of an organization has everything to do with how it works, how authority is structured, how resources are structured, how work is structured. And so if you have a structure like in Charlie Chaplin’s movie, Modern Times, where everybody is just doing repetitive stuff. There’s a boss who tells them what to do and there’s no collaboration there at all. It’s all about domination and about what is it? Richard Walton in a Business School article: The difference between control organizations and commitment organizations. And control organizations is what I’m describing. And so that does not bode well for an organization. Collaboration goes with the delegation of authority that we’ve been actually already talking about. If the work depends on our collaborating with one another, like a team and so forth, where we have an interest in each other’s success rather than competing with each other to put the other down, then we have much more possibility of real accountability, of real voice, because everybody is required. And so that’s where collaboration, collaborative structure is. The more that you can create structures that require collaboration, I think the more helpful it is in dealing with these tensions because everybody’s kind of got a stake and everybody’s got to take other people’s needs and want seriously. And that comes back to, you know, how you design a team, a real team in a real way that can enable that to happen. It also affects this question of leadership development. There was this debate about offsite training. You do this offsite training and everybody’s got to bloom, you know, it’s all wonderful. But then they go back and things are structured exactly the same way. And, you know, it takes maybe a week to maybe a month and they’re back in the same thing. Because structure shapes culture. And so how you organize the work, what’s the role of leadership development in it? What’s the role of collaboration in it? It’s not an add on. It’s a fundamental. And the snowflake form that we developed for campaigns is intended to build leadership development right into it, where you can’t succeed without developing other people’s leadership. And that’s what also challenges the burros, the donkeys, because the donkeys don’t want that to happen. 

Salimah Samji It really is a good one. The donkeys eating corn. I have a great visual of it and I can see when you do mention it to people that they can actually see it. One of my favorite parts of this podcast series, Marshall, is this practical aspect that you’ve brought into every single episode. And so for this one, also from a craft perspective, how do you practice structure? How do you think about what you can do? 

Marshall Ganz Well, I think we practice it all the time without calling it that. Any time we make commitments to each other about how we’re going to work together. You are creating structure. And so it is something humans do. Now the question is how to be intentional about it, how to be purposeful about it and how to see it as a legitimate question and not just like, we hate structure or structure is bad. So from my perspective, it’s recognizing that we do that anyway and then do it intentionally. And let’s understand the consequences of the structural choices that we make. Rather than treating structure as this kind of other thing that has nothing to do with the work or it’s something to be avoided. We have the tools. But then the question is, how do we think about it? And based on how we think about it, how do we create it? And I think starting with these four tensions is not a bad way to sort of say, okay, we need to structure what we’re doing. So now let’s look at these tensions. Let’s start with them and see where we are on that and what our ideas are about that and work your way to a functional structure. I don’t think there’s a magic formula, but there is a lot of life experience if we don’t kid ourselves. Another very important dimension of organizational structure is about what organizations actually do. If you think about it, they have meetings. We all know that. They act. And often it stops there. What’s missing is celebration, because unless they are also honoring the work they’re doing, the sacrifices they make, the values that are at stake, the heart dies. You can’t just all do it through head and heads. And in movements, it’s obvious. I mean, the civil rights movement without the mass meetings would have collapsed because the mass meetings were celebratory. They were honoring sacrifice. People gave testimony. We had same thing with the farmworkers. And we’re trying to encourage organizations to take this seriously. And so when we launch a team, we have our decision making thing. We have roles, we have the commitment, how we handle commitments, accountability, but we also have a name and a chant. Now people hear it – name and a chant. That’s ridiculous. We don’t need that. We’re adults. Come on. Why would we do that? But then they do it and it’s joyful. It’s celebratory. It’s funny. It’s a way to stop taking yourself too seriously. And invariably, we did a workshop just this last weekend with law students on organizing. And again, initially. What? Boy, but when they got into their names and chants, it was really cool. That was funny and it was great. So recognizing that the heart has to be fed. And it’s not all just numbers and all that. These are human beings. And as human beings, we need to honor ourselves and each other. So that’s what I mean by celebration. So there’s meaning. Of course there’s action, of course. But yes, there also needs to be celebration. Otherwise, the loop runs out of steam. 

