The safest thing you can do with a volunteer supporter is waste them

I woke up one morning to a headline from an organization I admire. I have worked alongside this org and their people. I have recommended them to others. The headline invited political parties to harness the power of women in the coming elections.

Harness.

In many places, women have spent most of recorded history occupying, in law, roughly the position of livestock — property that produces. Harness is the exact word for what we do to an animal: contain it, control it, and take the useful part. You harness an ox. Women do not need harnessing by organizations. They need the opposite of it: liberation, power, agency. 

I do not think anybody in that building noticed. That is what makes it worth stopping on. Nobody sat in a meeting and decided to describe half the electorate as draft animals. The sentence came out that way because the model underneath it was already shaped that way. Language can of course be purposeful, but so many of our words and phrases include the very oppressive structures we aim to dismantle.

This is not really just about women, but about the infection of market-based power dynamics that has crept into social justice work. The unintentional linguistic slip reveals something much deeper. The same posture runs through almost everything we write about our members, our supporters and our constituents. In the first chapter of this series I quoted Wendy Brown's account of where we are currently: people are treated as consumers of democracy rather than the agents of it. “Harnessing women” for elections just a more extreme expression of this sentiment. 

An organization that begins to think of itself as a business inherits a business's structure of purpose. A business’s structure is singular and linear: produce a return. Everything else must be secondary to the goal of returns. There is an enormous, sophisticated body of practice for optimizing an operation toward a single number. It is available to anybody, and on its own terms it works. Leaders reach for it under pressure, sitting as they do inside a world that runs on it.

What drifts is not the mission statement. What drifts is the distance between the mission and how we get there: how many staff we have, how many names are on the list, how much of the budget we spent and reported to the board. Each of those is a proxy for power. Each is countable, legible, and defensible in a room with a board in it.

Hahrie Han and her colleagues put the trouble with that plainly in Prisms of the People. They write that familiar models of collective action work by stockpiling resources. These resources being people, actions, and money. Then one assesses themselves by the scale of what they have amassed. Against which they set the finding:

Research shows there is no linear relationship between any given resource and political power, whether that resource is numbers of people, amount of money, or intensity of adherents.

No reliable line runs from the size of your list to your ability to change anything. And yet, most of the dashboards in this sector are built on the assumption that list size = change.

The instinct is not foolish. An organization with no reach, no audience and no money is not powerful either. Once the list becomes the measure, though, the list becomes a resource, and a resource is a thing you draw from. You build it and then you, for lack of a better term, harness it. That is faster than building power from the people on your list. It produces a number this quarter, which building power does not currently. Extraction has to be held in place by something, and what holds it is control.

The pressure inside an organization never runs toward putting power into the hands of the people it organizes. It runs the other way, toward an arrangement where those people cost as little as possible- in time, money, emotional energy. Whatever power exists stays concentrated near the top, held by the few people in charge. Concentrated power also feels like more power, for a reason that is not mysterious: the people doing the feeling are the ones holding it.

Here is the trick in that. Concentration requires control, and control at that setting is not free. What it costs is collective power, which is everything that might have been done by the people who were never given a decision to make.

Is any of this ill-intentioned? No. I am not going to be an idealist about it, because anybody who has done this work can name more pointless meetings, more difficult personalities and more unresolvable internal conflicts than they have fingers to count on. I have worked with organizations on several continents. If you asked me for the one thing they all have in common, I would not say values, or theory of change. I would say internal turmoil, chaos and turnover.

Suggest to a staff leadership team that the answer to their problem is to bring in more people, and to involve the ones they already have far more deeply. There is a panic. I’m not naive in this regard. They are not picturing democracy. They are picturing more meetings, more conflict, and more things happening in their organization's name that they will not find out about until afterwards. They are picturing more chaos and more time dedicated to chaos. 

The pains that actually decide these questions are not strategic. They are immediate and close to the body. Giving up control is scary. Involving more people inevitably means more personalities. Thoughts that might come up: I cannot see what is going on out there. I am going to get in trouble with my board. I did not sleep. That meeting last night was horrible and I am not doing another one.

Most of the technology sold into this sector is built precisely against those sensations, because that is who signs the contract. It is a strange arrangement to say out loud: an industry designing for the discomfort of the staff, inside organizations that exist because of the pain in somebody else's life.

Who among us does not want some degree of control over the thing they will be held responsible for? Control's sisters are order, alignment, and organization: and there is a reason they call it political organizing: nobody has ever changed anything without organization. Structure is not the opponent of participation. (I spent a chapter arguing that structure is the precondition for it).

