• Is simple to comprehend
• Captures the imagination
• Provides a moderate challenge
• Is winnable
• Results in real improvement in people's lives
• Gives people a sense of their own power
• Builds leadership
• Suggests concrete and immediate action
• Relates to people's experience
• Involves emotional and intellectual attachment
• Has a clear target

 
Personalize the target mean to identify the person who has the power to give you what you want and make them the target of your effort.

Primary targets are those people who can give you what you want.

Secondary targets are those who have influence over the primary target and over which you have some influence.

 Strategy: the science and art of orchestrating resources toward goals. A process of thinking, an approach to action, and a method of moving in the desired direction.

Tactics: The specific methods for implementing a strategy.

• Locality development--community forum, support group of concerned citizens, organizing a coop or alternative institutions
• Social planning--community survey, needs assessment, resource inventory, program evaluation, demonstration project
• Social action--boycotts, strikes, rallies, protests and marches

Collaboration: working cooperatively with the target.

Campaign: educating and persuading the target.

Contest: confronting and challenging the target.

Based on the relationship between the target and action system.

Two questions:

• Is there agreement about the nature and scope of the problem and agreement that something should be done?

• Are the lines of communication open between the target and action system?

Collaboration tactics:

• Implementation
• Capacity building
• Participation
• Empowerment

• Education
• Persuasion
• Cooptation
• Lobbying
• Mass media appeals

• Bargaining and negotiation
• Large group/community action
• Legal (conventional)
• Illegal (rancorous)
• Class action lawsuits

Counter-tactics used by the target

• Buffer groups
• Divide and conquer
• Absence of decision makers
• Vague agreements
• Telling you what you want to hear
• Endless meetings
• Request for volumes of information
• Overwhelming you with information
• Providing you with special attention and offerings
• Feigning injury or hurt feelings

 

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Conflict and conflict management

Conventional approaches: Officially established methods for resolving conflict.

• Courts and law suits
• Grievance procedures
• Mediation program
• Negotiation

Rancorous (non-conventional) approaches: Methods that go outside the officially sanctioned approaches to resolving conflict.

• Boycotts
• Strikes
• Rallies
• Staged media events

 

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Six stages of conflict

1. Starts with a relatively minor single issue.

2. Bring into open issues festering under the surface.

3. Breath and depth of conflict increases.

4. Polarization increases.

5. Focus of conflict shifts to issues nor directly related to original conflict.

6. Conflict deteriorates into personal attacks.

 

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Benefits of conflict

• Strengthens identity and cohesion.
• Catalyst for addressing more deeply seated problems.
• Develops conflict management skills.
• Creates opportunities for diverse groups to learn about each other.
• Can be a relief valve.
• Can add life and dynamics to a dull and stagnant system.
• Conflict resolution can have an integrating effect.
• Conflict may be a strategy to test one's opponents.

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