Disruptive politics. How does it work?

The world of politics is a world of competition. So is the world of business. They both evolve, but not in the same way, not at the same pace and not with the same purposes. The business world is one of construction and development, of failures and successes, of innovation and discovery. The world of politics is ... you all know how it is.

There is a question that keeps haunting me: Can politics learn something from business? Why would it? Well ... because many of us believe that the politics should be something much better than it is today. And this is one way of achieving that.

Can politics learn something from business?

But can politics change for the better? I believe that the answer is yes. You may wonder why would I say that, when we are starting to be afraid, these days, to even watch the political news on television, as politics seems to be changing mostly for the worse? Because there was something that happened ten years ago (and keeps happening since then, here and there) that can make us hope that the world of politics can become a better place.

What is disruptive politics?

First of all, to avoid possible confusions ... you don't see at the top of this article a picture of Donald Trump (or of any other politician like him). So, disruptive politics has nothing to do with what such political mavericks are doing in today's politics. Nor is it what a Google search brings you on top of the results (contentious politics), which is defined there as "disruptive techniques that disturb the normal activities of society".

Furthermore, you might be more familiar with the term grassroots politics, but the disruptive politics is more than that ...

So, what is it, then? In their book Groundbreakers: How Obama's 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America, Elizabeth McKenzie and Hahrie Han didn't give it a name, but described it like this:

By integrating principles of community organizing in an electoral setting, OFA [Obama for America] practiced a distinct model of grassroots politics.

Without expecting it to be adopted by any public audience, whether we call it grassroots politics or disruptive politics, this definition version suits the purpose of this article:

Disruptive politics is business Strategy principles' application to political movements, enabled by grassroots communities organizing, for involving the politically-disengaged people in the political decisions of their country.

You might wonder "Would you expect me to believe that politicians should be some sort of business strategists?" Well ... some of them already are!

When talking about business Strategy, the reference is made to two Strategy models: Disruptive Innovation and Blue Ocean Strategy and to the fundamental Strategy principles they are embedding. Even if the way some political movements have applied the concept of disruptive politics didn't result from learning about these two Strategy models and their core principles, they did it like if they would have had.

When did it start?

Before going into details and because I've said that something happened ten years ago, let me bring you into the mood for what comes next. Please watch this video clip (2:34), from the end of Barack Obama's campaign, in the autumn of 2008.

What could have made so much difference for Obama, who worked for several years as a Chicago community organizer, so he succeeded to become United States' first African American President in 2008? Could it be that he had viewed politics through different eyes than the leaders of the American political establishment?

As a consequence, what did he do differently during his 2007-2008 presidential campaign that allowed him to take the world of US politics by storm and become the 44th President of the United States, against all odds?

What did Obama do differently during his 2007-2008 campaign that made him the President of the United States?

I'm sure that you have heard many opinions about this question and read articles and books about it, but let me present you with a different perspective about what happened then. It's about the concept of disruptive politics.

And, whatever Obama did in 2008, it happened again four years later, during his 2012 re-election campaign. Not with the same magnitude, as he gained only 5 million popular votes more that Mitt Romney (2012), compared to the 9.5 million popular votes more than John McCain (2008), but it did happen, once again.

Seven years later ...

The revolutionary view on the way politics should address people's needs, which has been employed by Barack Obama in 2008, has found its way into the political solutions of a candidate for the office of Canadian Prime-minister. Elected leader of the Canadian Liberal Party in 2013, Justin Trudeau inherited a party in virtual dissolution and in debt, running far behind the Conservatives and New Democrats. In August 2015, when the Canadian federal elections campaign has started, nobody gave Trudeau any chance of winning.

Three months later, he became Prime-minister! What happened? Trudeau's opponents focused on their core voter segments, those who would vote for them no matter what, while Trudeau focused on the Canadians who did not bother to vote because they did not recognize themselves in any of the major parties, being turned off by the negativity and cynicism that had gradually became the political standard in Canada.

Justin Trudeau focused on citizens who didn't bother to vote anymore, meeting with many of them face-to-face, and stirring their emotion and new hopes in a Government driven by competence.

Nine years later ...