The problem is never control by itself. It is control in the service of extraction. Flattening people’s genuine desire to participate, harnessing them. Where the purpose of control is to make people cost as little as possible, the least money, the least risk, the least emotional weather in your week, you pay the price in depth of interaction. That is not in service of the mission.There is a version of a program that satisfies that purpose perfectly. Limit what the groups may attempt. Limit what any one leader is allowed to decide. Limit the whole thing to the size a single person can watch. It is calm, it is safe, and it performs exactly as designed. The trade, is that nobody inside it ever gets to do anything.

I said in the first chapter that it is cheaper and cleaner to run systems where the messiness of other people's autonomy never clutters. 

Here is what I find striking in almost every room. When I run leadership sessions for organizations I ask people to describe the last time they got somebody to do something that person had no obligation to do. People do not say “I instructed them.”. They describe finding out what the other person actually cared about. Handing them something to decide. Leaving the problem unsolved so there was something in it for them to work out. Then the same people go back to their organizations on Monday and hand their supporters a fully solved problem and a set of instructions for delivering it. 

Daniel Pink spent a book on why that fails. Drive makes the case that sustained effort runs on three things: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Look at a token task against that list. The purpose is enormous, because the cause is real and that’s what brings supporters in.. Yet the autonomy they are given is zero. The mastery is rendered mute, because nobody gets better at a job that develops no new skills. The arrangement disengages the people who arrived caring most, whether intentional or not..

And even if they are harnessed, how long will they want to be a part of your cause?

The real value is not control but what make the individual want to participate. Her read on what is happening in her own town. The people she knows and we do not. The professional skill she uses all day and has not yet applied to organizing. Her own sense of which of our issues matters most where she lives. A harness cannot take any of that. A harness is built to take effort, and effort is the cheapest thing she has.

Which brings me to what I call envelope licking.

Every organization I have worked with has its version of this: fully scripted calls or door knocks, already written post cards, a social share to copy and paste.

The same person decides to give her evenings to this. She arrives, and what is waiting is a stack of envelopes, or the modern equivalent, which is a graphic and a suggested caption. The job is real in the sense that it needs doing. It is also built so that nothing depends on who does it, which is exactly why it can be handed to a stranger on her first night.

Licking an envelope doesn’t drive transformational change or nurture sustained relationships. 

That is the second half of the loss, and it is the larger half. I argued in the first chapter that people do not mainly take part because of their beliefs: they form their beliefs by taking part, and the belonging and the doing come first. If that is true, then the doing has to be the kind of thing that can do it. A task engineered to carry no consequence cannot change the person performing it. She goes home the same as she arrived, minus the evening.

So she stops. There is no resignation, because there was nothing to resign from. She answers one fewer email, then misses one meeting, and at some point she has become a person who used to be involved. And it isn’t documented. There is no post-mortem for a person drifting off, no line in the annual report for the four hundred people who wanted a part and were handed a task. In chapter seven I wrote that holding on tighter produces the same failure you were guarding against, slower, and in a form nobody has to write up. Doing nothing produces its failure the same way. 

One caveat: it is less common, but there is a mirror image of this dynamic. Some people are not given too little. They are handed an enormous volume of work and no authority over any of it, which is the most exhausting position in any organization and the one we most reliably hand to our most committed person. Boredom takes months to drive somebody out. Not supporting or coaching potential leaders takes weeks to drive people out.

The people are there. I want to be clear: this is not about apathy. They are willing, they are capable, and a great many of them are waiting. They do not want what we are offering, because what we are offering is not interesting and uses none of them.

None of this is a plea to be kinder to volunteers, and there is evidence rather than sentiment underneath it. Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han studied Obama's 2008 field chapters and asked why some of them dramatically outperformed others. The answer was not resources, or demographics, or tactics, or technology. High-performing chapters had organizers who coached volunteers into leaders. Low-performing ones had organizers who activated volunteers into tasks.

Same campaign. Same materials. Same week in the same election. The difference was what the person in charge believed the volunteer was for.

The alternative to harnessing is not dropping the reins. It is the opposite of a harness, but rather creating a structure for people to find autonomy and meaning.

What that takes is not complicated:work that matters, handed over deliberately rather than by accident. Coaching the person through first experiences, so that handing it over is not a bet placed on a stranger. Scope that widens as expertise that is built. None of this is a loosening of control. It is control aimed at something else: a supporter’s capability, rather than their compliance.

In the political mobilization world, we have spent twenty years perfecting the harness, and it works (in one sense). It does exactly what it was built to do. It produces people who cost us very little, and who give us the least valuable thing they have.