GETTING TO YAY!!!!
By Wayne Roberts
Right after the US election, I wrote a spirited article that made quite a splash (by my standards) along the lines of “don’t whine, organize!” The article made that old “glass half-empty/half-full” point that helps people flip their perception of things, by arguing that Trumpists didn’t so much win the election, as others lost it. Specifically, I argued that it was lost because of chronic incompetence which we should do something about.
I promised to do a few follow-ups on helpful points about how to be more competent, especially on food and city issues. So here goes.
Today’s issue is how to pick issues that have a chance of winning sometime soon and that we can rightfully feel good about: Getting to Yay!!!
The easiest way to understand that our side is incompetent is to look at the issues we do and don’t make an issue about.
If we were competent, we wouldn’t be slouching around, wondering why incompetents get all the media attention while we get ignored. (The painful explanation is: because they’re not as incompetent as you think they are, and you’re not as competent as you think you are.)
Bernie Sanders, to give an example many people feel positive about, shot to the top of media coverage and mass appeal because he knew how to pick an issue that had the legs to be a popular and unifying one — the 1 per cent. The rest is campaign detail.
From my experience with food and city issues, here are two key steps to picking an issue “with legs.”
— understand that you pick your issues, in the dead-serious way people mean when they say “pick your battles” and “I don’t want to die on that hill.” You pick an issue because it allows you to make some progress, for both you and the person you want to pick a bone with. If It only works for you, it won’t go anywhere, except to a fight about picking over a bone. Issues need traction, just like car wheels stuck in icy snow, or else they just spin their wheels.
— understand that you can make progress easier on issues that many other people automatically agree are important problems to solve, because they’ve long thought this was an important issue to solve, and couldn’t figure out why no-one paid attention to it before.
If you don’t get these right, pushing your campaign will be like pushing rope up a hill.
There are two city food issues that obviously qualify — food waste and local food.
There are a few issues that you might think are close runner-ups. Obesity and child hunger come to mind. But they fall afoul of the third rule: don’t pick an issue that lots of people immediately disagree on the right way to go, and get really ticked when they hear your way is different.
There’s barely a person alive who doesn’t know obesity and child hunger are hugely important issues, but the issues are minefields for every kind of disagreement you can name. Because both obesity and hunger have causes, which are obvious (too many calories or too little money, respectively), but also highly complex and controversial “causes of causes” (lack of willpower or frugality, versus Big Food and capitalism). Most disagreements about causes of causes go back to dearly-held and deeply-embedded beliefs and unconscious assumptions that can’t be reasoned with, and certainly don’t offer a platform for starting a conversation or engagement.
People who say “we don’t want to go there,” and back off from a confrontation over causes of causes, know a thing or two about campaigns. And people who say “I disagree totally with you” on a causes of causes issue may have something valuable to argue, but they are going to spend their time arguing, not campaigning. I don’t think the planet has time for that.
Although I readily admit that there are many issues more important than food waste and local food, almost all these other issues fall afoul of the fourth rule for campaigners: don’t pick an issue that no-one even wants to talk about, let alone do something about on their own time.
I’ll bet you already know what those issues are: global warming, chronic disease, and poverty.
You actually have to be out of your mind not to know those are THE BIG ISSUES. As well, unfortunately, you actually have to be out of your mind to think anyone can win meaningful support for an action campaign on these issues.
Not the slightest problem, however! Why? Because doing the right thing by food waste and local food will automatically look after the problems of global warming, chronic disease and poverty.
We need to be strategic!!
The test for competence in campaign design is two-fold.
One, you pick an issue that you can win with. If that doesn’t appeal to you, or if you think that is sissy or opportunist, please go to the other line, which is for the course on Seven Habits of Highly Effective Self Sabotagers. The Good Intentions Highways is well-paved, and there are rarely traffic jams, because no one who’s actually going somewhere pleasant is on that road.
Two, you design your platform and programs on food waste and local food, without making a big fuss about it, so that the programs coincidentally foster significant progress on issues such as obesity, child hunger, global warming, chronic disease and poverty. When you reduce food waste, for example, you eliminate the major source of global warming in cities — the emissions from food rotting in landfills and emitting methane. Reducing global warming, hunger, and chronic disease are co-benefits of doing local food and food waste right. You don’t need to have an argument about motivations to get a good conclusion.
This is the way many great victories have been scored. How many people ever stop to think that if they worked at their same job 40 years ago, they would likely have died from breathing in toxins, or if they swam in the same place they just swam 100 years ago, they could have got polio? When the problem is solved, no-one loses sleep worrying about whether the original reason for solving it was right.
I show how to pass the second test on city food issues in an e-book that costs less than five dollars: Food for City Building: A Field Guide for Planners, Actionists and Entrepreneurs. It shows, I hope, how to use food’s multi-functional power to provide leverage to solve many problems at a city level at the same time.
Here are some of my strategies for effective design for food campaigns, tested while I was manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council.
