How Can We Measure Organising?

This is an extract from the article “How Can We Measure Organising” by Ned Howey. For the full article and further details on the equation, check out the full blog post here: https://www.tectonica.co/equation

To better understand organising and the elements that comprise it, we developed a metaphorical equation - symbolic rather than mathematically rigorous. We did it in response to questions about how to measure organising and hope it serves to help justify investment in organising, as well as help innovate our methods of #DigitalOrganising. Our equation shows the elements that make organising powerful and the relationship between these elements to build long term power. 

Explaining our Organising Equation 

Why do we need an equation to measure organising?

• The leadership of campaigns needs to measure the key components of organising to help them make good decisions, invest resources correctly, and make their work effective. 
• To measure organising, we need to understand how power works within organising. 
• Organising itself is far more complicated to measure than other methods of political change. This is because of the intangible nature of the elements that comprise it (such as trust) and how power works within organising, as it is built exponentially through coordinated action, creating a feedback loop.

Campaign Strategy

The design of a campaign is an essential ingredient in making change. It is a multiplying factor in the equation of organising power. and must deploy their theory of change to create political change as, without this, it is powerless. The impact of a campaign is dependent not only on how the power of human resources is generated but how it is strategically applied. 

Some campaigns can win by mobilising, continually applying pressure, raising awareness, and leveraging the power that already exists from those who support it. But to address problems of a power imbalance, organising is needed to build alternative power and creatively poke holes in existing power structures. 

In organising, the creativity and design of a campaign’s emergent strategy are inseparable from coordinated action because leadership is distributed, and the strategy emerges from many places. Collective decision making and collective wisdom are essential for true coordination to happen. 

Scale and Magnitude

Achieving scale and magnitude is key to building power - but often over-valued in the planning and measuring organising success, likely because it is easy to measure. Certainly, list size, volunteer hours and message reach are more simple to report on than the level of leadership or allegiance of activists. 

The most important factor of scale and magnitude is its relationship to the entire formula for power. This is the base with which coordination can exponentially multiply. But equally important is the feedback loop in the equation, where the overall collective power output also increases scale and magnitude. The clarity provided to us by this lovely two-dimensional diagram misses a bit of the fourth dimension - that this is a dynamic process throughout time. 

Coordinated Action

This is perhaps the most important element of our equation - it takes the summation of strategy and scale and multiplies its impact exponentially. Power beyond the summation of individual actions comes from coordination between activists, supporters, members, strikers, etc. 

Coordination requires collectivity, prioritising the needs of the group over the individual. 

In some ways, taking part in collective action almost certainly implies some degree of personal sacrifice through efforts in the short term, with the aim and hope of winning something bigger. 

Coordinated Action: Variables

• Allegiance

Allegiance is determined by several key components, such as trust, the state of the relationship between supporters, the sense of belonging, and identity. It is probably the largest and most important factor determining if an individual will coordinate with other activists for collective action. While this may often appear as allegiance to an organisation or entity, in reality, the allegiance itself is to the group. This difference is important - because it is other people and the relationships between them ultimately where the source of allegiance can be found. 

• Objective Alignment

Willingness to participate in coordinated action is also deeply impacted by the group's overall alignment with the campaign's objectives or movement. While you can mobilise around objectives set by a centralised decision-making body, such as leadership or organisation staff, you can never truly achieve the power unleashed by coordinated action this way. For that, you need a collective objective agreement. 

• Hope

Just promising repeatedly that you will win is not enough. Smaller symbolic wins along the way are just as important in building hope. An activist must believe their involvement will come to something to choose the community outcome over the personal. A leader’s experience in winning elsewhere or seeing similar fights won elsewhere can help fuel hope too.  

• Narrative Strength

Being able to see the value in the world's movements through story plays deeply into the decisions we make. Beyond just selling the importance of a cause to engage supporters and develop activists, narrative in a campaign is essential because it frames how collective agents will see their relationship and role in the ‘story’ of the movement. 

When activists see themselves as playing an essential role in how the story is unfolding, they commit to collective work. This requires essential components such as agency, unresolved conflict, the forces of good and purpose, and plot in action that follow a conclusion. 

• Leadership and Symbolism

Leaders can play a role beyond guiding campaign design and strategy. Leaders personify collective and community values and serve a core symbolic purpose for building a coordinated action. If the symbolic personification of values can be deeply represented within an individual, then the case for trusting the movement’s centre is already made. 

So what does power look like?

Any measuring of organising - and the development of best practices around it - must ultimately be measured against whether the change sought as identified by the community was achieved or not. We often see the utility of power from organising the present in the longevity and sustainability of movement in the face of adversity. There will unquestionably be moments of loss, backlash, spinning in place, and setbacks throughout. The ability of the movement to overcome these is actually one of the essential components of organising. Additionally, organising power itself is fundamentally transformative to both individuals and communities alike.

We hope that this preliminary framework serves to both acknowledge the complexity of organising and encourage attempts to measure its elements regardless of what messy business it might be. It is the only thing that will allow us to understand what can be done to impact change, face the goliath tasks of rebalancing injustices, and inspire innovation in campaigning.