The same principles of political movement and political campaign management, which have been applied for the first time, at national scale, by Barack Obama in 2008, have been employed several times since then, but probably the most remarkable recent success in doing so belongs to Emmanuel Macron and his party La République En Marche! during the 2016-2017 campaigns for both presidential and parliamentary elections.

Although Macron was part of Fran?ois Hollande's staff and Minister of Economy and Finance, for several years, he was not a top political figure of the French Socialist Party. On the contrary, his reform proposals were met with significant opposition by party's leaders.

So, what did he do? He resigned from the party and from the Government in 2015 and, soon after, he has founded the liberal, progressive movement, La République En Marche!

But what is the connection with Obama? The way Macron has organised his party, more like a grassroots volunteer-driven movement, the principles and methods for campaigning across France, for nearly a year before the official electoral campaign, have borrowed a lot from the way Obama did it in 2008. Emmanuel Macron's political movement organizing style, principles and campaigning methods represent an application of the disruptive politics concept.

Macron has borrowed a lot from the way Obama did it in 2008, becoming President of France and gaining 66.1% of votes for the Parliament, in less than 14 months after he decided to participate in the 2017 elections.

You might wonder: "But what happened with Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump, in the 2016 elections?" Wasn't the same model of disruptive/grassroots politics used in Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2015-2016? Yes, it was. And, again, with good results. But the results that are relevant here, for the disruptive politics concept, are not the electoral college votes (where Clinton lost), but the popular votes.

In an electoral system where the results are based on the popular votes of the two final candidates (typically, in a second round, like in France), Clinton would have won by 51.11%, as she gained 2.9 million more popular votes than Trump. For comparison, the results for Obama, in such an electoral system, would have been 53.67% against John McCain, in 2008, and 51.96% against Mitt Romney, in 2012.

But there is one more important observation about what happened in 2016. Michael Slaby, Clinton campaign's chief technology officer, made this remark, at that time: "We lost this election eight years ago". What did he mean? The article Obama's Lost Army, published in The New Republic, will clarify for you why a grassroots movement has to be designed as a continuous one, rather than an electoral campaign occurrence. Emmanuel Macron seems to have learned this lesson (see the 2018 En Marche pour l'Europe example) ...

What principles are we talking about?

To answer this question, we'll need to briefly look into the two Strategy models that I have mentioned above: Disruptive Innovation and Blue Ocean Strategy, because that's where these principles are best explained, even if they come from the business Strategy world.

Disruptive Innovation

Launched in 1997 by Prof. Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School, and described in his book The Innovator's Dilemma, the concept of Disruptive Innovation is a way to predict how your competitors will react to what you do.

More specifically, it allows you to initially address and secure the least profitable segments of your competitors' market, by employing innovative or revolutionary ways to respond to customers' needs (including the marginal customers), with a high probability that your competitors will flee those market segments, rather than fight you.

Then, little by little, by improving your solutions, you move upmarket and secure critical mass in more and more profitable market segments, until your competitors will control only a small, high-profit segment of the market, which will no longer allow them to survive for long, due to the small and continuously-shrinking size of their addressable market.

The Disruptive Innovation model allows the acquisition of lower-value customers, without incumbents' significant opposition, as a foundation for the continued market advancement and for targeting more and more valuable customers.

Blue Ocean Strategy

Launched in 2005 by Professors Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim, INSEAD, and described in their book Blue Ocean Strategy, the model describes the method by which competitors can become irrelevant.

More specifically, it allows you to focus on creating a value proposition that is mostly based on different competitive criteria than those used by the main competitors, making such proposition relevant for marginal customers and non-consumers and, at the same time, allowing you to offer them a higher value at costs significantly lower than your competitors' costs.

The Blue Ocean Strategy model allows customers who are less or not at all interested in what has been available on the market until now to discover a radically new proposition and new kinds of presenting it, which address their needs in ways that many of them never thought of before.

The Blue Ocean Strategy model allows the re-definition of customer value, involving lower cost and higher revenues, targeting marginal customers and non-consumers, with better results than the incumbents.

Jobs-to-Be-Done

Both these business Strategy models converge on several core concepts. One of them, the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD), was coined, by Clayton Christensen and best described in his book Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice.

