Intro to Leadership and Organizing

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.

Salimah Samji Welcome, Marshall. We are just delighted to have you do this new podcast series with us on leadership, organizing and action. 

Marshall Ganz Thank you Salimah. Appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation. 

Salimah Samji Great. So in this introductory podcast to your work, I wanted to start with some of the motivations of what got you into organizing. And your story starts of when you got into organizing in the summer of 1964, when you volunteered for the Mississippi Summer project. And so I was wondering what motivated you to volunteer for that? 

Marshall Ganz You know, I think it’s a combination of things and some short term, some long term. I’d come to Harvard originally in 1960. I took a year off. This was 62, 63. I had a girlfriend at Mills College, and so I lived in Berkeley for a year, and it was when everything was kind of starting up. You know, 63 was a very big year, 62, 63. One thing I did was go to this Pete Seeger concert in the Longshoremen’s Hall in San Francisco. And he was doing this whole medley of civil rights songs and he really emphasized how this is a young people’s movement. That was the story and that was very inspiring, but it was also very challenging because it was like, yeah, yeah, I’m a young person, but I’m not here. So no, it’s funny because then later I went to the Monterey Folk Festival and heard Bob Dylan sing some of the same. I couldn’t understand Dylan. I understood Pete Seeger. But when I came back to school that year. See 63, Medgar Evers is assassinated. Four little girls are killed in Birmingham when they blow up their church. The march on Washington is happening, and there’s just a lot happening. And so I came back here. I shifted my major to history and literature. I was going to write about the Weimar Republic and Bertolt Brecht, and I was interested in cultural politics. But I met a woman named Dottie Zellner, who was an organizer first to Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and she was doing the Friends of SNCC and the Epworth Methodist Church basement here. And we got into conversations about this. And, you know, it became just more and more real, like, this is what’s happening now. And I remember I had a high school teacher. I haven’t thought about this in a long time high school teacher, Mr. Ringler, who we had these conversations and he said, well, would you have been a conscientious objector or would you have fought in World War 2? And he said, oh, I would have fought. Well why? He said, that was what was happening in my generation. I wanted to be part of what was happening in my generation. And those words kind of resonated because that’s kind of what was happening. And so as Dottie and I continued to talk, you know, I began to meet people, then I began to meet the people working in SNCC and, you know, I sometimes tell a story about the first SNCC staff meeting I went to in Atlanta, where it was in a church sanctuary, and I thought, they’re going to have charts all over the walls with strategy and all this. I go in and they’re having a preach-off. Now, I didn’t know what a preach-off is, but it was who could imitate Doctor King better. And the joy, the celebration, together with the courage. How could you not want to be part of that? I mean, so it wasn’t like, oh, these poor people, these poor victims. It was these people are fighting, and how could you not want to support that? Then when President Kennedy was assassinated, which was then in November, and I was here and, you know, we basically spent the next few days in the basement of Winthrop House watching. That was such a shattering thing, because it wasn’t just the loss. It was like you couldn’t count on, anybody was going to do stuff for you. If you’re gonna do stuff, you have to do it. You have to own it. And so when spring came and SNCC wanted us, they wanted people from Harvard to come to Atlanta to plan a campaign to get Harvard to sell its stock in Mississippi Power and Light Company. So we came back. We did our picketing here, of course, not too much avail, but it was in that context, more and more I was thinking, well, this is something you need to do. I mean, Bertolt Brecht, that’s very interesting. But that’s not what’s happening right now. And so when the opportunity came for the summer project, it was like, yeah, this is what I’m going to do. And I mean, the roots go back. I mean, to my father as a rabbi and growing up with Passover Seders and living in Germany after the Second World War, you know, meeting Holocaust survivors, there was a whole framework that I grew up with, but this gave it focus. And the other thing that I also grew up with was my father was suffering from, well, it was later diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. What it meant was that he became very unavailable to me or my mom, and it turned into some pretty bad kind of “do it because I say so” things, and I just kind of developed this visceral reaction to that, to do it because I say so and boy, that’s what the police were doing every day in the South. So it struck another chord that had more to do with anger and like, yeah, you can’t do this. You can’t do this. And so, you know, it all sort of came together there and it was like, how could I not do this? I wanted to join those people who were fighting and what they were fighting for. 

Salimah Samji That’s really powerful, you know, being part of your generation. And it’s always the young people who feel that they can and aren’t automatically just telling themselves, no, it’s not possible. Let’s not bother. Let’s not try. 

Marshall Ganz Yeah. Unfortunately, sometimes undergraduates are much more open. By the time they get to graduate school, sometimes hmm some of that edges. I find undergrads to be very courageous. 

Salimah Samji Absolutely, absolutely. I think there is something to be said about that age. So here you are. There’s 300, 18 to 21 year olds gathered at a training college in southern Ohio. You know, as you’re getting ready to leave for Mississippi. And what happened? 

Marshall Ganz Well, we were there being trained. And it’s actually there’s some interesting video footage of that training. There was a movie made a number of years ago called Freedom on My Mind, where they interviewed a number of us who had been there, but it was like 25 years later. So that’s when I saw some footage where I was talking that I didn’t know existed. The whole deal was to prepare us because we were innocents, you know, and there was the whole racial thing. I mean, a lot of volunteers were white and the organizers were black, and the people were black. And so there was a lot of stuff to try to engage with there. And so we’re getting ready to go. And it’s the night before we’re going to Mississippi next day on busses, initially cars, and we get word that three of our party had disappeared. Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. They had gone down a few days before to investigate the burning of a black church in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where there had been civil rights activity. They hadn’t been heard from since. So Bob Moses, who was the lead organizer and Bob was a very soft spoken guy, called us all together in this high school auditorium. He gets up on the stage, he says, we heard what happened to our brothers. We don’t know what happened exactly, but we think they’re gone. And sure enough, two months later, their bullet riddled, beaten bodies were found buried in a dirt levee where the Klan had buried them after executing them, when the county sheriff’s turned them over to the Klan for that purpose. We didn’t know that, but we kind of knew that. And so Bob said, look, I’d like to tell you, just forget it. Go home. He said, but I can’t. I need to ask you to go. But I can’t take the whole responsibility. Everybody here, you have got to decide. And you know, if you can’t go, there’s no shame. It’s fine. Well, it’s utter silence and I sank into my chair, just like everybody there. And that’s when I was reflecting on what got me there. And that was when I was thinking about the experiences in Germany. I was thinking about growing up. It’s the equivalent, I don’t know, some people call P.K. and R.K. it’s like, preacher’s kids, you got to go to all this stuff. But you’re also supposed to be perfect which is a different support group project, but I did love those Passover centers that telling the story of that exodus from Journey to Freedom. And they would say you were slaves in Egypt. I say, I’ve never been a slave. I’ve never been to Egypt. Until I realized that what it meant was that the story wasn’t the property of one people or time or place. It’s told generation after generation. You going to be with those guys with horses and chariots, or are you going to be with those people who are trying to find their way to the land of promise. Well, Doctor King described the civil Rights movement as yet another chapter in a story I had grown up with. And so you reflect on these things. The civil rights movement was a movement of young people. And there’s a Protestant theologian, Walter Brueggemann, wrote a book called The Prophetic Imagination, where he says that transformational vision occurs at the intersection of two elements, one he calls criticality, a clear view of the world’s hurt, of its need, of its pain. Coupled with hope, a sense of the world’s promise and possibilities. One without the other goes to despair or complacency. Together, they create a tension that can be powerfully transformational. And young people come of age with the critical eye on the world. They find almost of necessity, hopeful hearts. And so the affinity between generation change and social change is very, very deep. Those are some of the things, you know, that are going on. But then this young woman named Jean Wheeler is African-American organizer for SNCC. She stood up in the back of the room and she started to sing. They say that freedom is a constant struggle. They say freedom is a constant struggle. Oh Lord, we’ve struggled so long. We must be free. They say that freedom is a constant dying. We’ve died too long. We must be free. And as she stood up and walked out of the room, everybody filed in behind her. And the next day everybody went to Mississippi. So for me, that was a real choice point, because it’s in Mississippi where I would find really what would be my calling for the rest of my life. 