GETTING TO YES: THE FREE FOOD APP
In my Food for City Building book, I confess that I learned how to orchestrate city food campaigns from reading three books: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, a fantastic manual called Dealing with the Customer from Hell, which I thought described my bosses pretty well, and the old tried and true Getting to Yes.
Right now, I’m only going to talk to adapting the main points of Getting to Yes to campaigns (rather than negotiations) in city food topics. If you live somewhere warmer or less slushy than Toronto is in the wintertime, I’m available to do workshops on adapting the lessons from all three must-reads for grassroots campaigners.
The first principle of Getting to Yes is to separate the person from the problem. If you want to have a productive conversation with someone, you don’t start off by saying “Your remarks show you to be a male chauvinist.” You say “When it’s put that way, it makes me feel that my needs to be recognized as an equal aren’t being respected.” Then the other person at least has a chance to say “I didn’t mean to suggest that.” That’s what it means to separate the person from the problem, so the problem is easier to focus on and talk about.
In my view, the way good campaigners do the equivalent of this is to make sure their issue is understood as a public interest issue — not an issue for the poor against the wealthy, the just against the unjust, but of the public overall — all of whom will benefit if the problems is solved. That’s why public education and sidewalks, paved roads, subways, fire halls, parks and hundreds of other accomplishments of the last 200 years are accepted — because they’re in the public interest.
I hate to be the one who says this, but I believe Americans — whether they’re on the right or left, or good people or mean people — no longer know what the public interest is. That’s why Americans can’t have a miniscule and meaningless difference of opinion about a tax on pop without getting hot, bothered and polarized. Everyone thinks the debate is aimed at screwing or getting back at them! They can’t separate the problem and the people, so they can’t problem solve.
Time to get over that, I would say. The hard part about this, especially in the US, is to recognize the need to impose some self-discipline on the impulse to “identity politics” and the discourse that flows from “the personal is political.” That impulse leads away from separating the people from the problem, and has led to both a downplaying of policy centered around structures and systems, and an ugly polarization that ultimately advantages the rightwing end of the political spectrum.
Because that lack of appreciation of the public interest runs so deep in America, I want to leave it for another newsletter. For the time being, please trust me and try to figure out the importance of asking this question in campaign design: why is it in the public interest to do it this way, and why is that whacko from Canada telling me this is so important?
FOCUS ON INTERESTS, NOT POSITIONS
This is Rule 2 of Getting to Yes.
Incompetent campaigners are suckers for hanging everything off one position — which is either right or wrong, and which you only disagree with because you’re a dickhead.
When the Zapatistas, model peace-making revolutionaries in my book, heard the statement “an alternative is possible” they must have wondered “what’s wrong with those gringoes?” They countered with their slogan: “many alternatives are possible.” They do not live in what academics call a binary world.
The world is rich with solutions. All of them do a lot of good, and all of them have a little problem that they overlook. So let’s not fight over a particular position! Let’s focus on the problem that needs to be solved, and bring on a range of solutions.
The need to pose a yes or no question on a referendum should not dictate how we see the world or design a campaign.
To give one example (sorry if this ticks you off), let’s talk about a tax on pop, which is starting to establish itself as a big campaign issue in cities across the US, and could preoccupy a lot of people over the next four years.
The over-consumption of pop is a huge problem, most people will agree, and leads to obesity, teeth decay, and plastic waste, among other ills.
But there are some questions we need to ask before dedicating a lot of resources and time and spending a lot of reputational capital, for a flat-out campaign to tax pop.
Is a tax on pop a game changer for the obesity problem? Does a proposed tax on pop lead to a campaign which unifies the 99 per cent against the 1 per cent, or does it divide the 99 per cent? Does a proposed tax on pop lead to a suite of changes that are good for social equity and the environment, as well as obesity? Will a tax trigger positive changes throughout the food system? Is a tax in one city worth a year of hard-fought and heavily-financed campaigning? What are the opportunity costs of such a campaign? (Michael Bloomberg recently donated $20 million to it; what other forms of public education about pop could have been funded by that money?)
I’m not saying what the answer is to those questions, but these are the questions we urgently need to ask before we form into battle lines.
We have to think hard because the world is rich in solutions, but not in campaign resources. There is only so much time, energy and money for winning campaigns, so we have to choose priorities. As well, city governments, which have to oversee thousands of essential services, only have limited legislative time for debating and implementing new proposals. A city can’t absorb more than two such campaigns a year. Is taxing pop one of those?
Or do we want to table a suite of proposed governmental actions on obesity, and focus public attention on the Big Door Opening Question of obesity policy: is government policy, in general, responsible for programs to counter obesity, or is obesity mainly a private matter? If society hasn’t answered that in the affirmative, the pop tax puts the cart before the horse. I don’t think competent campaigners do that.
INVENT OPTIONS FOR MUTUAL GAIN
This is Rule 3 of Getting to Yes.