What does it say? No matter how tempted you might be to segment your target market based on demographic, behavioral or socio-economic criteria, you shouldn't do that! Why? Because the correct unit of analysis is not the individual, but the job that he/she is trying to accomplish in a certain time and space context. As a consequence of this, the solution that you are proposing should be the best candidate solution to be employed by the customer for helping him/her accomplish that job. Therefore, you should segment your target market based on the types of Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD), not on any of the traditional segmentation principles used by marketeers, for so many decades.

Want an example? Read this statement from the video above, but read it through the lenses of JTBD: "America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done, not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for, not with an economy to fix, and cities to rebuild, and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect, and so many lives to mend."

Was all this about blue collars or white collars, about Whites, Blacks or Hispanics, about young or old, about people living in cities or in rural areas, about college-educated or less educated? No. It was all about the Jobs-to-Be-Done, about the specific challenges that stood between all kind of Americans and their typical well-being aspirations.

The Jobs-to-Be-Done concept allows the identification of the best solution addressing customers' needs, by targeting categories of jobs, rather than categories of customers.

Cause-and-Effect

A cornerstone of the Strategic Planning discipline, the causality, or Cause-and-Effect relationships, represents the opposite of the laundry-lists of objectives and actions that we often see in so many future-related plans, especially in the public/governmental sector.

The principle of causality has shown, in theory and in practice that, in all such cases, achievements are strongly inter-correlated, in their parallel sequentiality, and cannot be effectively managed in a silo manner. Improvements in the economy are interdependent with very specific achievements, obtained at certain moments, in the transport or the energy infrastructure, in education, in the fiscal incentives system and in international trade. Social security is interdependent with healthcare, with law enforcement, with life-long learning and with the immigration. Examples are numerous.

Example: In 2016, the Conservatives and New Democrats of the Canadian political scene were strongly focused on reducing the public deficit, in a beauty-contest of who promises more cuts and with more significant outcomes. Instead, Justin Trudeau decided to go opposite. He presented the Canadians with a plan to increase, rather than reduce the public deficit, but only for three years and only for the purpose of increasing the investments in the public infrastructure. Why? Because he has shown, based on economic arguments, that such decision, apart from switching the country from austerity to growth, will increase the rate of employment and the federal budget revenues, leading, especially in the fourth year, to a public deficit reduction, well below the initial level.

The Cause-and-Effect principle allows us to determine the correct logical sequence of change actions intended, towards the achievement of the high-level outcomes.

Important note: The principle of go opposite, mentioned above, is the starting-point approach for most game-changing practical applications of both Disruptive Innovation and Blue Ocean Strategy. More details, further below.

Co-creation

Another fundamental principle of modern business Strategy, employed systematically by the Blue Ocean Strategy model, is involving the main stakeholders, especially the customers (but not only) in the process of re-defining the value that is relevant for them.

Customers used to be presented by vendors with alternative value propositions, so their only 'involvement' was to choose one or the another. But, over time, repeated failures of creating meaningful value propositions for the targeted customers and their Jobs-to-Be-Done, have determined many vendors to involve the customers in the process of designing the value proposition. And not only the customers, but the suppliers, the partners and the employees in the whole organization, as well. Does this work, or it's just marketing lingo? Repeated again and again (and applied correctly), this principle has shown, for instance, to work miracles in getting customers interested in products they've never considered before!

The Co-creation principle, applied correctly, succeeds to involve customers in creating value propositions that didn't exist before and to gain their interest in something they've never considered until then.

How does disruptive politics work?

Of course, the analysis of what happened in the three examples presented above (and in several others), in relation to the business Strategy models described, is much deeper than what has been summarized here. But here comes the question: How does disruptive politics work? Let's dig a little deeper into its principles, which have been replicated from business, into politics.

The grassroots volunteer network

In 2008, Barack Obama was saying about his experience as a community organizer: "It was the best education I ever had, because it taught me that ordinary people can do great things, when working together". However, organizing volunteer communities is not quite an intuitive capability, therefore the volunteer grassroots networks developed by Obama, Trudeau and Macron have used the train-the-trainer method extensively, along their entire campaigns.

Were the volunteers party members? Not at all! They were just ordinary people, empowered by the goal of changing the way politics works in their countries. They were enabled by a grassroots-organizing model that was focused on building local communities, and on extending and multiplying them, at an accelerated rate. Once the elections were over, many of those people went back to their daily lives, after having participated together in the common effort that succeeded to change their countries.

