The Creative Activist

No one in the United States can say they are totally ignorant of the issues surrounding last week's death of Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. This post is not about the incident, which has been covered in great depth by others. This post is about setting goals to pursue in the wake of Floyd's high-profile death.  What do protestors want, exactly? This is probably unknowable right now. Sure, they call for justice or for an end to police brutality, maybe in those exact words. Each one of those goals has a huge problem. Let's see why. What does justice look like exactly? Will you know when justice has been served? Theoretically, some felony convictions for the involved officers would work. Right? Maybe.  The goal of ending police brutality is far more problematic. How can we ever achieve a state of affairs where no cop ever abuses any suspect? That is what an end to police brutality might look like. Achieving perfection is a bit too amb...

Everyone knows now that Donald Trump is taking his (mostly) conservative, business-friendly agenda to Washington, DC. While there, he will at least be able to start working with a House and Senate controlled by Republicans. I'm not taking a public position on whether this is good news or bad news, but I want to say there are ways for progressive activists to make things happen. Social Marketing Trumps Politics: The whole point of social marketing is to get people to make a change that would truly benefit them. Many challenges that Trump appears unlikely to address, or indeed to make worse, can be tackled by direct appeals to individuals. What do I mean exactly? Consider climate change. Conservatives are never going to support robust climate change policies that interfere with business or with their lifestyles. Many moderates would refuse to play along. Fair enough. Forget sweeping legislation. Redouble efforts to "sell" behavior changes that can benefit the climat...

Genership 1.0: Beyond Leadership Toward Liberating the Creative Soul by David Castro describes some tactics for approaching social innovation in a creative, collaborative way. This post introduces three specific ways of thinking collaboratively, or individually, about social change efforts. Castro offers much more detail on using leverage, systems thinking and design thinking. Three Approaches to Thinking about Social Change : Whenever a group of social entrepreneurs gets together to plan or problem solve, they can choose to adopt one or more modes of thinking about the challenge at hand. The three modes of thinking that Castro mentions each deserves a book or two, but an introduction is easy to supply: 1. Looking for Leverage - This is a social change approach I’ve advocated for in previous posts. Activists should look for places they can intervene in society to produce the most benefit for the resources invested. A deep familiarity with the problem might be enou...

This is going to be the first of many posts on how cognitive bias might undermine social change efforts. Yeah, I know. I will do my best to keep this concrete and interesting. A number of quirks in how our brains work might lead to mistaken judgments in many areas relevant to social change: problem analysis, strategy, program design, and advocacy. Maybe fundraising. Taking effective action on a certain problem is what activists want to do, so we'll come back to fundraising later. 1.Confirmation bias may cause us to look for reasons why a certain strategy or tactic is the right one. Supportive evidence gets woven into the narrative, lending support to the need for more education for women or more gun control or whatever the topic might be. Negative information gets tossed out. 2. Bandwagon effect -This may be a real problem when the resources devoted to addressing an issue get all of proportion to the seriousness of an issue. Instead, bandwagon jumping siphons away money and v...