Getting Strategic about Peace and Social Justice Work
When convening a group interested in strategy, particularly groups with varying professions and ideas about strategy (or none), there is often a struggle to come to a common understanding of what strategy is and whether it’s worth it to take the time to figure out.
Strategy has its origins in warfare and while it’s easy to translate the language of winners & losers to business, it’s more difficult to see whether and how strategy applies to peace-building. I’ve been doing lots of strategizing lately, mostly with groups working for peace and social justice in my hometown of Baltimore. In these contexts, it seems that without a compelling argument for suspending our current way of working, discussions about strategy can seem like a waste of precious time.
My efforts at sharing swardley’s technique for mapping are often met with quite a bit of resistance — even with groups that buy-in to getting strategic. It reminds me of the tension that arises at times when a group of friends gets together to play a new game that nobody has ever played before. The rules never quite make sense until you play a few times. In the context of a work meeting, this anxiety is compounded as we’re not in a game-playing mindset at all! The anxiety evoked by trying something that may, or may not be productive makes it challenging to justify taking precious time to “play” with mapping. So often, we’re already feeling crunched for time. What if it reveals nothing useful? While Simon Wardley makes an excellent case for mapping in his medium book and many online videos, most of my colleagues will not watch a 45 minute video of a keynote address.
I’ve made a short animation to try and accelerate the process of coming to a common understanding of what strategy is, and why we should include some visual mapping as part of getting strategic. This is my take on Simon Wardley’s take on Sun Tzu & John Boyd’s takes on strategy… applied to the work of building a more peaceful, just world. Note, I do not go into the details of Wardely Mapping here, as there are plenty of pithy descriptions of that already (see Ben Mosier’s Basics of Wardley Mapping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDtKkBqWV9Q)
An early reviewer noted that I focus quite a bit on Doctrine in the animation. Perhaps this is due to my struggle to make sense of this part of the strategy cycle as described by swardley. “Doctrine” is very close to dogma in my mind, something I aspire to question, and yet, I also aspire to adhere to some basic “rules” (doctrine) of interacting with other humans: kindness & respect. Sadly, it’s all too easy to abandon core doctrine, even under just moderate time-pressures. I’ve also started thinking of this doctrine bucket as “the means we are willing to use” to do our work and also the means currently available to us — our repertoire, if you will. I don’t address the latter in the animation but it seems to fit.
Note: the way I’ve framed strategic paradoxes in the animation is a mashup of Barry Johnson’s Polarities and Wendy Smith’s paradoxes of time, attention, and space.
A closing disclaimer: I do not claim expertise in anything other than making sense of sh*t, and in that realm I have logged a good chunk of my lifetime.
Oh, and in an effort to make work that is freely shareable, I opt out of Medium’s paywall. If you find my animations useful, consider becoming a patron on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/researchArtist