By doing so, the Obama campaign was able to rally in 2008 an 'army' of 2.2 million active volunteer activists (Obamaphiles) across the United States, who created around 35,000 communities and theme-related groups, all over the country. Each of those communities organized hundreds of off-line events, house parties and debate meetings. The online application that was the nervous system of this network, MyBarackObama.com, had more than 1.5 million accounts opened and most of them were active along the campaign.

Justin Trudeau had signed-up around 150,000 volunteer supporters, who helped his campaign reach the target of Trudeau meeting one thousand people per day, spanned over eight or nine events held daily, during the three-months electoral campaign in 2015.

During 2016-2017, Emmanuel Macron and La République En Marche! have built a nation-wide network with nearly 400,000 volunteers (Marcheurs), who have knocked at hundreds of thousands of doors and have spoken face-to-face with people all over the country. They call their network Le Mouvement.

The grassroots volunteer networks were quintessential for the success of Obama, Trudeau or Macron. They were the low-cost, deep-penetration competitive advantage that allowed them to involve many politically-disengaged citizens.

"Is this grassroots community an NGO?"

This is one of the confusions that may plague the organizing of grassroots volunteer networks and their effectiveness. No, the volunteer network communities are not at all NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), nor are they part of such type of organization.

Why? Although NGOs are civic initiatives to be highly commended, they have different scopes, methods of work and organizing principles. They are focused on projects (safeguarding a clean environment, helping the elderly in retirement homes, helping people in poverty, helping sick children, and so on). NGOs are are therefore organized around projects that they develop, promote and finance through donations.

The grassroots volunteer communities have a different scope: to change the way ordinary people are involved in politics, to mobilize them through many events and face-to-face interactions, organized by the communities that do what needs to be done to get them to vote, when the day of the elections comes.

This quote is from the Action Guide that you could find on MyBarackObama.com, in 2008, about the role of the grassroots volunteer network:

"The most important thing that you can do [as a local community] on behalf of this campaign is bring in new supporters. It’s these people that you reach out to who will come out on Election Day and cast their vote to change America."

What is the relevance here of any of the two Strategy models mentioned? Remember that the scope of the disruptive politics concept is to involve the politically-disengaged citizens in driving the political decisions in their countries. But they might have as little interest in engaging into an NGO-style activity, as in the existing politics!

The Enabling Core Team

Political parties have always relayed significantly on party members and on their central and local hierarchical members structures, which have as primary role to command, control and coordinate the necessary actions during electoral campaigns.

When the disruptive politics concept is at work, the grassroots volunteer network takes the central role, not party's hierarchy. The fundamental role that the political movement members have, both at the HQ, as well as in the local offices, where they exist, is to act as a Core Team and become enablers of the grassroots volunteer network, To facilitate the creation of local communities and groups, to help them extend and multiply, to train volunteers and to provide the tools for carrying out their actions, in a synchronized manner, and to facilitate the exchange of good practices and information between communities.

The most important role that political movement members have is to act as a Core Team that enables the grassroots volunteer network of local communities.

The political movements that employ disruptive politics are flat organizations, where the vertical, hierarchical party structures are replaced by the horizontal, inter-connected network of volunteer communities, enabled by political movement's Core Team. This can become extremely relevant for new political movements, which start from virtually no local organizational infrastructure anywhere in a certain country.

What is the relevance here of any of the two Strategy models mentioned? Both models are emphasizing the flexibility of initiatives (in this case, at local communities level) and the adaptability to the needs and the expectations of the target audience (in this case, of politically-disengaged citizens).

Moreover, these attributes significantly reduce and break down the cost of network's overall activity, allowing it to (a) expand and multiply at an accelerated pace and (b) reach out through face-to-face interactions with non-voters or swing-voters, who are usually considered by political parties as too unprofitable (in terms of effort vs votes generated). This has proven to be a significant competitive advantage over incumbent political parties or over the traditional ways of political campaign management.

By enabling a large number of volunteer grassroots communities, the party structures used by Obama, Trudeau or Macron have succeeded to empower and give a front-role to hundreds of thousands or millions of active supporters.

Want an example of the go-opposite principle, mentioned above? Here you have it, just applied for structuring a political movement, the other way around that the incumbent or traditional political parties do it.