Salimah Samji It is really remarkable that Bob gave everyone choice, right? It’s crucial. He literally said, I can’t make this decision for you. You need to each of you decide for yourselves and the fact that all of you decided to go. 

Marshall Ganz Yeah. No, it was an incredible moment. In this movie, Freedom on my mind, they were interviewing us 25 years later and that moment, we almost were using the same words to describe it. It was so powerful. We have those moments, you know, when we make choices and you don’t know where they’re going to lead. But you do what you’re called to do. And I think the word called is a really important word because it’s not just about what’s my career what’s my job. It’s what am I on earth here to do? You know, what’s my life to be about? 

Salimah Samji Yep. You say, as you already mentioned, that that moment in the auditorium is when your life changed and you found your calling to enable others to find the courage to lead, to build community, and to enable that community to turn resources it has into the power it needs to get what it wants. I was wondering if you could just, what’s the difference between power and resources? 

Marshall Ganz Well, first of all, we think of power as the thing you have, which is not. You know, if you need what I’ve got more than I need what you’ve got, then who’s got the power. It’s intuitive. And if we flip it around. So power is a relationship of interdependency. That’s a starting point. So resources are involved but it’s resources in relationship to needs. You know I may have the only food store in town, but if everybody’s on a fast I don’t have any power. It’s that kind of understanding that balance. The reality was that in Mississippi, African Americans didn’t have the right to vote. They weren’t protected by the labor laws. I never had the experience of going up to someone twice my age would stand up and call me Mr., Introduce himself with his first name, offer me his chair because he was black and I was white, went on thousands of times a day across the South. You put together the cultural and political and economic powerlessness, and you sort of say, oh my God, what happens here? And so we tried getting power from DC and so forth, but it became clear that unless the people with the problem could also be the solution, it wasn’t going to change. But they don’t have any power. Well, what was so instructive for all of us was Montgomery bus boycott, 1955, where everybody knows the story of Rosa Parks. Just, you know, who one day got tired. Well, no, she was secretary of the NAACP chapter. She trained in organizing. The whole thing was a strategy and it was a strategy to use the law, like the year before. Brown v Board of Education, to desegregate the busses in Montgomery, Alabama. And the busses where it had blacks in the back, whites in the front, no man’s land in the middle, armed deputized bus driver. Every black person who had to get up, walk past all that, find a seat in the back and then give it up if a white person wanted it. So there’s a lot of anger. And so they convinced the Women’s Committee, the black college convinced Doctor King to call a one day solidarity thing. So they agreed. And there is an account of Doctor King gets up early in the morning. He’s watching the busses go by. There’s not a single black face on a single bus. That moment, that community saw itself differently because powerlessness fragments you. But that kind of unity empowers. So that’s when they decided they would just stay off those busses until they won. And they did win, it took, you know, a year. And that’s when they discovered, we all discovered, the difference between resources and power. In fact, they all did have resources that could become a source of power, namely their feet. If they use their feet to walk to work and deny the bus company the bus fare, instead of using their feet to get on the bus, give the bus company the bus fare, then their individual dependency on the bus company turns into the bus company’s dependency on a united and powerful community. The lesson there is that, yeah, you know, power has to be created and constructed, but resources are much broader than we sometimes think of them. And as human beings, we all have the power ultimately to say no. And that’s what they did for a year. And they used their feet and they won. I guess the other important thing is that, you know, feet are much more widely distributed than money. 

Salimah Samji They are indeed. 

Marshall Ganz And time is more widely distributed. And so people power then that’s the challenge is how to turn people resource into the power that people need to create a world into which they want to live. That’s the starting point, is people, human beings. 

Salimah Samji People are power. And I really like that idea that you have the power to say no. Right. I think a lot of times you don’t even think that you can say no to anything. That’s something that you have that you can do. That is your choice also. 

Marshall Ganz No, it’s sort of fundamental often to the whole idea of nonviolence, as any system of oppression depends to some degree on the cooperation of the oppressed. And it may be very costly to withdraw, but you can. And that then becomes very powerful and liberating, really, to recognize that you do have agency, you know, and you have to sometimes exercise that agency to turn it into power. 

Salimah Samji So you spend the summer in Mississippi and then you return home to Bakersfield, California. But this time. And you’ve lived there since sixth grade. This time you come back with what you call Mississippi eyes. What did you see? 

Marshall Ganz Well, actually, I stayed down there for another year and really got more deeply into this. And that’s when I was like, go back to Harvard or not. It seemed like, how can I come back and study history when we’re busy making it? Which was arrogant but also true. 

Salimah Samji Very true, very true. 

Marshall Ganz No. So that’s when I went back to California. And Bakersfield is an oil and agriculture town, southern San Joaquin Valley. John Steinbeck made it infamous in Grapes of Wrath. And Cesar Chavez had just begun a strike in the grape vineyards. And I’d grown up there, but I hadn’t seen it. I had to come back with what we called Mississippi Eyes to see. Oh, here’s another community of people of color, also without political rights, also without economic protections. California, with its own rich history of racial oppression, going back to native peoples, the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Mexicans. So it turned out that Mississippi was not an exception to America. It was an example of the America that we need to change. And that’s when I began to work with Cesar. And that was really where I learned the organizing craft. You know, the calling in Mississippi was very clear. But then how do you act on that? And so the craft was what we all learned in the farmworkers. It was organizing, it’s not just like be one with the people. It’s like, no, you had real craft skills you had to develop. And I’m so grateful for that because I learned so much from that and learning how to learn and learning how to teach also comes from that. 

Salimah Samji So after doing that for several years, you did some more years on electoral labor issue, organizing, training, and learning. I was wondering if you can speak to some of the political campaigns that you worked in, etc.. 

