Movements Cannot Shy Away From Conflict
This is an excerpt from “For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness,” originally published at Convergence.
The truth is, most of the groups and organizations that make up our movements do not have a strategy for winning. They might think they have a strategy. They might tell themselves they have one. They certainly tell their funders or dues-paying members they do, and on their websites there is plenty of stuff written under the header “Our Strategies.” They have mission statements, vision statements or other grandiose paragraphs in flowing prose that say what they think they’re doing. They have lists of programs — the things they do, hope to do or once did.
But they have not, for the most part, spent real time and energy getting a grasp on the challenge their organization exists in order to solve. They are not usually clear on their purpose, beyond the visionary sense and in the narrower, more practical sense — the specific part of all this grave need around us for which they are going to actually take responsibility; the specific point of intervention they are going to make and how that specifically is going to add value to our greater project of liberation. They are rarely clear on the role they play in the broader ecosystem, nor are they willing to adjust it because of what else is going on around them. They don’t often, if we’re honest, have a coherent plan for how to get from here to there despite the real constraints they will face from the world around them and the opponents who continue to forward their own interests. They do not usually know what they want to win in practical terms, nor how they will measure their successes or failures. In fact, they do not often genuinely measure these successes or failures at all, beyond what ends up in self-congratulatory social media posts, glossy end-of-year reports, inflated fundraising documents and glowing emails to the base inviting them to the next thing. They do not, almost ever, know how to make the strategic decision to shut down programs that are failing or sunset their organization to make way for something else. They are aided and abetted in all this by leaders who are conflict avoidant, by members who are more concerned with their belonging than on good strategy, by consultants and facilitators who have made a living helping groups stay on the surface and maintain their business as usual, and by funders who expect this kind of behavior and decide on their survival based on it. And they push one another to do this too, by competing over media attention and limited funding, and bullshitting each other at conferences and coalition meetings.
I know, because I have been in movements for over two decades, played a leadership role at Occupy Wall Street, built organizations and supported some of the cutting edge movement groups of our time. I know, because I have led movements like this, run organizations like this, have been a facilitator like this, have been a fundraiser like this, have been a bullshitter like this myself. Mostly, I have done this out of fear of conflict. I thought I was being good, being noble: avoiding conflict to shield people from pain, to keep resources and activity flowing, to keep my people happy and connected, to keep the train moving. But none of this led to the work we were doing becoming greater than the sum of its parts, or prevented the pain of loss in the long-run anyway. And years later, I can see that I avoided conflict for selfish reasons, too: to shield myself from having to actually justify the thoughts and feelings driving me, to protect my ego, to protect my place in the group (and my income), to maintain an image of confidence and success and security that masked my fear of failure. I avoided conflict to protect my team from loss, but, honestly, to protect myself from loss too.
Conflict avoidance is widespread in our movements and the organizations that drive them. We avoid conflict by diffusing tension with humor, discouraging anger, expressing negativity with passive aggression and gossip instead of discussing things directly. We sweep conflict under the rug, find surface-level tensions on which to spend our energy or project grievances onto some external actor (like, for example, a facilitator). We replace deep planning with an untenable pace of doing, or with producing documents everyone can agree on but that ultimately don’t change much. We use tools like stack, where people are called on in the order they raised their hands, or progressive stack, where the order is arranged based on the facilitator’s sense of people’s identities. And these tools, although reasonable, often lead to circular, abstract conversations where people are not responding to one another directly but rather saying whatever they wanted to say when they raised their hands 15 minutes earlier. When we see tension come up in a conversation, we move on to the next person on the stack, and the opportunity for engagement flutters off into the ether instead of landing at someone’s feet. We encourage compromise toward a middle ground to avoid polarization, and though compromise is good in many contexts, it can also be the avoidance of choice — a way to mediate conflicting interests and desires rather than pushing to get somewhere deeper, sharper, clearer. We let folks stay on the surface, and accept indirect statements, behaviors that don’t line up with stated intentions and ideas that would fold under cross-examination. We hire facilitators who do all this for us too: steer us away from the bumps, protect the agenda at all costs, smooth things over to support the group feeling connected and help us get to the end instead of to the bottom.
But I have also seen good strategy, been led by people committed to doing the hard work of making it, and even — I am lucky to be able to say — tasted its fruits. It almost always rests on a real orientation to power — wanting it, being willing to sacrifice for it, and it almost always begins with the willingness to tell the truth, even when it is difficult.
On the precipice of good strategy
This retreat center has weird chairs. They are folding chairs without legs, so the bottoms lie flat on the carpeted floor, and the backs sort of crank backward into an L shape, but it’s easy to flop over or sink into them, especially late in the day. I often have to get the participants out of their seats to keep them from drifting.
