strategy as facilitation

The strategist of tomorrow won't be the smartest person in the room. They'll be the person who knows how to shape the room. And that room will include machines.

“I think of organizers,” Ransby told us, “as people who really are trying to move other people, [and] create collective movement in a very conscious, deliberate and strategic way, informed by a larger social change agenda.”

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

“Being an organizer, to me, means seeing the kinds of things that people either are doing or might be able to do, given what their energy and excitement or vulnerability is, and helping people achieve a goal that undoes some aspect of what makes life too difficult or makes it not precious,” says Gilmore. “So that can be anything from organizing

Organizing, on the other hand, is a more specific set of practices. It is a craft that requires us to cultivate a variety of skills, such as intentional relationship building and power analysis.

For too long, we've treated strategy like a board game: static pieces on a flat surface, governed by logic and turn-taking.

But the real world isn't orderly. It's dynamic. Interdependent. Shaped by weather, mood, emotion, timing, attention, trust.