I’m not aware of anything being able to compete with food in terms of generating benefits for everyone and everything. If we do the right thing by food waste, for example, taxpayers save tens (in Canada) and hundreds (in the US) of billions of dollars a year, so it’s very good for government finances. If we stop landfilling foodwaste, burying it so it can’t breathe, forcing it to emit methane which is over 22 times more damaging a global warming gas than carbon dioxide, it’s good for the climate. (Landfilled food accounts for about a quarter of methane emissions in North America.)
As well, if we prevent food waste, we save huge amounts of scarce resources, such as water, fertilizer, pesticides and so on, which is good for the environment. I could give you 10 universal benefits of waste reduction and prevention without stopping to breathe, and could explain 100 universal “everyone wins” benefits if you gave me an hour.
I could also come close to that for healthy weights, which is the right framework for discussing obesity.
We need to be known for proposals that are in everyone’s interest and that benefit everyone, not issues that polarize people. That’s how we build “reputational capital” — the momentum of which we carry from one campaign to the other, instead of starting from scratch with every campaign.
Our reputation needs to be such that people automatically say: “if they favor it, it must benefit a lot of people; otherwise they wouldn’t risk their reputation.”
Do you think we have that kind of reputation now? Is that a reputation worth working for?
INSIST ON OBJECTIVE CRITERIA
This is Rule 4 of Getting to Yes. It is so obvious, I don’t even know where to start.
We need a reputation for “truthiness” and for getting things that matter done. Never mind “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” That’s not true. It’s more pertinent to say “if you can’t measure it, you shouldn’t campaign on it.” Why go to all the bother and expense of a campaign and legal change if it won’t do anything? The answer to that gives you the key line in your campaign!
I want to run a campaign that says “within two years, our local food campaign will create 10,000 food jobs in this town, jobs that will pay at least $15 an hour. And that is going to create 10,000 direct jobs, and another 7,000 indirect jobs that come from all the businesses that benefit when 10,000 people start spending their decent wages. And if you don’t believe we can do it, check out all the free publications by Ken Meter at Crossroads Resource Center.”
That’s what marketers call “selling the benefit.” Marketers always warn sales people (what are campaigners other than sales people of ideas?) not to go down the road of saying “my product is made of stainless steel with genuine Indian rubber on the inside.” Instead, you should sell the benefit, and say “my product is guaranteed to last ten years, to be easy to clean, and is made from natural materials that are perfectly safe for everyone in the family.” Then they show the warranty, and sit back and collect the sales revenue.
The downside on that is that you have to deliver. But if you aren’t confident in that, why are you campaigning, when you should be doing your research?
KNOW YOUR BEST ALTERNATIVE
This is Rule 5 of Getting to Yes.
In case you didn’t know, before I got into food, I was a senior staffer with a major public service union, which is where I learned to negotiate and campaign in the big leagues. Both sides in a campaign need to know the price of disagreement. “If we don’t get x, we are willing to take a strike, or go on strike, for at least a year.” Or, you honestly tell your members, “if you want this, it is going to take a long struggle and a big strike.” Knowing the cost of the failure to agree is what energizes — or not — the need to be realistic and agreeable.
This is the strongest suit of city and food organizers a constituency of people who have options besides asking the government to pass a law.
I’d like to say to the pop companies “we’re actually doing you a favor by proposing this tax, because lots of people are talking boycott. Would you rather us work on that?”
I know a anti-tobacco campaign that did a version of that. They asked a senior politician to pick the full-page ad they should run. One ad was full of praise for the government for their action to reduce tobacco marketing to kids. The other was an attack on the government for turning kids into victims of the tobacco industry. I know a pro-wildlife campaign that did the same with one of the most conservative premiers of the province I live in, and scored a big victory for wildlife. The people whose minds you’re trying to change need to know the price of disagreement before they have to lose face in public by giving in.
Our best alternative is direct action by consumers. We should be on campaign footing to educate all citizens of the power they hold when they shop. We should do the math on what it means when you spend ten dollars a week on local and sustainable food. We should build up the capacity of farmers markets to expand their sales. We should build up the capacity of local artisan processors to boost their sales. We can support co-ops, especially new generation co-ops that bring producers and consumers together.
Our power to access an alternative to a change in government laws needs to always be in front of politicians, so the option is always “what kind of change?” and not “nothing needs to change.” We should never concede to government or Big Food the capacity to deny change.
That’s why European countries have a great social welfare state. Because the option was much more radical than that. The weakness of North American campaigns is that we have never had a “or else” that amounted to anything. We need to build up our “or else.”
We have lots of strings on our fiddle. It’s easier and more efficient for us to make certain changes through laws. Changes in the law can also be easier and more efficient for organizations promoting the products that cause problems for health, equity and the environment.
Getting to Yes comes from negotiating from strength.
Building that strength, and going from strength to strength, is what becoming competent campaigners is about.
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