How do you break through inertia?

The initial challenge for an organizer—or anybody who’s going to provide leadership for change—is to figure out how to break through the inertia of habit to get people to pay attention. Often that breakthrough happens by urgency of need. Sometimes it happens because of anger—and by anger I don’t mean rage, I mean outrage. It’s the contradiction between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. Our experience of that tension can break through the inertia and apathy of things as they always are.

How do organizers master urgency to break through inertia? The difference in how individuals respond to urgency or anxiety (detected by the brain’s surveillance system) depends on the brain’s dispositional system, the second system in the brain, which runs from enthusiasm to depression, from hope to despair. When anxiety hits and you’re down in despair, then fear hits. You withdraw or strike out, neither of which helps to deal with the problem. But if you’re up in hope or enthusiasm, you’re more likely to ask questions and learn what you need to learn to deal with the unexpected.

Hope is not only audacious, it is substantial. Hope is what allows us to deal with problems creatively. In order to deal with fear, we have to mobilize hope. Hope is one of the most precious gifts we can give each other and the people we work with to make change.

The way we talk about this is not just to go up to someone and say, “Be hopeful.” We don’t just talk about hope and other values in abstractions. We talk about them in the language of stories because stories are what enable us to communicate these values to one another.

Why Stories Matter, by Marshall Ganz

Why I Can’t Stand Disney

I can’t stand Disney. At one time, I had difficulty articulating why. But it came together when I read Jennifer Hochschild making this point a while ago.

The theme of most Walt Disney movies boils down to the lyric in Pinocchio: “When you wish upon a star, doesn’t matter who you are, your dreams come true.”

Nonsense of course. It does matter who you are, not because people get what they deserve, but because things are not fair. And wishing is worthless, fighting for it is what matters – fighting with others.

When we organize, our dreams have a chance of coming true.

Alinsky on Communication

Communication with others takes place when they understanding what you’re trying to get across to them.  If they don’t understand, then you are not communicating regardless of words, pictures or anything else.  People only understand things in terms of their experience, which means that you must get within their experience.  Further, communication is a two-way process.  If you try to get your ideas across to others without paying attention to what they have to say to you, you can forget about the whole thing.

Saul Alinsky, Rules of Radicals