Marshall Ganz Well, my first political campaign was actually Bobby Kennedy when I was still working with farm workers, and we took, mostly non-citizen immigrant farmworkers, went to East L.A., in East Los Angeles, and we turned out the vote of Latino citizens in that primary. We won the primary for him and went down to celebrate at the hotel that night with a mariachi and all that. And that’s when we lost it. And, you know, that was like, well, there’s so much there to reflect on. But it also was one of those moments you got to do it. You have to do it. You can’t just depend on somebody to do it for you. So, you know, in the farmworkers, I had learned basic political skills doing Jerry Brown’s campaigns, you know, because he was an ally of ours. So by the time I left the farmworkers, I did have some skills that I could pay rent with. And so what it was, was trying to reintroduce organizing in politics in a state where the whole shift to targeted digital, all that was already in play. This is in the 80s. And so it was kind of are there ways that we can continue to make people relevant as opposed to, you know, all the targeted messaging and all that other stuff that was going on? And so we began to learn how to do that. We were experimenting in many different venues how to make this stuff count, but it was also very challenging and very frustrating because we felt like we were just pushing against these forces. I wrote a piece in 1994, actually, the first thing ever published that I wrote called voters in the crosshairs, and it was just how the combination of marketing and tech created this class of professionals who were making more money. The more money was spent, the more money they made. And it was turning people into data points and utility functions. And boy, we saw it early in California. And so it was like, how do we fight that? And that’s what I was struggling with. And I was actually helping Jerry Brown try to rebuild the California Democratic Party. But it was very frustrating. And that’s when I got invited to my 25th reunion here, which surprised me because I didn’t think they invited dropouts to reunion. 

Salimah Samji That’s right. You had one year left. 

Marshall Ganz I had a year left. And. Yeah, and I wasn’t that good. The dropout up in Seattle, you know, started a small software company. That wasn’t my situation. So it surprised me. But when I came back, it was like I came to that reunion, it was the first reunion I ever went to because I was feeling stuck. And so that’s when I ran into 20 year old me who was still here. Hey, how’s it going? Feeling stuck. Come back. Finish the senior year. Tuition had changed. Synapses might not work. Anyway, we figured it out. So in 1991, I did and wrote a senior thesis in history and government and graduated class of 64-92. And my 81 year old mother got to come and see her son finally become a college graduate. 

Salimah Samji Must have been so incredible for her. 

Marshall Ganz Well, it was incredible for her. And it was challenging, but it was wonderful. I mean, you know, so I’m in a seminar on liberalism and its critics with Michael Sandel, me and 18 juniors. And I’d say, well, that’s pretty cool because there’s the cross generational dynamics. And the faculty was so cool in supporting, like, [inaudible] and others who were very supportive. But it was just an amazing year. And yeah, I was so hungry. So my wife Susan, and I then did the mid-career program at Kennedy School. I know I’m the only person who went from senior to mid-career in one summer. 

Salimah Samji Absolutely.

Marshall Ganz Then got the bug and did my PhD in sociology and while working on that, was asked to teach a class on organizing at the Kennedy School. And that was a real gift to me because I could connect my life experience with the social science I was learning and really rich stuff that I was learning. But combine them into pedagogy to engage with a rising generation. And so I’d go to class twice a week, and it was like, I’m having a conversation with the future. I mean, how cool is that? And that’s sort of been the core of what my research, my practice has been that pedagogy of practice, of enabling people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to get what they want. And in a sense, I’ve been doing that for my whole life. And that’s what I get to do now. The other thing I should say is that I got back into the world of practice, mainly through my students who were engaged, and particularly with the Obama campaign in 2007. And we were able to bring elements of what we’ve been working on in the classroom into these Camp Obamas that developed leadership teams, that we developed this idea of five practices as core for organizing. And we introduced public narrative. It turned out that it worked. And so for me, the interaction between practice in the world, the research understanding and the teaching, they’re intimately related and each influences the other. And that’s what’s so extraordinary about the opportunity, the privilege, really. I have of being able to do that and being able to continually engage. And now it’s increasingly not just with the future, it’s with the world because of the international character of everybody we work with. And it’s been extraordinary. 

Salimah Samji Yeah, it really has been a gift and most recently the mayor in Toronto, won using your organizing principles as well. And you’ve also done some work in the UK and it continues to happen, which is really, really remarkable. So it’s not just the Obama campaign or other things that you’ve done. There are constantly new stories every day on how one can use these organizing principles and leadership principles and action to be able to make progress. 

Marshall Ganz And the idea has never been to come up with a blueprint. The first workshop we did in Jordan, where we’ve done a lot of work. There’s a woman, [inaudible] said, oh, I see this is not a blueprint. It’s a roadmap. Yes, it’s a roadmap. Look within your own identity, your own culture, your own traditions for the sources of hope and solidarity and courage. And that’s kind of what the deal is, and that’s what has enabled it to be useful to people in so many different parts of the world. The online organizing class I do this fall, this spring, we had 140 students from about 35 countries. 48% did not have English as their first language, and 65% were women, by the way. And the average age was in the sort of 30ish range. That’s who you want to be in conversation with around the world, because that’s happening. So that’s what I say. It’s just been a gift. 

Salimah Samji You know, you talk about organizing and you talk about leadership. You also say how it’s not about a single person. And I was wondering if you could just say a little bit more about, because a lot of people have this idea that there is that one leader, and that’s how change happens. So I’d love to hear your thoughts. 

Marshall Ganz No, I mean, we describe it as the dot problem. I think lots of people have wound up being dots. What I mean is everything comes to them and then they burn out. Or they’ve tried to work with a dot, in which case they get burned out. It’s just. And it’s interesting. It’s a little digression, but the foundation for this challenge is actually in the book of Exodus in chapter 18, where Moses is leading the people and he’s exhausted, and his father in law, Jethro, shows up with his wife and kids and says, hey, how’s it going, Moses? Moses says oh, it’s really been hard, really. He says, yeah, I see you’ve been blessed by God. It’s great. So they have a celebration the next morning, Moses goes to work and it’s described. He’s sitting on the ground and people are towering over him. And Jethro says, this is not good. He says, look, you’re going to burn yourself out. You are gonna burn people out. What you got to do is among every ten, find one who can take responsibility for decision making. And among those ten one. And among those ten one. And then that’s who you work with are those ten. And he does it right away, which is pretty interesting. But it’s like Jethro, the original management consultant. I mean, this is really what. So this is not new information. So much of this is not new information. It’s embedded in how we are as people. So when you’re a dot, it doesn’t work. And so then sometimes we say okay well we’re not going to have any leadership. We’re all adults. We’re just going to. And then you get what feminist sociologist Jo Freeman called the tyranny of structurelessness. You pretend like there’s no structure, but structure develops, but it’s under the table. Who decided that? What was that? So what we’ve tried to do is focus on leadership teams as a way of developing leadership, where you create a real team. It’s as real a team, as a soccer team or a string quartet. It’s not like, hey, we’re all a team. And you know, this is one of the learnings that I got from Richard Hackman, who taught here for many years, whose research is so practical about how to form real teams. And so we’ve tried that with Obama, where it hadn’t been done. I mean it was always like the precinct leader. And we structured these teams so they’re collaborative, maybe 5 or 6 people. It’s collaborative leadership where it’s interdependent and nobody’s expected to have all the answers. Nobody can anyway. And so it’s a combination of people leading in different ways. And then we got into the scale. So then we realized each team member could form their own team, and then they could form their own team. And we could build out sinews really, of leadership within a movement. And that’s what we got to figure out doing. So leadership, then we think of it as accepting responsibility for sure, but it’s about enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty. And core to that is the learner becomes a teacher. The follower becomes a leader. It’s building leadership development into the whole thing. So it isn’t like a seminar you send your people to. It’s how you work every day. And that’s what we’re trying to develop in terms of leadership. 