It’s the fall of 2021 and I’m with Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, or CAAAV, a long-time New York City community organization that’s been remaking itself for the past few years, organizing Asian tenants to break the relationship between the real estate sector and the government so that their base — mostly Chinese and Bengali tenants — can afford to stay in their homes, in their neighborhoods, in this city. Right now they have an active campaign in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and are building a new base of Chinese, Bengali and Korean tenants in Queensbridge Houses, a public housing complex in Long Island City, Queens. We’ve spent some months now reading Richard Rumelt’s strategy book “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy,” designing what he calls a strategy kernel, and putting it through the wringer. They have gone toward conflict many times already — something we have learned together is critical to good strategy — and they are getting sharper and deeper, but something still isn’t quite landing.
We abandon the weird chairs, and move to stand in a half-circle around the big whiteboard where they’ve scribbled and diagrammed for the better part of a week. As we stare quietly, I am struck, not for the first time, by the scale of the task before them. I wonder how on earth they will beat this much more powerful opponent, how they will turn their small advantages against the opponent’s weaknesses. So I ask, What’s actually going well? Where are you growing? Where are you strong?
Emily, one of the veterans, says: Chinatown. They struggle there too, of course; they constantly feel under capacity, without enough time, without enough money. But they punch above their weight, are in the middle of a campaign that they really have a shot at winning, and are building a solid base. The others agree. They have been in the community for ages; this is the part of the work that CAAAV has always been known for.
I continue: Ok, so then why not take the Chinese organizers out of Queensbridge and put them there? Why not throw down where you have something going already, and really throw your full weight behind the campaign you’re in?
This question is not altogether innocent. I have a sneaking suspicion that no one has made this suggestion because if they moved all the Chinese organizers out of Queensbridge, it will more or less crush that operation, require them to let go of it. Someone says something to this effect. Most of the others nod, and seem to move on, accepting the boundary and continuing to gaze at the whiteboard, as if staring at it hard enough will reveal something hidden.
But then Em, a young Chinese organizer who has been doing that work in Queens, interrupts the quiet pondering: Well, what if we just . . . didn’t do the organizing in Queensbridge anymore?
We all take our eyes off the whiteboard and look at Em. It is significant that this question comes from Em, someone who is doing the work and demonstrating commitment and care for the leaders being developed there. It feels like people are taking this option seriously for the first time, but I know the group might still back away here. They are thinking now about the leaders who they have organized there — poor and working-class Asian tenants who are sacrificing so much to help build something there. They are thinking, too, about the Korean and Bengali staff who have been recently hired to do this work, talented and energetic people who have been trained and invested in, who won’t have a place in Chinatown. They are thinking, probably, about the conflict that going down this road might force them to have in this room, worried about its costs. Maybe they’re thinking also about CAAAV’s reputation, or funders, or partners. They are thinking, in short, about loss — this strange, dark shadow that often keeps us doing things that aren’t quite right because doing them is better than the risk of something new.
Conflict for the sake of good strategy
There are lots of reasons for the lack of good strategy we often see across movement organizations, but conflict avoidance is one of them. Facing that isn’t the only thing we need to do to correct course, but it is a prerequisite, because groups need the capacity to be in healthy conflict in order to develop good strategy and the ability to carry it out.
Sometimes the conflict we are avoiding is between one another on our teams, or between us and other organizations, or with our funders, or our members. But perhaps unexpectedly, often enough, the conflict is inside us — between the parts of us that want to be big and powerful and effective, and the part of us that is ambivalent about power, the part of us that is afraid of the loss that comes with all real choice. Many of us are truly not in the habit of telling the truth when it is hard; we prefer, instead, to stay on the surface, to keep doing what is comfortable and within reach, to keep one another happy, to avoid the hard choice that might put us in conflict with one another or force us to give up things we care about, to protect the little islands we have made for ourselves despite the tidal waves heading straight for us. Conflict avoidance most often looks, in the end, like dishonesty.
But groups that don’t tell the truth cannot form a winning strategy, and they are unlikely to be healthy and strong enough to actualize it even if they did. So much of good strategy — and strong movements more broadly — is about making choices, to prioritize one thing over another, to let go of some things all together, to say many nos for the sake of a strong yes. Good strategy is about painstakingly clawing our way toward the truth: what is real about the opponent, about us, about the world, about our role, about the best way to move from here to there, about what we will need to change, even if it’s painful, in order to get there. Groups that lie to themselves about these things make strategies divorced from reality. Groups that lie to themselves and each other about these things can’t make real hard choices. And groups that lie to themselves about the tensions that exist in their strategy or their group dynamics also lie to themselves about everything else — about what is realistic for them to accomplish, about their competence and levels of accountability, even about their deadlines and when they’ll start their meetings.
