one x one

I have been a quite off schedule on the blog lately. I am very sorry about that. I have been doing a bit of other work and that has taken me away. And I just am not sure what to say about literacy these days. I think it has to do with the fact that some of us, because of funding cuts, are not sure what the future holds and when we talk about literacy in general or our own work we always come back to that question. Many who work in literacy -- or in any publicly funded community development work -- spend a good bit of our working lives in this space. Planning for things that may or may not happen. Trying to figure out how to make things happen with no money. Trying to figure out how to make a living and do literacy work at the same time.

In thinking through some of these things, not very effectively so far I will admit, I keep going back to an article by Umair Hague: Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators.

The seven lessons are:

1. Have a self-organization design.

2. Seek elasticity of resilience.

3. Minimize strategy.

4. Maximize purpose.

5. Broaden unity.

6. Thicken power.

7. Remember that there is nothing more asymmetrical than an ideal.

Right now I am thinking a lot about number 3.

"Obama's campaign took a scalpel to strategy - because they realized that strategy, too often, kills a deeply-lived sense of purpose, destroys credibility, and corrupts meaning."

More and more, literacy programs and organizations are being expected to or are asking to engage in strategic planning processes. We think of it as a way of finding answers to how to move forward in uncertain times. We hire consultants and post the result of our 3-day planning retreats on our websites. And then what? How do we do long term planning when we know that will probably never have the resources to carry out the plans? Or that circumstances change almost daily and the plan that made so much sense just a few months ago seems quite irrelevant to the purpose of today? And what about the heartbreak of engaging in these processes with partners to find the results of our work, the hard won compromises and recommendations shelved and soon to be forgotten?

Many literacy workers choose literacy because they want to live their lives with "a deeply-lived sense of purpose" and what Hague seems to be saying is in order to achieve number 4, maximize purpose, we must do number 3, minimize strategy. Perhaps number 3 also gets us more easily to number 2, the elasticity of resilience that would help us sustain our purpose in the face of changing governments and each administrations' strategic planning and ensuing policy whims. Do we respond to the barrage of strategies with little strategy of our own but with deep purpose and resilience? What if instead of speaking back to policy with strategies and recommendations of our own, we broadened our unity and thickened power of the whole field?

Some would say that many already do. I agree. I see it and I hear about it all the time but I see it happening program by program. I wonder how we could do this as a field and what would happen if we tried.