Salimah Samji Yeah, I think this idea of not just a dot, but growing it into you use the word snowflakes or other organisms, you know, like a network structure. Yeah. So that if you lose the dots, the dot burns out or whatever, there is structure to be able to carry on that work. 

Marshall Ganz You know, there’s a difference between coordinating a leadership team and being the leader. There’s a big difference. And because everybody then has their chunk of responsibility for which they’re providing leadership. And so it’s day and night. So we’ve launched teams. It’s one of the main things we teach here is about launching a team not based on the issue but based on values. You know, what do you share that you can work together on behalf of a shared purpose and take advantage of all your differences of experience, your different perspectives, diversity in order to enrich your capacity rather than to cripple it. But that requires values work. And I think this team stuff, it’s really been an essential thing because out there in the world, when people are organizing only around issues, they’re fragmenting. You know, I’m a tree person, you’re a fish person. Well, we can’t work together. We’re competing for the same donor, whatever. But when you discover that the foundation is relational and that by forming relationships with people with whom you share values about a particular cause or whatever, then that becomes your strength. And so then you choose, we’re going to do that issue because it helps us build our power. But it isn’t just this one campaign after another that doesn’t build anything. So yeah, that whole notion of interdependent leadership is really fundamental. 

Salimah Samji I really like the idea of uniting on values as opposed to, because we disagree on very many things. But there are some very common core values that we are human, after all, that we can really unite. And using that as your glue to say to hold people together is very powerful. So, Marshall, you talk about the erosion of our capacity for collective action. What does that mean? 

Marshall Ganz You know, it seems like increasingly we are moved into a place where we forget that relationship is fundamental to who we are. That we are not isolated atoms, individuals floating somewhere. We are relational creatures and relationship is fundamental. And I’m not talking about transactional. I’m talking about relationship. Because transaction is, hey, we make an exchange right now and good. It’s done. Forming a relationship is about the future, and it’s about taking the risk of committing to another person that in the future, we can continue to grow and develop our understanding of ourselves and what we are together. What makes us human is that capacity. I mean, one of the elements is that we are relational, and the idea that we are all these isolated individuals floating somewhere in space is just not how the world is. The problem is that we have these structures, like market systems, that individualize rather than create venues for us to learn. What de Tocqueville’s insight about the U.S. when he first came here was, he was worried about radical individualism based on his experience where that led in France. And he observed all these associations in the U.S. and they were not just organizations, they were associations. And his point was that then people come together so they can learn from and with each other about what they share. They can build effective bonds for solidarity, and they can learn how to govern themselves in a democratic way. Now, that was really insightful. But what’s happened is that whether it’s the combination of market dynamics or the way we do politics, it’s all individualizing, individualizing, individualizing, and then we confuse aggregating a bunch of individual preferences for the preference of the whole. In other words, democracy is not just about individual liberties, it’s about collective capacity. It’s sort of saying, here is a way that we can learn with and from each other what we share. Now, it’s not like everybody’s always going to be in agreement. Of course not. That’s not the point. But there is a learning process that then leads to decisions and choices about policy, how we’re going to use the power that we create by coming together. Well, today, it’s sort of like a weird combination of, on the one hand, the whole consumer market thing. Everybody’s an individual, individual preferences. But then there’s also a reaction on the left side about individual autonomy being the highest good in the world. And so one form that takes is everything’s got to be by consensus. Well, yeah, that gives one person the power to stop a whole collective effort that people want. But that’s not democratic, that’s narcissistic. It’s kind of like, it’s out of whack in both ends. So then the big challenge from my perspective, how do we put the collective. And by collective, I mean, I don’t know, I say the word collective and people right away, oh, that’s communist. No, it’s always a balance between the self and the other and how we manage that, but how we can bring that back to the center of our politics and our work together. And so that need to build, they say, when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, okay. But we don’t operate that way. We sum the parts. We say that is the whole, but it’s not. It’s just the parts. So political venues, organizational venues, learning venues where we can rediscover the significance that we are in each other’s lives and need to be, boy, it’s a moral need, it’s a political need, economic need across the board. And that’s one of the things we’re trying to do. 

Salimah Samji You’ve talked a lot about learning and you have this saying, the way we learn is what we learn, and what we learn is the way we learn. Can you explain what you mean by that? 

Marshall Ganz Well, the idea is what I sometimes call a pedagogy of practice. That if we’re going to study building relationships and what we’re going to do is read all this literature about relationships and look at studies about relationships. But we never encounter building a relationship. What we’re learning about something that we’re not learning the something. In other words, in most colleges and universities, the practice that’s being taught is research. But that’s not what we need for the world. Yes, we need research, but we need leadership. We need to be able to build relationships, to tell stories, to strategize, to create structure, to act. But we’re teaching it. I know Ronnie Heifetz used to say it’s teaching neck down stuff in a neck up way. In other words, we try to abstract. So then what we’re teaching. That’s what I’m saying. We’re not teaching leadership, we are teaching research or we’re teaching writing. Well that’s fine. Those are important things. 

Salimah Samji The way we learn is what we learn, and what we learn is the way we learn. 

Marshall Ganz Yes, exactly. When we are learning, when we’re teaching, we are learning how. And so are we learning how to teach. What are we learning? And for professional schools, it’s a huge problem to not be equipping people with learning practice, because what we’ve tried to do is create a pedagogy that enables people to learn practice. The metaphor is the bicycle. We talked about how do people learn to ride a bicycle? Well, they, you know, study bicycleology or, you know. 

Salimah Samji Get on the bike and try and try and try and try again. 

Marshall Ganz And the first thing that happens when you get on the bike the first time is what? You fall. 

Salimah Samji That’s true, several times. 