The Political Platform

The application of the Blue Ocean Strategy model's principles to the disruptive politics concept has produced political platforms and value propositions that uniquely address the fundamental reasons which have lead, more and more over time, to political disengagement of large masses of voters.

Rather than following the same path and aiming at the same targets as incumbent political parties, or traditional party strategies, the political movements that have employed the disruptive politics concept have succeeded to identify and address the competitive factors that have not been considered relevant until then.

For example, Fares Boulos, Associate Professor of Strategy Practice at INSEAD, has mapped the political platform of Justin Trudeau (LPC) and highlighted the competitive factors in his value proposition for the Canadians, in the 2015 federal elections campaign.

This is called the Strategy Canvas and is using the Four Actions framework (Eliminate, Reduce, Raise, Create). Which have been the competitive factors that Trudeau's platform was focused upon?

• Eliminate: Negative ads
• Reduce: Boutique policies (silo solutions for silo problems), Financial resources (mainly, investment in TV and outdoor media ads)
• Raise & Create: Best qualified to be PM, Perceived competence in dealing with issues, Social media connections, Relationships with media, Emotional connection with voters, and National vision

For more details, read the INSEAD case study: Justin Trudeau wins 2015 Canada Elections: Creating a Blue Ocean in Politics.

But Justin Trudeau did one more thing, which is worth mentioning. He has decided to create a new economic value proposition, challenging the logic of Governmental economic priorities in which the Canadian Conservatives and New Democrats were entrenched for many years, related mainly to the reduction of the public deficit. Trudeau proposed a deal to the Canadians, based on a cause-and-effect logic: The deficit will be maintained at the same level for three years, to invest in the development of country's infrastructure, then the effects of these investments will help reduce the public deficit and contribute to further investments. Brilliant!

The political competitive factors re-design and the cause-and-effect logic are essential for creating a political platform that can determine more politically-disengaged citizens to vote.

Moving Early in platform Co-creation

In many cases, with the exception of the 18 month-long presidential campaigns in the United States, most political parties don't make their electoral platforms public with more than 1-2 months before the start of the official electoral campaigns. But we are talking mainly about incumbent, established political parties, which address those voters who have a high propensity of voting them, as they do at each electoral cycle. For such political parties, this exercise becomes a rather formal periodic ritual. So they have no reasons to start this process early.

For movements like Macron's La République En Marche! as well as for any new political movements that are built around the disruptive politics concept, it makes a lot of sense to move early and transform the initial version of their political platforms into reasons for launching campaigns of face-to-face interaction between their grassroots volunteer networks and the target voters, at local level, long before the official electoral campaign is planned to start. In business Strategy, it's called an early-mover advantage.

Then, it's the process of electoral platform co-creation with the target voters, who can see that their opinions are listened to, as they are engaged for months (sometimes for a year) in discussions about the political platform of a new political movement. One that might offer them the reasons to become more interested in politics and to step out of their political disengagement.

Emmanuel Macron announced his political platform in October 2016, following several month of face-to-face interactions with people in 50 cities across France, in a campaign, Le Grand Marche, carried out by around 5,000 volunteers, who knocked at 300,000 doors and filled-in 25,000 questionnaires. What do you think that the Marcheurs did after that, for six months, from October 2016 and until the presidential elections in April 2017? They knocked on even more doors and had even more face-to-face interactions with selected voters, but mobilizing 120,000 volunteers, who were part of the grassroots network of La République En Marche!, organized in 3,000 local communities that carried out, on average, 400 events each week. The main subject of those face-to-face interactions and local events? You've guessed it! The political platform of Macron's political movement. Just two months later, by the time of the parliamentary elections, the Marcheurs number reached nearly 400,000.

The early co-creation of the value proposition together with the target voters is essential for identifying the topics that interest them and for designing the solutions that best fit their needs and expectations.

Want another example of the go-opposite principle, mentioned above? Here you have it, just applied for early political value proposition co-creation, with the help of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, the other way around that the incumbent or traditional political parties do it, based on some top-experts gathered around the table.

The Local Representation Co-creation

Going hand in hand with the Enabling Core-team and with the principle of Co-creation is the process of grassroots proposing, electing and supporting the people that represent the political movement at local level. This is most relevant for new political movements and for local and parliamentary elections (for Euro-parliamentary elections, in Europe).

