Embracing Conflict Didn’t Tear Our Organization Apart, It Transformed Us
During the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice uprising, amidst exhaustion, confusion, and tension, staff at Movement Alliance Project came to a breaking point and decided to take a four-month pause from external work to look internally. Bryan Mercer and Hannah Sassaman, current and former leaders at MAP, vulnerably share the process they went through and examine how confronting conflict avoidance — both across the organization and between the two of them as leaders — allowed MAP to choose purpose, strategy, and be transformed in the process.
The Breaking Point and Making the Choice to Pause
Philadelphia summer makes you surrender. Days start hot enough to sweat and stay that way until well after dark. We had all already surrendered to so much that 2020 summer. First the pandemic put millions out of work, closed schools, strained social connection, and placed our communities under constant threat of illness. Then, after George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis police, surrender turned to rage in our streets. As two leaders in a long-standing Philadelphia-based community organization, Movement Alliance Project (MAP), we jumped into the thick of those urgent fights.
But as we showed up — in the streets, on coalition zoom calls, and at budget hearings, fighting for affordable access to the internet in the midst of the shutdown, connecting people to mutual aid projects to meet community needs, and demanding our city’s budget invest in communities instead of policing — our hearts sank in exhaustion and sorrow, because we’d seen this before and would again.
Without deep organization — a place for those thousands marching to go and a strategy to channel their power towards a world we all deserve — the protests would ebb. And in their wake, the political machine that defunded schools, cut taxes for the rich and lavishly funded the police would continue its stranglehold on power. Our Philadelphia neighborhoods and communities, segregated and alienated from each other by design, would continue to pay the price.
As the external conditions of 2020 rocked us, we started to understand longstanding major internal contradictions inside MAP, too. MAP had grown rapidly over the last five years, winning multiple major campaigns, securing hundreds of thousands in funding for community coalition building, technology justice, and media making work, and beginning a fiscal sponsorship program serving 14 projects.
We were always changing direction, chasing newer, bigger things after each success.
We grew as we won campaigns, expanded networks and relationships, and got into new battles as a part of new coalitions. This led to us having over a dozen different areas of work within the organization. Staff felt split in too many directions. The intensity of 2020 exacerbated exhaustion and problems with work-life balance for everyone from the policy and campaign staff to the administrative and finance staff. On top of this, we changed our organizational structure to expand capacity, which included creating a formal leadership team of new directors. With years of inconsistencies in hierarchy and supervision, our staff was confused about decision making in the organization and pointed out imbalances in compensation that we didn’t account for in the restructure.
This combination created a lot of tension on our team. So in the Fall, we held a week-long Staff Advance (others may call it a “retreat”) where we set out to address the issues coming up and slim our work down to focus on our central purpose. But in those few days, it soon became clear that we actually didn’t have a clear sense of our organization’s purpose.
During this Fall Advance, we asked ourselves questions like “What is MAP uniquely positioned to do?” And we got vastly different answers from our staff.
As we tried to make choices on what we should and shouldn’t focus on as an organization, we spent our days asking questions that led to more questions. Despite our best attempts, one week just wasn’t enough time to solidify our purpose with clarity. We needed much more time and a very intentional process to sort this out. But we were facing large crises in our communities, and felt called to respond.
The same month, Walter Wallace Jr. was murdered by police in West Philadelphia. The pain hit us right at home this time, and the rebellion started up all over again. As we sprang into action and reaction, feeling the cycle repeat itself broke us. Seeing an entire community erupt in rage again, be attacked by police again, while being ignored by a city apparatus that would not see their pain nor hear their cries again broke us. Knowing that our efforts couldn’t truly meet the challenges we saw broke us. Knowing we had no real internal clarity of our movement’s collective strategy to meet that challenge broke us.
“We can’t do this anymore,” we admitted, our tears caught in our throats. In a political moment of seemingly constant crisis, completely stretched to capacity in every facet of the organization, something had to give.
After years of sprinting, we asked ourselves: what might be possible if we just stopped?
