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Click for full view. Original graphic from Movement for New Society.
"It might have been prudent at the beginning to identify potential groups that would oppose the movement, and solicit their support, but we did not anticipate such opposition."
— Emile Short in Powerful Persuasion
“The media”, I asked, “where should we put the media?”
“Somewere in the middle”, said someone in the group. “No, the media's more like a hostile neutral”, said another.
As I moved the marker across a crescent shape drawn on the flip chart, we settled on a wedge between Neutrals and Opponents. A small group of us had gathered for a Strategy Retreat in the Spring of 2000. In a little over a year, the Summit of the Americas would be coming to Quebec City, a key milestone towards the conclusion of a new Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). We were trying to figure what to do to prevent the secret international draft treaty from being hastily adopted.
I had instinctively pulled a graphic (as reproduced above) from an old newsprint broadsheet published in the early 1980’s by the Movement for a New Society (MNS). I drew an arch on a flip chart and we went over it to survey the political landscape. This allowed our group to build an overview of who were our most determined allies and who were our fiercest opponents, and who fell in between the two extremes, as either Active and Passive Allies, Neutrals, or Passive and Active Opponents.
The exercise proved invaluable. We came to see that most of our efforts should be devoted to winning over the uncommitted neutrals in the middle, who seemed to hold the balance of power, rather than simply push forward and escalate tactics that would spend the exhaustible base of our most militant activists, or hit our heads trying to convince our fiercest opponents.
If we could move some oblivious neutrals to become passive allies, that could also allow us to succeed, we dreamed. Or, if we could arouse doubts among some key active opponents so they became passive, that would perhaps make a huge difference, we thought.
The key to winning, we realized, was to move a significant segment of the population and bring it closer to us. That’s when we decided our strategy should pay close attention to the media; and we chose to focus on journalists as a more specific constituency.
At the time, I wished we had had instructions on how to run such an exercise. It would have made our strategizing so much easier.
A few months later, we invited George Lakey of Training for Change at a conference designed to help us and our allies move forward. That's when he led an exercise he called the "Spectrum of Allies". He drew a crescent on the blackboard — there was the old MNS graphic! A hundred of us populated the graph with the various constituencies around our issue. Even with a group this size, we could reflect collectively on where to spend our limited energies most effectively.
I have used this exercise many times since, including as part of the Asia Regional Training Workshop with the New Tactics Project. You will find a step-by-step description of the Spectrum of Allies here.
When you feel ready to go beyond the Spectrum of Allies towards a more in-depth planning framework to further your group's strategic thinking, download the excellent CANVAS Core Curriculum: A Guide to Effective Nonviolent Struggle. In Chapter 8 (pp. 94-105) you will find a tool called the Power Graph. It will help you build a more sophisiticated and dynamic view of how you may want to move your political segments over time.
— Philippe Duhamel, interTactica.org
Have you ever used the Spectrum of Allies? How did it go? What other strategizing tools do you know about? How do you strategize with a whole group? All comments welcome!