While incumbent parties or traditional politics organizations use to 'allocate' top-down the prominent party members to run as candidates in local elections or for elections based on constituencies, the political movements that are adopting the disruptive politics principles are engaging the grassroots volunteer communities in Primaries-like elections, even where the electoral laws don't mandate such a process.

The grassroots communities have a front and active bottom-up role (enabled by the Core Team) to propose, validate and elect local people with high morality and professional profiles who will represent their city or region in the future elections. Many of these people are not even formal political movement members!

This is a powerful co-creation process, that has multiple effects, both for the volunteers who are part of the grassroots communities and, most importantly, for involving the politically-disengaged citizens, who recognize in such transparent preelectoral process something that they've long expected to see, but not seen really working, in incumbent or traditional politics parties.

The co-creation of the local political representation, bringing to the forefront high morality and professional profile local citizens, is a powerful, transparent way to involve politically-disengaged citizens.

Want another example of the go-opposite principle, mentioned above? Here you have it, just applied for local representation co-creation, bottom-up, the other way around that the incumbent or traditional political parties do it (top-down).

The Face-to-Face Interaction

The probability to change voters' decision about getting to vote, as well as the probability to influence their voting decision, for those undecided, depends significantly on the channel used for interacting with them. Empiric research, experiments and the field experience gained in campaigns like those of Obama (2008), Hollande (2012), Trudeau (2015), Macron (2017) have indicated that the direct, human face-to-face interaction has the most significant effect, above other channels used during political campaigns (phone calls, e-mails, leaflets, social networks, and so on).

The above results have been crunched from the sources mentioned by three people, Guillaume Liegey, Arthur Muller and Vincent Pons, who have participated as volunteers in Obama's campaign in 2008 and then, as organizers, in Hollande's (2012) and Macron's (2016) campaigns. In 2015, they've published a book about their experience until that time: Porte à porte: Reconquérir la démocratie sur le terrain (Door to Door: Reconquering the democracy on the ground).

This is how Guillaume Liegey summarizes this experience (11:38):

For those skeptical about door-to-door campaigns, in the social culture context of various European countries, it might be worthwhile to mention that practice has shown that it works virtually everywhere. Liegey, Muller, Pons were not met with enthusiasm when they have proposed it for the first time in France, but they have succeeded to demonstrate that it works even there, as well as in other countries like Germany, Italy or Spain.

Furthermore, campaigns in European countries have proven that the same kind of human interactions can happen in public places and in 'captive audience' circumstances, like people sitting in parks, watching their children in public playgrounds, people waiting in train stations or even those waiting for their car to get out of the car-wash, to mention just a few.

But canvassing for interacting with people, either door-to-door or in public places, is not the only way of engaging the target voters. The local events are the bread-and-butter of the grassroots volunteer networks. These are special occasions to meet with people and turn them into supporters. Such events go from house parties, organizing meetings, fundraising events, public debates, watch parties during televised political debates or speeches, top movement leaders meetings, political program discussion events, petitions signatures gathering, and so on.

As for the locations of such events, they go from public bars, restaurants, meeting rooms, home patios of network members or rented conference rooms, for larger events. This is how the 'organize your event' first step page looked like in MyBarackObama.com:

The face-to-face interaction with citizens are the bread-and-butter of grassroots volunteer communities for achieving their most important role, long before the election day: gather more supporters and involve more politically-disengaged citizens.

The Online Communities Platform

Another cornerstone of the disruptive politics concept is the online communities platform. As Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe said in 2008 "Technology has always been used as a net to capture people in a campaign or cause, but never to organize them". They were lucky, as well, back then in 2008, as Chris Hughes, a 25-year guy who was also one of the founders of Facebook, has build MyBarackObama.com, or MyBO, for short.

What did it do? It allowed Obama supporters to create groups, plan events, raise funds, download tools, and connect with one another. MyBO also let them reach the most passionate supporters cheaply and effectively. By the time the campaign was over, volunteers had created more than 2 million profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fund-raising pages.

Online platforms like MyBO are the nervous system of the grassroots volunteers communities network.

