Methodology and Facilitation

The overall design of the New Tactics Asia Regional Training Workshop benefitted from the experience gained through four previous regional workshops (Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, West Group, and Latin America), and the International Symposium held in Ankara, Turkey. During the first four workshops, the program primarily consisted of peer-to-peer tactical training sessions. To improve this model, the Asia workshop incorporated similar tactical sessions within a larger, hands-on experiment using strategizing tools. This experiential strategy building process allowed for an immediate application of the tools and tactics to relevant issues and scenarios.

The hope was that participants would gain, by experience, an understanding of how to incorporate new tactics into an overarching campaign framework.

To realize this, participants formed four "village" teams around common issues (housing, labor, equality, transparency, and women’s and children’s issues). The villages served as the primary structure for the workshop program. In addition, the villages created self-managed identities that vastly improved participants’ involvement and sense of belonging in the workshop process (while also freeing everybody from the sometimes cumbersome management of large plenaries).

The overall objective was for each village to create a "tactical portfolio" containing:

• a Tactical Map of key relationships
• a clear short term goal (based on a long-range vision)
• a campaign slogan (based on a Myth Reality Value analysis)
• a Spectrum of Allies
• a timeline with identified tactcs to move toward the objective(s)

Another exciting new feature of the Asia workshop was the introduction and use of technology to capture and share information during the workshop. To do this, each village used wiki technology to create web pages where participants could document their experiences.

In the past, the use of "strategy" was, for the most part, limited to the precinct of generals, high-ranking business executives and – if you were lucky – elder activists; however, democratic strategizing has revolutionized planning among human rights practitioners. We are now entering a new era where strategy, tactics and campaign plans are built not from the top down by a single master strategist, but from the ground up by grass roots human rights practitioners.

That is why, as facilitators, we are providing these resources on the Asia workshop design. We hope that the group processes and tools we used will travel far and wide and adapt to a wide variety of contexts. We also hope to refine these concepts and designs through future trainings and learning opportunities.

Please newtactics [at] cvt [dot] org if you’ve found this information useful. We also encourage you to send us tools and resources you’ve created to help your group with the challenging but essential tasks of setting goals, designing strategies and implementing tactics.

Nancy Pearsonnewtactics [at] cvt [dot] org">
Asia Workshop Facilitator and New Tactics Training Manager

Philippe Duhamel
Asia Workshop Facilitator

 

[Download a detailed facilitation agenda]

[Download tools and exercises]

 

*Note: Some of the tools and activities used during the workshop were created by Training for Change. These documents are marked as such.