Marshall Ganz So you so you either find the courage to get back up on the bike, knowing you’re going to keep falling for a while, to learn to keep your balance, or you go home and go to bed. And so our pedagogy is designed that way to explain a concept, model it, you do it, you get on the bike, it’s not perfect. And we debrief. And so it means creating a learning context in which it’s all about learning, not judgment. It’s not about perfection. It’s trying things and then learning from that. I think it’s one of the most important things that we do in terms of enabling people to learn, is to create a brave space within which people can learn. And one of the practices that we start off with now, everything is coaching because we’ll say, okay, who’s got a leadership problem? Okay, now your job is to help that person with that problem, but you can’t give any advice. All you can do is ask questions. No advice. Not allowed. And so people pair off. And first of all there’s describing a challenge they have. They’re not talking about all their medals their awards and how great they are. This is a challenge I’ve got. And then the other person begins to figure out how they can help that person without having all the answers. What they have is the right questions. And so it elicits and enables learning. My mom, she called herself an educator, she’s a teacher because she pointed out that education comes from educare, the Latin, which means to draw out, not to put in. And so it’s that kind of context. So people discover, oh, guess what? We can actually enable each other. And we get there, though, by acknowledging our vulnerabilities, but also by paying close attention, listening and asking questions because our curiosity draws us to learn. So that sort of foundation that we build on. That’s crucial. Then you fall off the bike. Well, okay. What do we learn from that? You know, it’s not. Oh, what a jerk. You fell off the bike. No, it’s Carol Dweck. It’s from growth mindset versus fixed mindset. It’s also beginner’s mind. The zen idea that let go, be present to the present. Let go of all these assumptions. Bring an open mind to learning and open spirit and we try to create that brave space with a lot of intentionality. So then people can practice and they can take the risks and they can discover the learning. They can afford each other through their own interactions and coaching and so forth. 

Salimah Samji I really like that idea of questions to draw out. And for that you do need openness. You need that beginner mind, you need that curiosity, and you need that humility to recognize that you do not have the answer. And it is okay that you do not have the answer. Because we live in a world of complex problems and challenges, and no one person is going to solve them. You do need a team. You do need more people to be able to work to it. But that growth mindset is really something that is needed. 

Marshall Ganz It’s really about letting go of the judgment idea for the learning. We need critical feedback as data on our learning. Because it’s not judging us as people. That’s a different thing. And that we have to have solid and creative foundation for it. We ground everything we do in the respect exercise to actually make it real, and it’s kind of a foundation for the whole approach. 

Salimah Samji So, Marshall, you know, you say learning organizing begins with learning to practice leadership. What do you mean by that? 

Marshall Ganz Leadership is one of those things that as many different people that you’re learning with that many different definitions. So to be clear about our own, it’s rooted in three questions posed by the first century Jerusalem scholar Rabbi Hillel. Who when asked, how do I figure out what to do with my life, articulated three questions to ask yourself. The first one, ask yourself, if I am not for myself, who will be for me? Now, it’s not meant to be a selfish question. It’s a self-regarding question. In other words, if you presume to enter into a leadership relationship with others, you better be clear about your own values, your own expectations. And with enough self-awareness, you can actually see others. But then the second question is, if I am for myself alone, what am I? Because to be a who and not a what, a human being and not a thing, is to recognize that we exist in relationship with others in the world. Our capacity to realize our objectives is inextricably wrapped up with the capacity of others to realize theirs. And finally, he says, ask yourself if not now, when? It’s not advice to jump into moving traffic, it’s more of a caution against what Jane Addams called the snare of preparation. Just know that your strategic planning will have the perfect plan. The world will totally conform to our expectations, except that never happens. The point being that rarely can we learn to do well what we want to do until we actually begin to do it. In other words, that understanding flows from action rather than preceding it. So for me, leadership is about the interaction of these three elements of the self with other and with action. Now the other point about leadership is when is leadership needed? Now sometime people may have had the experience of being in a project or organization. Everything’s going really well, and there’s a long line of people saying, we want to thank the leadership. On the other hand, the more common experience is you see that long line when. Wait, who decided that? Who was in charge of that? In other words, that approaching the work of leadership can be very challenging because if everything’s going fine, what do you need leadership for? I mean, everything’s working. Systems working. It’s the surprises. It’s the unexpected, the dilemmas, the contradictions. That’s where the creative adaptive initiative taking capacity for leadership is required. So it can be kind of daunting to say no. The time everything will be under control does not exist. That’s not why you’re here. But it can be daunting then, because you ask yourself, do I have the skills I need for this new situation? That’s a challenge to the hands. Then can I use my resources in new ways? Strategic challenge. A challenge to the head. And then there’s. Where do we get the courage? Where do I get the hope? How do I inspire the hope and courage in others? That it often takes to take the risks involved in dealing with real challenges? And that’s a challenge to the heart. So it’s a way of thinking of leadership in a head and heart kind of way. And often there’s so much emphasis on the head and the hands, the heart is forgotten about, when in fact it’s what moves everything. So the definition then, that I’ve come to use for leadership is that leadership is about accepting responsibility, there’s a choice, but accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty. This is not leadership as a position. This leadership is practice. I think we all know people who occupy positions of formal leadership that have turned out not to be such great leaders. On the other hand, we’ve made people in neighborhoods and communities and workplaces who are exercising leadership in the way I’m describing it all the time, but they don’t have the titles. So it’s a practice. And it’s not leadership like the diva or the sun with it, that heats or burns or whatever it is. It’s a form of interaction with other people, and it’s a relational practice. So now organizing is a form of leadership that begins by asking the first question is, who are my people? Not what’s my issue with my cause, who are my people? Who are the people with whom I’m entering into this relationship around working together to deal with challenges? It means working with people, not as clients for services. It’s not as customers for products. It’s not even as people who you’re speaking for as an advocate. It’s about bringing people together to engage with one another. The word for this is the work that is turning a community into a constituency. And constituency comes from the Latin constituere, which means to stand together. So it’s about bringing people together. To stand together, learn together, decide together, act together, and hopefully win together. Now, the second question though is what is the change they need? And not because somebody did a survey, it’s in terms of people’s lived experience. What are the hurt points? What are the hope points? How is it real? What kind of change do they need? And finally is how do they turn resources that they have into the power they need in order to create that change? And so it’s people, change, power. Now, power is a really key word, although it only means like in Spanish, poder, to be able to, to have the capacity. Doctor King called it the ability to achieve purpose. But it’s a word that right away you get a reaction when you say power. And it’s interesting to think about why that is. And it may just be that folks who have a lot of it don’t want a whole lot of us talking about it. That could certainly be one of the reasons. Now, the thing is that power is intuitive, because if you ask if you need what I’ve got more than I need what you’ve got, then who’s got the power? Think about it for a moment . You need what I’ve got more than I need what you’ve got. Who’s dependent on who? You’re dependent on me. And I’ve got the power. And if you reverse it, then it’s just the other way that I’m dependent on you. And so it’s understanding that power is not a thing you have. It’s a relationship between needs and resources. And how you create that balance. Now sometimes we have interests that are aligned and that we have resources we can contribute to. And that’s when we can create more power with one another, like a co-op or a credit union, or together we have more capacity. But sometimes we need resources that we don’t have, like decision making power, like wage rates, in which case, then we have to figure out what resources do we have that we can use to leverage the interests or the needs of those whose resources we need. There’s a Spanish saying, “Al nopal sólo se le arriman cuando tiene tunas”, which means, it’s Mexican, people don’t come and look at the prickly pear cactus except when it’s bearing fruit. Well, that’s the politician show up in Nevada just before election because there’s some fruit there. And so it’s this recognition. Oh, we got votes that can be a resource we can use to leverage, to make it more costly for them to resist what we need than to agree to it. So it’s about learning how to build power with one another, but then using that power to challenge power that’s being exercised over us so that we can restore a power with relationship with everyone. Then in organizing, we look at not just one, but three. One is, did we win the campaign? Did we get the law passed? But the second one is, did we come out of this stronger than we went into it? I don’t know about you, but many of us have had the experience of working in a campaign, and at the end we may win, but we never want to see anybody ever again who was in that campaign with us. Now, that may be only my experience. I suspect not, but it turns out that what did we win? We came out weaker. What did we build to carry forward? How did we build any power? How did we sustain? And so in many ways, that second one is the most important, because it’s where the power for the future comes. We’re building stronger power of people. And then the finally is how we develop leadership. Because the development of abundant leadership is a source of strength for organizing and social movements. So those three outcomes. Did we win? Whatever? Did we come out stronger rather than weaker? And are we developing leadership. 