It is understandable that we sometimes avoid the conflicts that might lead to good strategy, because conflict can be difficult and dangerous. Many of us, especially those most often on the receiving end of the systemic abuses of this empire, have faced devastating conflict in our work, in our social lives, even in our movements. We’ve seen conflict break things we care about. Not all conflict, after all, is healthy, and even healthy conflict can be painful. And we have so few models for generative conflict, and often find ourselves unequipped, unpracticed and unsupported to carry it out.
The truth is, if we move toward conflict, we will encounter loss. We’ll discover disagreements where we thought we were aligned, weaknesses where we projected only strength, messiness where there was previously order. Sometimes we will work it out, but sometimes we won’t. In our organizations, moving toward conflict will sometimes mean changing course, letting partners down, disappointing funders or members. Sometimes it will mean parting ways with our teammates, hurting or being hurt, firing or being fired. Sometimes it will mean the group dissolving, leaving before the job is done, finding ourselves without a vehicle through which to do anything about the things we continue to want to change. Sometimes it will feel like failure. I cannot even count the number of times — as a facilitator and as a leader — that I avoided the conflict beneath the surface to escape this pain, to protect the people around me from it, to protect myself. It wasn’t just out of fear and comfort; it was also out of love. I loved the people around me and thought that what was best for them was to stay together, thought that conflict would wreck that.
But failure is a tricky thing. Often when we imagine it, we see groups imploding from infighting, mass firings or quitting, the organization disappearing. This happens sometimes, and it is painful when it does, to be sure. But more often, failure doesn’t look like collapse at all: It looks like organizations continuing forever and ever in mediocrity. It looks like achieving far less of our potential because we aren’t willing to confront each other and get to the bottom of things to become a stronger team with a sharper strategy. It looks like a movement incapable of meeting the moment. Conflict avoidance makes this kind of failure much more likely than open conflict would.
People are, in the end, much more capable of facing the truth than we sometimes imagine; we do it all the time. All we need are small supports, encouragements, structures and processes to do it well. In fact, avoiding it takes an enormous toll, requires immense effort, relies on endless tricks. If we want to build powerful groups, powerful organizations, powerful movements, we will have to cultivate truth telling as a skill, a reflex, a superpower.
From Chinatown to Zohran
There is a brief silence that covers the room with the weird chairs, as the organizers from CAAAV consider what Em has said. And then Sasha, the executive director, steps into the gap, walks through the door: No, really. This is an actual option. Let’s play it out.
It is rare to have leaders who are willing to say no to something important for the possibility of a sharper, clearer, more powerful yes; rare, I think, to find groups that are really, truly committed to sacrificing things they care about for the sake of winning. But when I am in their company, I can feel it like a kind of electricity, and it is humbling.
The group begins to loosen, and as they start to talk about what could shift, their eyes light up. Emily and Julie talk about what they could accomplish if Alina and Em joined them in Chinatown; it could mean the difference between winning and losing their campaign to prevent four luxury towers from going up and displacing many of their residents. Em breathes a sigh of relief at the possibility of having a real team, rather than working alone to organize Mandarin-speaking Chinese tenants in Queensbridge while Oni works alone with the Bengalis and Kit alone with the Koreans. They admit that they don’t have much of a chance of winning there.
They’ve knocked on every Asian door in Queensbridge, and even if CAAAV was successful in organizing all of them, it would make up only a tiny minority of the population there. Sandra reminds the group of the logistical cost of shifting their operation in such a big way again, offers some thoughts about how to do it. Alina says, voice catching, that she has always dreamed of organizing in Chinatown, where her grandma lives in a small apartment that she spent visiting as a kid and living in with her as a young adult. Every time I visit, she says, a tear escaping despite her best effort, I can see that my grandma is trying to hide some new pain over something lost and gone — a favorite restaurant closed, a service she needed suddenly shut down, an old friend pushed out of the neighborhood. Farihah and Oni start to wonder about Sunnyside, Woodside and Astoria, these neighborhoods in Queens that Bengali immigrants are making home — a huge new base of people to organize. When Farihah, whose ambition and determination are both inspiring and intimidating, shares that Astoria is where her own family landed all those years ago, the fire usually in her eyes is replaced by something softer and more vulnerable, something seemingly aware of the challenge and the need and the stakes. They all go on talking and scheming, and there is some laughter, some arguing, some more scribbling on the whiteboard. And then there is thoughtful quiet again.
Someone asks: But, what about the leaders in Queensbridge? The doubt creeps back into the new quiet, a doubt brought on by real costs — the real impact on real people’s real lives. They say the names of some of these leaders they have supported and trained and sometimes coaxed into the fight, these poor and working-class immigrants who have so much to lose, so few resources, such a hard road ahead. They talk about the time they’ve spent, about the work being unfinished. They talk about heartbreak.