What might we be able to accomplish if we let go of the urgency of the news cycle and strived for focus? So that fall — in the middle of campaigns, with ongoing grant commitments, despite all the pressures telling us not to — we said “no more” and decided to build the “MAPOut,” a process that would require us to fully stop all external work for four months as we determined the true purpose of our organization at this moment in history.
Building the MAPOut & Creating the Space to Pause
Just stopping our work felt almost impossible; we’d never seen another organization truly do it and had never done it ourselves for more than a week. It felt like we were abandoning our communities and our partners. But we couldn’t ignore the glaring reality: being in the middle of every fight helped us feel and seem useful, but it did not build power.
So we created a process to wind down all of our external work to a place where it could gracefully pause without leaving anybody hanging. We had lots of conversations with our current and past partners, our supporters and funders, and even political actors we’d worked with closely over the years.
Every conversation felt like a risk, like we’d let our people down. But after our comrades’ initial surprise came curiosity. What would arise from such a process? And to our surprise after curiosity came encouragement. Our people wanted us to take this time and were excited to see what we’d learn and how we’d transform.
We took a deep breath, and collectively built the MAPOut into what it needed to be: something expansive and intentional. Every member of our staff worked for months in teams to plan the process, from late 2020 through early 2021.
- One team made sure we built in breaks to allow for some recovery and re-grounding from the sprints of the past years, and planned a beautiful team-building process that would prepare us for the work to come.
- Another team designed a five-week political education program helping ground our whole team in our founding and history, the ways in which racial monopoly capitalism shaped Philadelphia and technology in our city and world, and how movements for justice in those twin fields were flowering now.
- The third team put together a program where we’d reflect on our impact and our history, and choose our future. We hired BJ STAR, a master facilitator with the Wildfire Project, to guide us through this high-stakes decision-making process with our entire team.
Conflict Avoidance At the Root
As our entire staff began working together to make the MAPOut possible, we started to unpack how we got to this point. How did we become an organization with 15 program areas? How did our strategy take the shape of something we’d later name the “spaghetti monster” — a noodly mix of tactics, without a clear endpoint or connection, tangled in a delicious but inadequate ball?
We studied the history of our organization. For fifteen years, we’ve built a big arc of relationship-building, winning, and trust. Our organization had a history in media making to unite poor and working people’s organizations, and then, training communities to use internet and media making tools. Following that, we’d won groundbreaking campaigns around internet access and corporate accountability. We built effective coalitions on issues of mass incarceration and political power. But we didn’t choose that work from a place of clarity about our organizational strategy.
At different moments in MAP’s evolution, instead of intentionally saying ‘no’ to old things, we just kept doing more–essentially saying yes to all things.
Now, our work was a mix of projects rooted in our legacy with media making, national and local campaigning on tech justice, and convening and building capacity with groups in Philly.
As we conducted a survey of our partners to ground our assessment we began to understand that our organizational confusion was visible to our comrades, too. Many of our partners had no idea what our purpose and role in our movement ecosystem was supposed to be, either. They appreciated that we often filled gaps and created pathways for powerful work that wouldn’t have happened without us; but they weren’t sure if we were campaigners, media-makers, or conveners. It confirmed our suspicions that rather than building capacity of other groups in the ecosystems that included us, we were shapeshifting into different forms so that we could be the capacity.
Our brilliant facilitator, BJ, shared something that helped us start to understand why we’d landed here. They said “at the heart of confusion in purpose is conflict avoidance,” and urged us to study Yotam Marom’s Moving Towards Conflict For the Sake of Good Strategy. Yotam’s piece touched us deeply; it felt like a mirror to us (and maybe will to you, too):
“Many of our social movement organizations don’t have a strategy to win. They do not have a clear grasp of their own purpose, don’t truly know why they exist or what their role is, don’t have clear goals they hold themselves accountable to, don’t run programs that add up to something greater than the sum of their parts, and lack a viable plan to grow to the scale necessary to face the challenge. There are lots of reasons for this, but conflict avoidance is one of them, because conflict avoidance is fundamentally the inability to really face the truth. How can we formulate good strategy if we don’t tell the truth?”