Salimah Samji I really like what you’re saying about power as a variable, because I think so many times we think that power is stuck. It’s fixed. You can’t change it. And this idea of power being the relationship between needs and resources, which can change, is extremely powerful and that you can build it, right? I also really like what you said about the campaign. It’s not just about winning, because after you win, you have to do something, and even if you lose, you still have to do something. 

Marshall Ganz Amen. Amen. Yes.

Salimah Samji Right? And I think it’s just really, really powerful how you think about this. You also say how organizing is a learnable craft. And you’ve identified these five key principles, which is really what this podcast series is about. And I was wondering if you can share with us what these five principles are, and we will have a podcast dedicated to each of these, but just for our listeners to identify what these five practices are. 

Marshall Ganz Well, if we think of organizing as being about recruiting, identifying, recruiting, developing leadership, building community around and with that leadership and building power from the community, it turns out that there seem to be five core practices that are involved. And they’re ways of doing they’re not just ways of being. And we think of a practice as having a skill component, but also a values component and also a conceptual component because if it’s only the skill, then the capacity to adapt and modify is not there, unless we also have a conceptual understanding of why that skill works or matters. And values are always implicit if they’re not explicit. And so we want to be very explicit about what the values are that are being communicated, or that are the foundation for each of these practices. The other thing about the practices is that they’re all rooted in human capabilities. None of these practices are like quantum mechanics or nuclear physics. They are practices as human beings we’re all equipped to do. And the first and the foundational one is about building relationships. Now, building relationships is fundamental because there are very few things that we can accomplish all by ourselves. And so we form relationships with others often in part because we share a common value or interest, but also because we bring different elements to it. So a relationship is really a combination of commonality and difference, and I think it’s really important to appreciate that. So when we’re forming a relationship, we may say, oh, that’s interesting person. Oh, why don’t we have coffee? So you sit down, you have coffee, and you’re exchanging interests, resources, exchanging information, and then it’s really good. And so at the end you say, oh, well, why don’t we get together next week? Oh, jee, I have a final paper due next week. Okay. What about the week after that? Oh, you know, I got people coming from out of town. Well, what about the week after that? Well, why don’t I send you an email? So what just happened? What was missing? You may have had a fruitful exchange of interest, resource, communication, but what was missing was commitment. And commitments are what create relationships. It’s what makes the difference between a transaction and a relationship. A transaction is of the moment. A relationship is of the future. Because when we commit, we’re creating a future for us as in a relationship. And so they are so fundamental to the whole notion of constructing anything with other people. And one of the big challenges today is that there is so much disaggregation, there is so much taking us out of relationship with one another and putting us into all these transactions in which there’s no commitment involved. We show up for a rally like mobilizing. No commitment there. We express a preference. No commitment there. We answer a poll. It’s commitment. That is what creates the power and what creates the strength. So building relational capacity is really at the heart of what organizing is all about. And it’s what distinguishes it fundamentally from marketing, from mobilizing and all the rest of that. There are many ways we do that, one on one meetings. There’s a whole array of tactics through which we can build relational power. One example was in Nancy Pelosi’s first campaign for Congress in 1987. It was a special election, and we had six weeks to put the campaign together and she had no organization in San Francisco. The first three weeks, we had 81 House meetings. A House meeting is not because it’s in a house. You invite people, you know, and then the organizer comes, and then out of each house meeting, you get another three house meetings. And it’s like Tupperware thing, you create a chain. So we had 81 house meetings in three weeks, to which Nancy came to most. And then the people who were the hosts became our precinct leaders, and we knew they already had people. So that’s how we built the get out the vote. And then, of course, we won. Not so different from what we did with Barack Obama in South Carolina, where we generated 15,000 people through 500 House meetings. And so, again, it’s not like relationships are just, oh, they take forever. And they’re very. No, it’s being intentional and building on that capacity, which is our human capacity for association and for relationship building. So that’s number one. 

Salimah Samji I really like that that intentionality and this idea of commitment to create an us in a relationship. Because without the commitment, there is no us. It’s me as an individual, you as an individual. And I also really like your example of going to a rally. It’s really easy, but that’s not necessarily committing to the movement or doing something bigger to grow into an organizing movement. 

Marshall Ganz Yeah, this is where the challenge in digital work, digital organizing is. I was at a conference at MIT recently where they were talking about online communities, and so it was interesting. I said, okay, so now what’s the commitment that people make to the community? Oh what do you mean? I mean, they show up. Oh, okay. So there’s no commitment required. Oh, interesting. So you get all rights with no obligations. That’s not how you build a community. A community requires voice in return for commitments or loyalty. So it sort of help me clarify why so much of the stuff online can be very thin. It could be much stronger, but so much of it is so thin, because commitment is not recognized as what’s fundamental for building power and for creating community and for living like a human being. So number two is the question of how we translate. We call it public narrative, because narrative is one way in which we’ve learned to access the emotional resources embedded in our values for sources of courage to turn threats from which we run in fear to challenges that we can embrace with hope. The important thing to appreciate about narrative is that it is rooted in values and values, they’re not abstract ideas. Values are what really moves us. You know, St. Augustine said it’s one thing to know the good, it’s another to love it. Loving it is what enables action upon it. And so the emotional content is what makes values real. And so in learning narrative, we’re learning how to speak the language of emotion. Some people say language of emotion. That’s crazy. You got to get emotion out of everything. Right. We got to be rational actors.

Salimah Samji A lot of people do that. 

Marshall Ganz Well, and you get rid of emotion, you’ve got a sociopath is what you got. Because human beings are emotional, physical and cognitive creatures. And that’s the wholeness of what it is to be human. And if you think about music, music speaks the language of emotion, worship, theater, poetry. We speak the language of emotion. And so this is about how to speak the language of emotion with respect to a fundamental challenge, which is how is it that we can confront the unexpected that for which we’re not prepared, the disruptive, but in a way that we are able to engage it with agency. And the challenge is that that disruption can certainly create anxiety, which actually could be very constructive, because it calls our attention to the fact that this is not business as usual, that this requires attention. The problem is that anxiety often flips to its close cousin fear. And once we’re into the fear thing, we’re reacting. We’re not acting. We’re reacting and we’re reacting in very problematic ways. I mean, dealing with saber tooth tigers, it was flight freeze. I never understood the fight part exactly with saber tooth. But once we began to live with people in communities, we learned culturally how to manage our fears, how to manage our hearts. And that’s where the deal is, because you can take that anxiety or anger, and if you pair it with fear, you wind up going a very different direction than if you pair it with hope. So hope becomes fundamental in this whole thing, you know? But by hope, I don’t mean flowers in May la-di-da. I mean, well, the best definition I know of was that of Maimonides in the 12th century who said hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible as opposed to the necessity of the probable. In other words, we live in a world in which it is always like probable Goliath will win, but sometimes David does. It was utterly improbable we’d elect a black man president of this country in 2007, and it happened. Hope is that sense of what could be. It’s the place between fantasy and certainty. It’s the domain of possibility. And in our own lives we have those experiences. And just as we have experiences of hurt that teach us what we care for, we also have experiences of hope, which suggests that we can actually do something about it. So there’s fear countered by hope, isolation, which often goes with fear, solidarity, love, relationship and self doubt challenged by what we call you can make a difference. Self-efficacy. And so the work then that narrative does is it can be a way to mobilize this. The last point on this is that this is what the core structure of narrative is about. All stories have a plot. They have a character. They have a moral. Well, the question is, how many times a day do unexpected things happen to us? Little things like no movie tickets, big things. You know, people lose jobs, marriages break up. We lose loved which almost by definition we can’t be prepared for. So having to deal with disruption is a fundamental dimension of human consciousness, of human awareness. And because we can identify emotionally with the protagonist of the story, we’re able to experience the emotional content of that challenge, including where the protagonist goes to find the courage and the hope so that, that becomes a part of our experience, which is the moral that we take away from a story. So this is why our cultures, our faith traditions all teach through stories. Most people heard their first stories from caregivers, from their parents or our grandparents. And you sort of say, well, why? Why? Most people will say, well, to keep them busy. You know, that’s true. But why else? Most people will say to instruct, well, then why not just give the kids a list, do this. Don’t do this. Done. It doesn’t work, does it? 

Salimah Samji It doesn’t work. 

Marshall Ganz It’s all in the head. It’s all in the head. But the story teaches the heart. It becomes an experience they take with them that they can then learn from. And so that’s really what the core of public narrative is then how to harness the power of story to, first of all, communicating to others why you’ve been called to what you’ve been called to. Not your resume, not your titles, but what life experiences have equipped you for the leadership role that you’re calling on others to join you in? Often very early child experiences when we form our values. It’s what are you really about? And then what kinds of experiences do we share that can create a connection with each other around these shared values? That’s a story of us. And then is the present moment a story moment that is a story moment is when there is a challenge and there sources of hope, and there’s choices to be made. And that’s what the story of now is. And so it’s anchoring these three together. And it’s pretty fundamental. And again, who has not told the story. We all have relationships we all tell stories. So all of these practices. So a lot of them are things we understand implicitly. And what we’re doing pedagogically is making the implicit explicit so that we can exercise agency. Something that’s been an influence on us becomes a resource for us. And in that way our agency is strengthened. But then the, other question is, well, how do we do something about it? Well, that’s the domain of strategy or strategizing. And that’s our third practice. Strategy is, for me, most easily defined as how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want? How do we turn resources that we have into the power we need to get what we want? And the thing about it is, just like story and relationships, we strategize too all the time. I mean, I don’t know if anybody has ever overslept and had to, you know, find a different way to get to work or to school. But you were strategizing when you’re doing that, you had an outcome you were pursuing, a disruption occurred. You then had to figure out how do I adapt and go around to still accomplish my goal. That’s all strategy. That’s what it is. And so we think of it as much more of a verb than a noun. Something you do and it’s grounded. It’s contextualized. I love the origin of the word. It comes from the Greek. Strato was the word for field, and the armies were called strata. And the general was called the strategos and he would go sit up on top of the hill and overlook the battlefield and come up with a hypothesis of how to win the battle and how to deploy his troops, and so forth. The troops down in the valley would call tactica, which is where we get strategy and tactics, strategy being the theory of change and tactics being the activities through which that theory is enacted. And of course, it’s always a hypothesis. It’s always a verb, just always learning. The problem so often comes is that we let fog settle between the mountain top and the valley, and then the person on the mountaintop thinks they got the whole truth because they can see the big picture. People in the valley think they got the whole truth because they have intimate knowledge of the context. The reality is it takes both. It takes both. And we see this play out in organizations that have very poor communication and connection between local groups, regional groups, national groups, and they get into thinking they each have the whole truth when the whole truth is a combination of what they actually do have. And that’s one of the major challenges, I think, in strategy and strategizing. That is how David meets Goliath is by compensating for resources he did not have as a warrior, and all that with greater resourcefulness for what he did have as a shepherd, a sling and a stone. And of course, that’s what created the surprise for Goliath. And so a lot of this is resourcefulness compensating for a lack of resources. Now, the work of strategy then, is to first of all, determine what purpose we’re trying to pursue. By purpose, I mean like equity in the law. But then taking that purpose and looking at the questions of, okay, who are we working with, just like we said. And then the question of, in this context, what’s our theory of how we can actually do something about that? What’s a first step that we can take. And that’s getting to a strategic objective like for a campaign. So doing the work of deciding on a strategic objective requires, first of all, recognizing that it requires analysis, looking at power and how it’s organized and where the points of intersection are and where they aren’t, and arriving then at a specific strategic objective that you can focus on. And that in turn requires coming up with the tactics and the timing through which you can do that. Now, this is what people think of as a campaign. And Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist, described time as having two different phases. One is time is a cycle, which is the pattern of it’s routine. It’s predictable every year, the budget review. But he also says that the rhythm of change is time as an arrow. In other words, it is specific. It has a start. It has an end. It’s episodic, it’s intense. And in the process, you’re changing the reality that you’re moving to. That’s what we do in a campaign. It’s specific. It has a certain focus. It has a start, it has an end. And each move we make is to create more capacity for the next move. So it’s not like we wait around till we have a grant to start the campaign. I mean, if did a political campaign that way, we’d never have them. You start with what you got, and from that you build the capacity. That’s how we can really create change, because the status quo never is going to make it easy to change the status quo. So we’re always having to start with less than what we will ultimately need. So how do we create these thresholds? Oh now we have enough people. So now we can form teams. Now we have enough teams. So now we can contact voters. Now we have enough. So it’s not just more it’s different. And well design campaigns then are the way in which we enact strategy in a campaign. So those are just some of the elements of strategy. The thing is it’s imaginative. It’s much more imaginative than it is analytic. It’s creative because you’re imagining what could be, not what will be. And that’s where imagination really matters, and that’s where hope really matters. So we have relationships. We have the why in story. We have the how in strategy. What’s missing is what action. How do we turn this theory into action? You know, because it’s one thing to have a nice theory, but then if it doesn’t turn into votes, if it doesn’t turn into facts on the ground, then it’s not there. So that’s the fourth is how to mobilize and deploy resources in such a way that we change the world. If you have a rally, it may be that you’re mobilizing people’s resources of time and perhaps courage and turning it into a rally. Often it’s translating individual resources into collective power. That’s often what’s involved. So you contribute, you contribute, you contribute. But then we deploy it in such a way that we are all together doing something powerful. And it’s critical whether we base that approach on what resources or where they come from. You know, you can think of a two by two inside and outside and people and money. If you think about inside people, that’s going to be the most consistent with your whole program. If you think of outside money, that’s going to be the least consistent. Because remember, the whole point is to build the power of your constituency. See it’s not about efficiency. It’s about effectiveness, which includes building a powerful constituency. So rooting your campaign in people resources, like time, like commitment, like imagination has a very different outcome than rooting your campaign in financial resources that come from somewhere else. And this is one of the problems we have today with the role of philanthropy undermining democratic organization and creating dependency on outside money because that does not build internal strength. So when we teach action, it’s about how we turn these resources into outcomes that we want. We use what we call the four C’s. It’s making a connection, creating a context, getting the commitment and then catapulting the commitment. That is, one person adds up to more. We also pay a whole lot of attention to the theory of motivational task design that the goal is to create tasks, volunteer tasks, that generate motivation, that don’t sap it. Too often you see like people on a phone bank or something like that, and they’re exhausted. You say, oh, just keep going. If you don’t you’re just not committed enough. Well, what’s really happened is we haven’t constructed in such a way that generates motivation, intrinsic motivation as opposed to depending on extrinsic. And there are five basic elements in this, which is what’s called task significance. Making clear why it matters to the person, what difference it will make, a task identity that a person is responsible for a whole chunk or a whole piece of work. Task variety that isn’t just one thing over and over and over again. Autonomy in that one is responsible for a chunk of the work. And finally is feedback that we’re able to see what we’re doing as we do it. You know, it’s the difference between somebody walking into a phone bank, getting tossed a list and saying, go sit over there and make calls and read the script, as opposed to really appreciate you showing up because you know why you care so much about electing so-and-so. And maybe we can reflect on that. Okay, so tonight we have to identify and get commitments from 500 voters, and they have to come from this part of town, and we need those 500, because with all the others, we can add it up to the 5000 that we need, which will get us over the hump of what we need for 51%. So your job, what we’re asking you to do is to take this neighborhood. And here are some lists. And we want you to call and identify and get at least 50 commitments. That’s your mission. Okay. Now you’ll learn as you do it, what to tell people. But let’s practice a little bit. Okay. So now go to work. And we’ll be checking in to see how it’s going. Well now we can do all that digitally. And you can see the numbers change like a video game. And that way I’m conscious of it’s working. It’s not working. I’m able to see what I’m doing. And then at the end, we are able to then reflect on what was done and not only appreciate the work, but learn from it. Because we can see what’s working, what’s not working, which is absolutely critical. You know, when I was introduced to organizing, I was told if you can’t count it, it didn’t happen, in other words. 

Salimah Samji Again, the efficiency argument. 

Marshall Ganz Well, but the counting is designing metrics that actually measure what we’re trying to measure, you know, otherwise we run into this problem. If you know the story of the drunk who lost his car keys, and somebody is walking along and, you know, it’s at night and the street light, sees the guy looking around the streetlight for his keys, and he says, what’s wrong? So I lost my car keys. Oh, well, where do you think you lost them? Well, where’s your car? It’s over there. Well, how come you’re not looking over there? Well, this is where the light is. So too often we count things that can be counted and say that that’s what. But that’s wrong. And so figuring out how to measure what we’re really trying to do, that’s essential for not just accountability but for learning. And so putting these pieces together, you get a very highly motivated, engaged people owning responsibility. And then you can easily identify who the people are that shine, because then you can turn it into a leadership development opportunity where that great phoner gets asked to be the phone trainer and then the coordinator and then the head of the whole phone bank. And so you’re creating a leadership ladder out of what may seem to be the most menial of tasks. So that’s sort of the action piece. And the final piece is about structure. Now that word often sets people off running in the opposite direction because we’ve had so much experience with oppressive structure. That we resist it. I’d say, oh, no, I don’t want structure. Without structure, just like relationship, without structure, there’s no future because structures are only the commitments we make to each other about how we’re going to work together. And are we going to meet at that time, or are we going to do that thing, or I’m going to be responsible for this or that? That’s how we give ourselves a future, and that’s what the purpose of structure is. And so the challenges then are creating structures that facilitate leadership development, organizing and action as opposed to those that inhibit leadership or organizing and action. And that’s kind of the whole piece. So it’s relationships you start with. Then you get to why, which is story. Then you get to how which is strategy. Then you get to action which is action, and then you get to the structure, the way you connect all these pieces so that they’re working more or less harmonically together to accomplish a shared purpose and effective collective action. Easier said than done. 

Salimah Samji Definitely easier said than done. So these five practices help engage the hearts, imagination, commitment, roleplaying, shared purpose, hope, and interdependent teams which really make for effective organizing. And this podcast series in the next set of podcasts will dive into each of these five practices. But to end this podcast, Marshall, when we started talking about this podcast series, you had mentioned how you end your classes, and I thought it would be really incredible for you to do that for this podcast series. 

Marshall Ganz Thank you. It is a real privilege and a real blessing to have the opportunity to work with people in this way, to contribute to people’s efforts to create a world into which they want their children to live. We just did this training with people in the Iranian diaspora. That was so moving because their proximity to the pain and their necessity for hope is so real. This is a song that I share. You know, I’m not going to sing because in the fourth grade I was told, please just mouth the words. And that was kind of a mean teacher. But this song was recorded by Judy Collins in the 60s, and it uses the word freedom because the civil rights movement never called itself the Civil Rights Movement. It called itself the freedom movement because freedom is a much bigger word than legal rights. It’s about power, about solidarity, about collaboration, and so much more. So the song goes like this. Freedom doesn’t come like a bird on the wing. Doesn’t fall down like the summer rain. Freedom. Freedom is a hard won thing. You have to work for it. Have to fight for it. Day and night for it. And every generation has to win it again. Pass it on to your children, brother. Pass it on to your children, sister. They have to work for it. They have to fight for it day and night for it. And every generation has to win it again. Pass it on to your children. Pass it on. And I thank people for the opportunity to pass it on. 

Salimah Samji That is very powerful. Well, thank you so much, Marshall. This has been a privilege an honor to be able to do this podcast series with you. 

Marshall Ganz Thank you. It’s been a real privilege and a blessing. Thank you.