Furthermore, the data-dimension, including information about voters census, past electoral results, demographics and so on, are core to such platforms. Back in 2008, this type of data mining utility was Neighbor-To-Neighbor, and it allowed grassroots volunteers to do some extraordinary things. For instance, as Chris Hughes describes it, ... "Instead of doing anonymous phone-banking and canvassing as campaigns have done in the past, you can log onto the system and in a matter of seconds have a list of undecided voters on your street, many of whom you probably know, so you can target them for the campaign."

The online platform used by the Barack Obama campaign in 2008 has evolved over time and became an online tool called PartyBuilder. Furthermore, its functional concepts have been at the foundation of some independent platforms, like NationBuilder or Fifty + One, which were developed in the US or in other countries (e.g. France).

These platforms allow volunteers to quickly create profiles, for themselves and for their new communities, connect with other community members or with neighboring communities, organize events, find and join other events, download materials and electoral constituency demographic data, upload canvassing results, and many more...

Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and the rest

Yes, these social media platforms are at play in a disruptive politics context, as well. And they are powerful tools for rapidly and massively propagating messages to millions of citizens and even for micro-targeting them, as well as for focusing the attention of this massive audience to deliberate targets.

But beware that they are used today by everybody, by incumbent parties, or traditional politics, who learned how to use them, as well as by disruptive politics movements. This is no longer the spring of 2011 (the Arab Spring times). This is the year 2018, two years after 2016, when the Brexit referendum allowed the 'Leave' camp to win, or when Donald Trump became the President of the United States. How? Partially by the harnessing of social media networks' power, by the winning campaigns and, most probably, with help from Russia's state-financed trolls army (still to be proven ... not an easy task).

Want to know more on this subject? Read this article, published in MIT Technology Review, after this article has been first edited (14th August, 2018): How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump.

Repeated calibrations have shown that, within social media, negative messages have an audience penetration of at least one order of magnitude larger than positive messages.

So, what can disruptive politics movements do, to tackle this, as their typical messages are usually positive, much more than negative? Turn the negative political messages against their sources, by feeding their high audience with fact-based responses that make it difficult or impossible for the political incumbents and mavericks who use social media intensively (through negative messages) to shift their Overton windows (see below).

The Overton Window

One of the most demanding challenge that disruptive politics movements are facing today, more and more, is the overuse by incumbent politicians and political mavericks of what is called 'The Overton Window', a theory launched by Josef Overton, in 1990 (as the 'Windows Theory'). As they loose ground to political movements that rely on grassroots networks, these political incumbents and mavericks have discovered a way to move their stances from defensive to offensive. Political messages that could have been considered pure lies, several years ago, are now taken to the forefront of the political communication and put on steroids.

The shifting of the Overton window, allows such once-outrageous political messages to go from (1) impossible, to (2) radical, to (3) acceptable, to (4) rational, to (5) popular and even to (6) legal.

Same as Donald Trump, who boosted the idea that the US economy is suffering, and the well-being of many Americans is decreasing, due to globally-integrated economy and the jobs stolen by the Mexicans, Nigel Farage and the Brexit 'Leave' campaign have shifted the Overton window with messages like those about the ￡350m per week that UK was contributing to the EU budget, that could have been used for better financing the NHS, an idea that they later recognized (after the referendum) that it was a mistake.

If you want to know more about how these politicians are shifting and boosting the Overton window, read the article 'How an Obscure Conservative Theory Became the Trump Era’s Go-to Nerd Phrase', published in the Politico Magazine, but also the book The Overton Window, authored by Glenn Beck in 2010, six years before the Brexit referendum or Donald Trump's move to the White House.

So, how can disruptive politics movements address this challenge? By doing three things: (a) push in the opposite direction (from 6 to 1) against the attempts to shift the Overton window to the advantage of incumbent and maverick politicians then (b) to detect the possible new opportunities of shifting their own Overton window, but with a positive outcome, identifying as early as possible the new ideas about citizens' expectations that they never thought to be possible, which may subject to such Overton window shift, and finally, (c) detecting where the dominating Overton windows are and consciously moving along with them, as they shift.

As Joseph Lehman, co-author with Josef Overton of this theory, once said:

A common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it.

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Instead of providing you any conclusions, I'll let you digest the information presented in this article about the concept of disruptive politics. I'm sure that if you have observations, or criticizing opinions or questions, you'll use the comments box below.

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