These words shone like a flashlight in our attic, revealing conflict that existed inside MAP at its highest levels and across the organization. We cooked up this spaghetti monster not only because we were overzealous and too driven by urgency, but also because we weren’t brave enough to disagree with each other about MAP’s purpose and have principled struggle over those disagreements.
As two people leading the organization for over a decade, we’d buried disagreements on strategy and work-style that’d been between us for years. Hannah led our work organizing for tech justice, coalitions, and campaigns on one hand, and Bryan led our work expanding movement infrastructure and capacity building in Philly on the other. We’ve worked closely together in the struggle for years, oftentimes in beautiful flow. However, we stepped on each others’ toes, Hannah sometimes taking up too much space, and Bryan shying away from taking a position to avoid conflict or critique. And we were both underdeveloped in what strategy meant, and in the real costs of not making hard choices.
We’d meet together to plan and advance our growing organization, but let too many of the big questions hang in the back of our throats. Working feet from each other in our West Philadelphia office space, our siloed phone calls on our different projects echoed off the embossed-copper ceiling of our street-level office. Our feet shuffled on the floor under our desks as we worked and pointed at different sides of the wall in the cramped back office room.
It felt too hard to ask the endpoint and purpose of so many different kinds of projects: how would they make our enemies weaker, our people stronger and more cohered? Despite decades of campaigns, many successful, we weren’t ready to fight about choosing a path that would make real winning possible.
By holding ourselves back and each other back from conflict, and continuing an organizational and movement-wide practice of avoiding conflict and principled struggle, we stunted what was possible inside MAP. This also meant we limited what was possible for our movement partners, and for our relationship as comrades in the struggle for human liberation. And now our unspoken disagreements were manifesting as at least two distinct areas of work stretching our entire team’s capacity as if we existed at opposite ends of a rubber band.
As we moved deeper into the MAPOut it became clear:
if we weren’t going to be brave enough to face and embrace conflict, we wouldn’t be able to choose a clear purpose for the organization.
We had avoided conflict inside MAP for a long time, because of many different fears. We even realized the confusion about the addition of a leadership team was rooted in conflict avoidance. We weren’t brave enough to have an open dialogue with our staff that might bring up disagreements, so we brought on a new leadership team without much explanation or discussion–and our team was not clear on the purpose of it.
Avoiding conflict helped us survive as people — protecting us from hurt, from loss. We’re taught that all conflict is destructive and results in pain. We all carry pain from past experiences of conflict — personal, community, and movement traumas — inside of us. If we face and embrace conflict, it might mean that some of our fears could come true. We might get hurt. We might lose a big sense of stability or comfort in the shape of the organization as it was, and there was the real chance that some of us would leave or change our positions. But beyond that fear existed the possibility that if we embraced the conflict about the purpose of the organization, that conflict would help us grow and transform into a new, more strategic, shape. This conflict might be generative for us and our communities and struggles for years to come.
Debating Strategy and Making a Choice
As we embarked on the final phase of our process, BJ helped ground us in the skills we needed to disagree with emotional intelligence. They skillfully guided us to communicate directly with each other, and pushed us to dig down more if we glossed over unspoken disagreements. All of this hard work helped us understand each other much more deeply, and served as excellent preparation for our strategy debates.
Yotam, building on Richard Rumelt’s work in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, says the most important part of strategy is making a choice:
“Strategy is all about choice. It is about saying no, sharpening a position through disagreement, narrowing focus. It requires the will to remain in tension long enough to expose the deepest misalignments, the skill to actually enter into serious disagreement and emerge from it stronger.”
We started the work of identifying the big choices we had to make. Using the framework of a strategy kernel as our guide, we understood that organizations are best positioned to address one single challenge, but there were a few that we’d been trying to tackle. The critical role technology plays in exacerbating oppression is one challenge. The under-resourced and disconnected infrastructure of Philly’s movement ecosystem is another challenge. The vacuum of community media telling untold stories is yet another challenge. We had to choose one.
We could no longer pretend that all of these areas of work could live under one strategy.
