From climate breakdown to fascism to runaway capitalism – what would it actually take to tackle our world’s roaring avalanche of challenges? Paul, a veteran of social movements through his work in facilitation, process and conflict mediation, stepped back and asked himself this question back in 2018. He realised that the problems are so vast and self-exacerbating that they require social change on a scale orders of magnitude beyond existing or historic efforts.
This epiphany led to Paul working with his colleagues in facilitation collective Navigate to formulate A Movement Like We’ve Never Known in an online presentation. Something between a blueprint, roadmap, manifesto and a provocation, this talk – accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f_bVh3bjpY – draws on deep wells of specialist experience to propose a new way of thinking about social movements with the scale and ambition we’re going to need.
The experience Paul brings to bear on this work is a topic in itself. As part of Navigate, Paul has spent a decade working to help movements function more effectively. He defines himself as largely drawing on a critical strand of NonViolent Communication; if you haven’t heard of ‘NVC’– or if you have, and weren’t convinced – it’s well worth hearing Paul’s account of it as an indispensable aspect of healthy movement life.
Our conversation is wide-ranging and tends toward the macro – but to repeat Paul’s closing invitation: Navigate is very much open to people reaching out to inquire about ‘movement fight rooms’, conflict mediation in general, and facilitation skills.
We cover:
Frame of collective power: why we need it, why we need to use it differently
Did The Left make an unconscious ‘Sacred Vow’ to not hold power?
“It maybe doesn’t even occur to us sometimes how we are taking on a particular shape of organising”
Framing of ‘higher leverage points’ and causation
The pernicious ‘punitive’ and adversarial dynamics in left/activist culture, and how they undermine our movements in micro and macro
A big takeaway is that we need to spread the orientation towards actually cooperating at scale
Movements are a spectrum, from fragmented to cohesive
Bernice Johnson Reagon: ‘coalition space’ vs ‘home space’
The nature of MLWNK as more ‘meta-movement’ (or mimetic intervention) than movement
Ghandian ‘constructive program’
‘A strategy based on a sensitive awareness of complex systems and is aiming for high leverage points within those systems’
The Fighting Together project: movement fight-rooms!
How do we actually seed change across movements?
The slow cultural shifts already in train: recognition of trauma, burnout, conflict, scale
Sketching an emergent movement-wide collaboration
Limits to the Left and implications of movement ecology
What Navigate can do for you
The presentation itself, A Movement Like We’ve Never Known:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f_bVh3bjpY
Find Navigate – and their potentially free conflict mediation help – at https://www.navigate.org.uk/
Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing
