We are in a global climate and ecological crisis, very uneven in causes and effects, requiring an urgent transformation of our society. Unfortunately, the present conditions of deeply entrenched and unequal power structures and systems of exploitation present enormous barriers to change as they continue to drive all of our interconnected social, ecological, and political crises. For the US left, navigating these contradictions in order to upend the status quo requires discipline, humility, and creativity as we try to do things that have never been done before in conditions that have never existed. Namely, we need to think and operate strategically.
But what does it actually mean to be strategic? In short, it means being deliberate about what we do and why we do it. So not only having a strategy, but thinking about how we produce, carry out, and refine said strategy. The more difficult a challenge is, the more important it is to have both an overarching strategy—a theory of change—and nested strategies for campaigns we undertake to carry out said theory of change. I have a few core principles I try to use when approaching strategic planning and decision-making: process orientation, open-mindedness, prioritization, and systems thinking.
Process Orientation: In poker, results-oriented means placing too much emphasis on outcomes. For example, if we get all our chips in with a 90% chance to win but we end up losing, being results-oriented would mean thinking that we made the wrong decision because we lost even though it was just bad luck (unfortunately, most situations are not as cut-and-dry as this). Being results-oriented can be a huge mistake for long-term strategy because when making strategic decisions there is always information we do not know and outcomes usually have significant elements outside of our control. So if we fail, that does not necessarily mean that what we did was the wrong decision for the time given our knowledge and conditions, nor does it necessarily mean that it is a bad strategy for the future. Orienting our thinking primarily around process rather than results of course still means always fighting for the best outcomes, but doing so while trying to separate ourselves from them emotionally (to the extent that is possible), contextualizing results as one important piece of feedback to incorporate into our strategic planning going forward rather than the totality of our analysis.
Open-Mindedness: When results are not considered enough, we may keep doing the same things in the same way. An exercise I like to use is to ask myself, “What would I do or what would this ideally look like if I could start entirely from scratch?” We usually cannot start from scratch but thinking about this exercise can be clarifying, and sometimes things are more changeable than they seem—the inertia of the status quo is powerful and can be blinding. It is important to always remain open-minded because we do not know what we do not know and because conditions change; what made the most sense at one time may no longer be the best approach. And in terms of moving towards a truly just and sustainable society, we are building the plane as we fly it and we do not know what is going to work. The ability to sit with unresolved contradictions is vital as we engage with our actually existing conditions with all the messiness and complication that entails and build towards the world we want and need.
Prioritization: While open-mindedness and humility are critical, most resources in a given context are limited—time, energy, labor, materials—so strategic planning requires being thoughtful about how we allocate them in order to be most effective. With regards to organizing strategy, if we are operating in small sub-groups working on discrete and disconnected projects we may be significantly less effective than if we were working together on fewer collective projects (particularly given that our main potential advantage is people power). This can be difficult to enact because as leftists fighting for transformative sociopolitical change, we are likely coming from a place of caring deeply about people and the world and we understand how so much needs to be done on so many different fronts. So in strategic discussions around prioritization, we often end up talking past each other because it can feel like people we disagree with are saying we should not or do not care about a given cause, or we conflate "this could have a positive effect if someone did it" with "this is the best use of our group's time and energy." The answer is never totally clear, but how we approach the problem is important.
Systems Thinking: It is impossible to understand how the world works, and therefore how to transform it, without thinking in terms of systems—how interdependent entities and their conditions interact to produce outcomes. This is a critical tool both with regards to our theory of change for society and the structures we set up for our organizations to effect this change. Otherwise it is easy to end up only treating symptoms, or outputs of the system, rather than underlying causes. Thus, the potential outcome of any campaign strategy should be aligned with the goals we set out and with our overarching strategy. This sounds obvious, but if we are not deliberate about it, it can be easy to find ourselves doing something that may feel right in the short term but is not moving us towards the outcomes we seek or intervening in the systems we want to change.