We had big questions that seemed impossible to answer: Would we choose tech justice work over Philly movement infrastructure and capacity building? Would we split our organization so that some of our staff could move forward on one strategy while the other staff move forward on the other? We resisted, but BJ helped us see that we were strong enough to make a choice. Our entire staff team wrote strategy drafts arguing for different options in a huge two-day debate. We disagreed with each other but, with more practice in generative conflict, those disagreements didn’t break us. Disagreeing allowed us to narrow our options down to the best possible purpose for MAP.
After honestly examining the core tenets, strengths, and weaknesses of MAP’s work, we all chose to focus MAP’s new strategy on strengthening the movement infrastructure in Philadelphia. We didn’t do that because the other work wasn’t important or crucial to the larger project of human liberation. We chose this strategy and future for MAP because after our years of work and study and months of the MAPOut, we knew that the challenge of Philly’s under-resourced and under-connected movement ecosystem was one we could take up and make into our full purpose.
But the other challenges MAP wasn’t taking on still had powerful foundations upon which to grow. Because of that, we also decided to create two new organizations: People’s Tech Project, to give dedicated resources to building power around how our movements engage with technology as an aggravating force in society today, towards winning their vision of human liberation, and the People’s Media Record, to house a community media archive we’d recently secured a major grant to develop.
We had to make the hard choice to split the organization into three parts in order to let each of those three core purposes — and the staff who chose to lead them — flower and thrive.
For the two of us, making this choice to split up the organization was a mix of deeply hard and liberating. We were forced to face the years of imperfect and even sometimes unprincipled communication between us that was a big part of bringing the organization to this point.
In one long conversation with Bryan, when Hannah faced the idea that she might have been leading with a lot of pessimism, and might be holding onto MAP as it had been because it felt comfortable and safe, her heart beat fast. Was fear keeping her from growing and from facing the loss of change? Instead of choosing purpose, was she picking comfort and belonging? She made a commitment then to practice choosing change and purpose, and to create her own sense of belonging. Choosing that purpose meant believing in the power of her own work and all of our work together, and working on transcending the pessimism that is so easy to fall into in our society.
When Hannah and Bryan took the time to talk through some of the cracks and fault lines in their working relationship, Bryan realized that he’d become well practiced in avoiding saying no, fearing conflict would come with it. He long took an approach to ‘try and do it all,’ even when he believed other work would suffer. Of course, after years of not addressing conflict head on, both Bryan and Hannah had built up resentments about their differences in priorities and approach. An approach of ‘keeping the peace,’ left Bryan vacillating between disinterest in some work and anger about other efforts. And in relationship to Hannah, Bryan built a barrier to expressing his feelings that did a disservice to them both. MAPOut gave Bryan a chance to realize that hiding his position was a bigger risk than honesty, and choosing to practice generative conflict with Hannah and across MAP and the movement he is committed to, was the actual path to make more possible for his leadership.
Across the larger organization, we all definitely knew this was the right path for MAP at this moment. But this decision had a major set of implications. While we maintained three core aspects of our work in this split, there were many other projects in our spaghetti monster that we had to sunset and say goodbye to completely. There wasn’t anything ‘wrong’ with these areas of work, but they didn’t fit into the strategies of the new organizations. The staff who built those projects and helped them flourish from inception had to confront the loss of those past efforts. We also had to accept that we wouldn’t be together as a staff team anymore. We had to figure out how to support most of our staff to find new roles inside these new organizations or support them to transition out and into other parts of the movement ecosystem.
For many of us, choosing trust in the midst of such uncertainty was the hardest part. Some staff had been let down by leadership before. How could they trust leadership now, through this delicate transition? As we shed old senses of self to build new teams with clearer purpose, how would we stick the landing?
Easing Transition with Intention
The MAPOut was transformative for every one of us — the hardest emotional and intellectual work many of us had done in years. It required leveling-up in the practice of trust and in choosing trust, despite heavy conditioning we had as individuals and as a group to doubt each other. Building an implementation plan that focused on successfully transitioning all of our projects — those becoming new organizations, those sunsetting, and those transferring to being led by trusted partners — helped.
