Micromanaging at Scale

In Micah Sifry’s excellent interview with Zack Exley and Becky Bond, the three talked about the Sanders campaign’s tech advantage in the 2016 election.

They discussed a number of aspects of the Sanders campaign, but one of the most interesting points for me was their discussion of centralization vs. distribution. With the digital tools that are currently being used for campaigns, it can be easy for campaigners to do the old thing (top-down and centralized leadership) in a new (digitally enhanced scope/scale) way. Whether relying on predictive modeling or centralized lists — what The Economist calls “database politics” — many campaign organizations are in the business of hoarding power and responsibility.

Sanders’ campaign isn’t doing the old thing more digitally. instead focusing on distributing both power and responsibility:

We’re shifting the focus away from a small number of sophisticated data and technologists engaged in a kind of Election Day arbitrage that ekes out incremental advantages by using micro-targeting algorithms to identify and turn out voters based on a model. -Bond

When a campaign has all the knowledge and candidate is the only one in the campaign worth having a relationship with, then Dunbar’s number means that there are only 150 meaningful relationship slots out there. When a candidate is dedicated enough to organizing that they spread power/responsibility to 10 or 100 or 1,000 people, suddenly Dunbar’s number means that there are thousands or tens of thousands of meaningful relationships to be had with the campaign. Bond calls this “Big Organizing”:

In a Big Organizing model where volunteers manage and grow the volunteer base, we’re building the big campaign. The campaign focuses on sharing strategic goals and the technology necessary to help a massive number of volunteers do the work to achieve those goals. That’s very different from a command-and-control, top-down campaign that allows volunteers to do some basic tasks but always under the supervision of paid staff.

The power of a distributed model of organizing is that the candidate doesn’t have to break Dunbar’s number to ensure that thousands of people are meaningfully connected to the campaign. The candidate distributes enough power and responsibility so each voter can have a meaningful responsibility and a real relationship with an important member of the campaign.

Volunteers succeed in moving votes when they both follow the leadership of the campaign on certain tactics and methods and improvise in all sorts of unique, bottom-up ways to bring in more people and get the job done. -Zack Exley

If the goal is to just give more power to the leader — build more efficient tools so that she can build ever more relationships — organizing really isn’t happening. That's just micromanaging at scale.