Salimah Samji I’m just going to say some of the things that have really been striking for me in listening to you speak about this particular practice. Structure is about making commitments. Structure is about building a way to the future that allows for both episodic change and continuity. And you do this by pushing responsibility out and down with coaching, integration, whatever you need. Understanding and I would say even accepting that dissent is not disloyalty. I really love that one. Facilitating collaboration and celebrating the wins, even if they are small because structure shapes culture. I think that is really magnificent. Marshall, you’ve given our listeners a lot to be able to chew on, think, and practical things that they can try. Thank you so much, Marshall. 

Marshall Ganz The one thing I would add. 

Salimah Samji Yes, please. 

Marshall Ganz You need to celebrate losses more than wins. 

Salimah Samji Oh My God. That’s beautiful. Can you say more? 

Marshall Ganz Well, you know, in any campaigns or whatever, you’re going to have losses. The question is, what do you learn from them and how do you process them? And this is where we teach in the public narrative, the second part. This work of Dan McAdams, a narrative psychologist at Northwestern, where he distinguishes between the loss experience as one of contamination or one of redemption. And it’s painful to lose. No question. But then, do you allow it to become predictive, like, oh we’re losers.  Oh, we’re victims. Oh, it’s always… Or, do we find a way to transform it into a source of learning? Yeah, that was hard but we learned something. And you know, what don’t kill you makes you stronger. It’s kind of that kind of idea. There’s another dimension to narrative about what we call the empathetic bridge. And the empathetic bridge is about how to bridge from leader to constituent in the face of loss and other challenges. And what we’ve learned is that the first thing you have to do is acknowledge the pain, not deny it. Not pretend it’s not there. The second thing is you have to offer, but not claim empathy. In other words, not: I know just how you feel. No, you don’t. But I can speak from my experience and I can offer that. The third is to find a way to narrate hope. Now, that doesn’t mean, you know, Obama is going to come and save us or something. It’s tapping into the hope resources of the people themselves. It may be their life experience because we have hope experiences. It may be their faith. It may be cultural resources. But it’s digging deeper for those hope sources. And then you end up with a choice. You say, well, we could do this or we could do that. And that is a restoration of the agency. We lose when we lose. And so it’s very interesting. We learned that from watching Bobby Kennedy closely when he delivered the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination to a black audience in Indianapolis. And then we found another version which we use now, which is Jacinda Ardern’s Talk to the Nation after the massacre of Christchurch when 51 Muslim lives were taken. And she does exactly what I’m describing. We use her in class this year. Happily, she was visiting us, so she came to class for that. And it was great because people could say, Well, why did you do it that way? So much of this stuff that we teach is discovery. It’s not invention. It’s stuff that’s out there. And a lot of it we learn implicitly. But by making it explicit, we can transform it into craft and intentionality and skill and agency. And that’s just one example. So celebrating loss is not pretend we didn’t lose. But who are we? What are we? We have a video that we use. A woman named Renata Teodoro. She was a leader in the Dreamers campaign and they lost that vote before the Senate when Obama was president on getting the DACA Act actually passed. And we have this video where it’s afterwards and Renata gets up and talks to her people. And it’s brilliant. And she does exactly what I’m talking about. Exactly. Because, you know, they lost. But the fight wasn’t over. So there’s something there that’s just even more important than celebrating wins. 

Salimah Samji I think that is so powerful, Marshall. And I really am grateful that you gave these examples also of people who’ve done this exact thing and how instead of making a loss a label, by celebrating it, you turn the loss into learning, which is much more powerful. And I also really liked how you came back to Choice, which has been a recurrent theme throughout this entire podcast series and the work that you do is how there is always a choice. And it is in that moment of choice you claim your own agency. Are you going to be a victim or are you going to grab that and turn it around because that is what you are going to do. And I also really like this whole point of discovery, because that really is the true nature of what this is. It’s a constant journey of discovery. So thank you so much, Marshall. 

Marshall Ganz Thank you so much, Salimah.