We created a cross-department project management team for the transition period that gave a real opportunity for staff beyond the directors to set the pace and timeline of our organizational priorities. The directors team also worked to embrace our leadership instead of shying away from it, clearly stating the decisions we were responsible for and owning our decision-making power (DARCI became a go-to tool throughout this period). This clarity gave us all some structure in the midst of a lot of uncertainty about where these choices would ultimately leave us.
The whole organization had to “trust the process.” We studied a tool, the Organizational Change and Transition Curve developed by William Bridges, which taught us that we couldn’t rush the pace of transition. We had to end MAP as it was, let go of what it could have been, and traverse a confusing neutral zone of neither here nor there as we implemented our new strategies. Only then could we commit to the new and live into our new beginnings as new organizations. We’d played a vital role. But that role was changing now.
We were letting go of who we were, and who we could have been, in order to embody who we had to become.
This was real for us organizationally, but also personally. For both of us, this process pushed us to face big emotional truths about ourselves and our working relationship as leaders. In this process, the two of us have been pruning and transforming the working relationship and comradeship between us. It has meant working to grow a new relationship that follows the function of our new organizational forms and relates to how MAP and People’s Tech’s different strategies will together help lead to a liberatory future.
For Hannah, this means making the choice to lead People’s Tech Project as its executive director, to shepherd the crucial work of its strategy, and to accept the trust and support of comrades near and far to take this role on fully. To do that, it also means feeling the grief of losing MAP as it was, of choosing this change. For her, strategy is in a dialectical relationship with grief, and the act of mourning what was powerful about the past is letting her live into her unique leadership at the intersection of community organizing and the national movement for tech justice.
For Bryan, this means stepping into the risk that comes from being vulnerable to feedback, while also holding the reins of the organization decisively. It means leading with vulnerability and unlearning that male leaders should be expected to hide the emotional impacts of the work. That looks like not shying away in the moments that call him to state disagreement, and not hiding the feelings of frustration or anger that shape how he is showing up in the work. To do that, Bryan is leaning on the somatic practices he’s learned over the years and sitting with discomfort rather than rushing or brushing past it. As they say, the only way out is through.
For us together, this change means both of us have a chance to build on our history to meet this moment in ways we never have before, that we couldn’t previously imagine. Choosing purpose, and our compassion and love for each other, eases this change. And knowing we are both on the revolutionary road — building a world where we can make true liberation become real — eases this change too. So much of this transformation is possible because of how we’ve developed as people, organizers, and fighters at LeftRoots — a project aimed at building strategy and strategists who can win socialism in the 21st century.
Every one of us at MAP — administrators and techies, communicators and managers — helped craft, debate, and choose this strategy and its implications.
We learned here that all staff and leaders at an organization should understand how strategy is developed and implemented, and their role in testing it and making it real.
We learned that we must give strategy a structure. The costs of splitting the organization into three new forms and transforming our purpose was heavy. But the costs of not doing it were heavier. For these strategies to be tested fully, they needed different forms so that we could reach our goals of human liberation and play our part in history.
As we write this, the air of Philadelphia is warmer every day, and the possibility and risks of another summer face us. The staff of each project — MAP, People’s Tech Project, and People’s Media Record — are getting ready to celebrate our transitions to these new forms together with a day at the beach.
But this time, this summer, we have more than surrender. We have a plan. Strategy is a theory, an idea of how each of our projects can address a particular challenge, the distinct roles we’ll take on to solve them. We’ll need connection, compassion, clarity, and care to test our hypotheses, and to make new ones as we learn and grow.
This world tells us only to surrender, that there is no alternative, that nothing else is possible. But we are proud and committed to fighting for a new world, a world we all deserve, alongside all of you.
This piece was drafted by Hannah Sassaman and Bryan Mercer, with vital editing support and review from Clarise McCants, Devren Washington, Shari Bolar-Martray, and Jenessa Irvine. Major thanks to all of our comrades for holding us through this process. We’d love to hear your feedback: email Bryan at (bryan ‘at’ movementalliance.org) and Hannah at (hannah ‘at’ peoplestechproject.org).
