Running — into barriers and out of resources: why good distributed programs sometimes stall out

Every big success we have had at Tectonica has had some element of decentralized organizing in it. Not as the theme of the campaign. As the thing that was actually working underneath it, wherever the results came from.

The same has generally been true at larger scale over these past years. Obama's field operation in 2008 put over two million volunteers into the country with real ownership of the outcome, and the line inside the campaign was explicit: you are not a volunteer for Obama, you are a leader in this movement. That is not a sentiment. It describes a structure.

The case for distributing the work is not in doubt, and I am not going to spend a chapter making it.

What I want to look at is why programs that start well so often stop growing — and why the answer has almost nothing to do with which method anybody picked.

Start with a distinction that gets lost inside the word. Big organizing, and a good deal of what now gets called distributed, runs on one principle: the work is distributed, the plan is centralized. Local people carry an enormous amount of activity, and headquarters decides what the activity is.

That can move real volume. Sign this, share that, give here, turn out on Saturday. But a program whose local people only ever execute somebody else's plan is mobilizing, whatever it is called. Plenty of effort, much of it landing nowhere in particular.

What makes it organizing is whether the people on the ground are creating and owning any of the strategy. Deciding what to do given where they are standing, which is the only place that decision can be made well. That is the base of real leadership, and it is the whole difference between a hundred groups producing reach, money and mere numbers of scale — and a hundred groups producing power. A leader handed a plan is a coordinator. A leader trusted to work out what her patch needs, and to change course when the ground moves under her, is doing the thing we all say we want.

Here is the expensive part, and it is the whole problem.

The people who can hold strategy locally rather than only receive it are people who have been cultivated. They know the campaign, they know their own patch, and somebody has spent real time with them — not in a short training session, over months. There is no shortcut to that. It is relationship, and relationship takes hours — which runs into a fact so ordinary that nobody bothers to say it.

Resources are limited by definition. Every organization I have worked with is choosing between things it needs, always, and the number of people it can pay to spend months cultivating anybody is small. In most programs it is one person. Occasionally three.

The capacity of a distributed program, then, is not really a strategy or a budget line. It is whatever that one person can hold: her hours, her relationships, her memory of what was agreed with whom and which group is wobbling this month.

The barriers are not out in the world where you could plan around them. They sit in her week, and most of them are not even questions. They are nudges. Checking in on the group that has gone quiet, or noticing that somebody is nervous about chairing her first meeting and finding ten minutes before she has to. Almost nobody is waiting on a decision from her. They are waiting on her attention, which is harder, because attention has to be remembered rather than requested.

Fifteen groups, supported properly, is a real program and she can do it. Then the program succeeds, forty more people want to start groups, and there is still one of her.

The program does not run out of enthusiasm. It runs out of one person's Tuesday.

There is a worse version, too. The knowledge in that program is not institutional, whatever the org chart says. It is hers. Who is reliable, what was promised in March, which chapter is one bad meeting from folding. None of it written anywhere that another person could pick up. She takes a job somewhere else and the program does not shrink. It resets. In our sector she probably does leave, because the post was funded by a cycle, and when the cycle turned somebody had to be let go.

All of that is the familiar complaint, and I have made it before. Here is the part I think we have missed.

The resource limit does not only decide how big a program gets. It decides who is allowed to organize.

Look at who is actually doing the sustained kind — not the surge that arrives when a candidate or an outrage has given everyone somewhere to put their anger, but the ongoing local work in the quiet years. In many of the progressive programs I have seen it skew strongly towards two demographics: younger people still studying, or not yet in full-time work and without families to attend to. And older (mostly) women, with a fair degree of financial stability and a real commitment to putting something back. Both groups tend to be driven strongly by the social component and have available time to apply to volunteer work.

I am not being unkind about either. Those people hold up an enormous amount of what still works in this sector, and they do it well, and they are usually the reason anything happens at all in the years when nobody is watching.

But notice who is not in the room. Anybody whose job takes everything they have. Anybody with children at home and no slack in the week. Anybody who would need the thing to be lighter before they could say yes.

We did not decide that. Three things did. The resource limit. How much somebody has to learn before they are allowed to be useful. And the kind of work we put in front of them, which is rarely anything that uses what they are actually good at and almost never anything hard enough to be worth giving up an evening for.

Then we described the result as who participates in political organizing these days.

When I talk about making real political work available to everyday people, this is the specific thing I mean. Not a wider funnel. A version of the work that a person with a full life can actually pick up.

We need these people involved. And they need somewhere they can show up as real leaders.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not talking about replacing the human contact. The one-to-one is the part that works — it is the only part that has ever worked — and a chapter that ended with and now software does the relationship would deserve everything it got.

What can be lighter is the setup. The structure of getting a group going, the things somebody has to know before the first meeting, the answer to a question at nine on a Tuesday night that is currently going to wait until Thursday because one person is asleep.

What I am really talking about is the potential for technology to change access to knowledge — and specifically to the know-how of bringing people together and organizing them for change in a way that actually works. I do not think our sector has taken in what is happening there yet. Knowledge that used to sit inside a career, or inside a consultant's head, or inside a training you had to be selected for, is becoming reachable by people who were never going to get access to any of it. That is unsettling if your value was being the one who knew. It is an opening if what you wanted was for more people to be able to do this.

There is one more thing, and it goes back to a chapter I wrote last week.

Capacity is capped because capacity comes out of a fixed budget. But a group of people who care about something has never been only a cost — it is the one part of an organization that generates as well as consumes. I argued last week that the fix for small-dollar fundraising is a different asker: somebody known to the people she is asking. If the groups are doing that asking, the groups are also producing the resource that supports them.

I know how that sounds after six chapters of me complaining about money in politics. I am not talking about squeezing a list harder. I am talking about a leader asking twelve people she knows to back something she is running, which is a different transaction entirely — and Act three is where I will put the mechanics on the table, including what it costs.

What I want to leave here is the shape of the problem, because I think we have had it wrong.

We have been asking a handful of staff to move a whole society, and carrying the weight of that on their backs as though anybody could. Then we run surveys about why the sector burns people out.

The organizer is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is that everything she knows has to travel through her to reach anybody else. She would still be the one growing leaders. She would just stop being the queue — and the work would stop being available only to people with a spare Tuesday.