And then Kit, clear and determined, says: We have to do it anyway. We aren’t going to win if we don’t get more strategic. We owe it to our people to build as much power as we can. This is the first time Kit has spoken, and there is a silence bigger than the others after she does, because everyone knows that what Kit is suggesting could very well cost her her job. Kit is Korean, was brought on to organize Korean-speaking tenants in Queensbridge, and one of the most likely scenarios of the pivot the group is moving toward will mean not only throwing down harder than before in Chinatown, but building a new base of Bengali tenants somewhere in Queens, likely Astoria. There may not be a role for her anymore.
I ask Kit how it feels to say this out loud and she replies: Honestly, I feel relieved. I know it’s going to hurt some of our folks. I know I might not have a job anymore. But winning is more important. And now it feels clear, even if it’s a little scary.
The silence now seems proud — reverent, almost. They look at one another with kind eyes, and it feels like a decision. Sasha comes in again to offer structure and process. They lay out the beginning of a plan to gradually phase out of Queensbridge in a way that helps the members there understand the choice, get themselves organized another way and continue on with CAAAV if they want to. They start to design a process to gather data about different neighborhoods in Queens where they might organize this growing Bengali community and make a plan to test the organizing on the ground. They talk about the campaign in Chinatown, which has always felt like a losing battle, but which they now suddenly feel they might actually be able to win. They set next steps to write out the new strategy kernel.
They can’t yet know, at this moment, that these shifts will result in them stopping the towers from going up in Chinatown, but also lead to the embodied conclusion that if they want more than partial victories in these never-ending defensive battles — want to win a city their people can afford to live in — they will need the power of city hall behind them; they can’t yet know that this will lead to their sibling organization, CAAAV Voice, having some of the first conversations, hushed and tentative at first, about throwing down for a longshot democratic socialist mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani; they can’t yet know that they will organize a formidable Bengali base to win a massive affordable housing campaign in Astoria against a private developer; they can’t yet know that pouring immense volumes of sweat and tears there will result — alongside the hard work of other immigrant-led organizations like Desis Rising Up & Moving, or DRUM, Beats, and the steady organizing of the Democratic Socialists of America, and others — in the creation of a new power base that will end up being essential to that longshot candidate actually becoming mayor. They can’t yet know that, some short months after this mayoral victory — because of a million small decisions made by a whole host of actors that add up to greater than the sum of their parts — the city will pass a historic rent freeze, something they have only barely dreamed of at this point. They can’t see the future, and neither can I.
But there is enough here: enough clarity about their leverage and their options, enough willingness to take risks and experience loss and enter into conflict for the sake of good strategy; there is enough courage, enough honesty, enough choice, enough possibility.
Telling the truth
Not having good strategy sends resources, attention and activity in different — even contradictory — directions. It’s a waste of what precious few tools we have; it usually means we lose. And the losing that comes with bad strategy shapes us over time, gets swallowed up in the form of despair, calcifies into ideas and behaviors that make up the politics of powerlessness — an ambivalence toward power, where we turn inward on each other rather than face outward to the public and our opponent.
In the end, breaking the conflict avoidance that blocks good strategy is really about telling the truth whenever we can. And if we want to be different, we’ll have to practice. We can all begin by doing the small but vital things that are in our control: say what we mean, steer toward tensions instead of away from them, ask follow-up questions when we sense there is something being left unsaid, get curious about what is inside us and inside others, be honest about misalignments when they arise. Every day, little by little, we can just be a little more honest, even when it is hard — about our groups, ourselves, each other, our fears and doubts, our hopes and dreams, the stakes, our plans. We can anticipate conflict, make time for it, create regular rhythms for feedback, have ongoing conversations about how power is being wielded in our spaces, regularly question our own strategic choices and put them relentlessly to the test. We can build all of this into our meetings, our retreats, our planning sessions. We can invite people from the outside to facilitate or advise us in these risky, delicate, transformative journeys; demand that they challenge us, help us fill our gaps, take us through the fire and not around it.
We should do all of this for the sake of good strategy and stronger groups. We should do it because organizations and movements that have good strategy win more often, and those embodied experiences of winning are some of our best protections from the politics of powerlessness — the choice to stay small and pure and righteous over growing and opening and taking big risks. But we should do it, too, because telling the truth is central to transformation. It is a fundamental part of looking at what is and what might be and making the choice to climb the distance between; a chance to flex that muscle of becoming and becoming again; an opportunity to become bigger as individuals and greater than the sum of our parts as groups. And it is absolutely central to the task we have taken up as movements more broadly: to take control of our lives, to shape the world, to make of it something nearer to the world we all deserve.
