 |
I think most of us in the nonprofit sector, myself included, routinely misuse the word "strategy". It ends up with a much broader and less useful meaning than it could. I try to correct this by clearly delineating between strategy and tactics in my teaching and consulting work. I do this in part to help offset our obsession with quick wins, tips, and tricks, and in part to help people identify the enormous returns we can get when we choose the right strategy for our projects. That's the context in which I read Mark Kurlansky's book Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
We can look at civil society as a sector that concerns itself deeply with power. In social service work, we focus on empowerment at a personal level. In social change work, we focus on redistribution of power. (I personally subscribe to the notion that there can be deep synergies between these two approaches.) Nonviolence is about as far from being a "quick tip" as you can get. It is a strategy for power that changes the way we think about everything we do.
Living as we do in a time of perpetual war, it doesn't take much to rally people, even most of civil society, around violent action. We tend to think we are being "realistic" when we do so. But the history of violent and nonviolent action reveals that the former almost never really works and that, at least sometimes, the latter does. Kurlansky's book should be required reading in today's schools, but failing that, strategic thinkers in the nonprofit sector owe it to themselves and society to know these things.
Posted: 3/12/10; 6:28:40 PM # |
RSS