On this page, you will find the video, summary and transcript of Chapter 6, Designing the Revolution, by Roger Hallam.

Summary #

In this talk, Roger Hallam discusses the importance of understanding the theory behind organizing and highlights the concept of complexity theory. He explains that actions in complex systems can lead to varied and unpredictable outcomes. When running organizations, it's beneficial to account for the interconnectedness of events while making decisions. The way you design your operations within a social group plays a crucial role in the outcome of a social or political project. It's about making systematic, iterative changes and learning by trial and error to improve effectiveness in the organization.

Part 1: Introduction to Theory in Organizing #

The presenter, Roger Hallam, explains the importance of understanding theory in organizing. Theory is the lens through which you view things and forms the foundation of your actions and priorities. A wrong theoretical perspective can lead to inefficiency and conflict. Understanding complexity theory can enhance your effectiveness and reduce conflicts.

Part 2: Complexity Theory #

The presenter describes complexity as being somewhere between simplicity and chaos, where things are complicated and interact with each other in ways that are not always predictable, leading to varying outcomes. However, you can still make a probability analysis of the likely effects of actions within the system.

Part 3: Causality, Network Theory and Social Categories #

According to the complexity theory, A doesn't only cause B, but also causes a lot of B and a lot of the opposite of B. Therefore, it is more about the comparison between good effects and bad effects. Network theory prioritizes analysis of links between things. Social categories are seen as a family of characteristics, not a foundational element.

Part 4: Designing the Revolution - Practical Applications #

The presenter discusses practical applications of complexity theory, such as prototyping, piloting, and iterative processes in social organizing. Through trial and error, organizations can optimize their strategies and improve their effectiveness. He warns against simplifying complexity and emphasizes a pragmatic approach to implementing ideas.

Part 5: Unpacking Social Space #

The presenter stresses the importance of the design of operations within a social group as being central to the success of a social or political project. Instead of focusing on individuals or macro-level dynamics, emphasis is placed on the design of the social space where operations are carried out. The design of the social space is the driving factor behind individuals' effectiveness in a group.

Full transcript #

Download subtitles with timestamps (SRT)

This is Roger Hallam and you're listening to Designing the Revolution. It's talk six, Complexity. Okay, so for the next talk or two I'm going to be looking at what you might call theory stuff before we get on to all the different types of organizing as it were. So theory is a bit of an off-putting word but I'd like to think of it as the way you see things and the reason it's so important is whatever you look at, whatever you try to create or organize, you're always going to approach it in a particular way. Often you don't realize you are but by definition you've got to have some assumptions behind what you do and that affects what you think is important, what you prioritize and you know fundamentally what you actually see happening. The reason why this is so important is, without beating around the bush, the reason so many people are unsuccessful at mobilizing and organizing is because they've got the wrong glasses on, as you might say. They're looking at the whole thing in a way that's suboptimal, as they say in the trade. Okay, so this, once you get into it, is really interesting because it enables you to be more empowered in what you do because the way you look at things is much more effective and also significantly, assuming other people share your theoretical basis, your way of seeing, then it reduces conflict because what I'm going to be going through with this whole complexity business is a way of making conflict more amenable to resolution because things aren't as obvious as you might think they are. That's the reason why complexity is so useful. Okay, so at the moment I'm sort of throwing in these bits and pieces of theory. I am hoping to bring it all together in a bit of a coherent whole, so I will be repositioning these themes and trying to bring them together so it's not like this is it and off we go. But it's a good enough start, at least I hope so. All right, so in our talk or two, I'm going to get on to practicalities. I'm going to be talking about proximity. I'm going to talk about sociability. So these are ways of organising people and principles of getting people to do stuff. And behind those two talks I'm going to do in about two or three talks' time is this theory about complexity and attention and non-linearity. So in this talk I'm going to be focusing on the complexity side of it and other things being equal we'll be going on to attention and non-linearity on the next talk. All right, so you've probably got an idea about what complexity is and I'm sure some of you know there's a sort of continuum. There's things that are simple in this world, you know, a car engine, it either goes or it doesn't go, you know, you press on the handle of a door to get out of a room, you do A, it causes B, everyone knows it's the way it is. At the other end of the continuum is what's called chaos. So chaos is no one's got a clue. No one's got a clue what's going on because whatever you do you've got no idea what the effect of it is and that's the situation as well. Now those two things are quite easy to understand in a way, they're pretty clear. Complexity is obviously something in the middle where things are complicated but it has particular characteristics which are unique to that phase or that situation. So it's not simple and it's not chaos, it's a sort of independent entity and it rotates around the following ideas. So because things are complicated and they interact with each other it's not possible to know for certain the effect of your action but it doesn't mean that you can't make a probability analysis. In other words you can say if we do this it's pretty likely that will happen and this is where this word optimise comes in. So you can work with other people and through your collective intelligence as you might say you optimise the best probability. But the fundamental thing here is you don't know for certain but as I said it's not useless, it's very useful to bring these ideas together. So your information is always going to be incomplete. A similar idea is there's an anchor or a signal in the system. So with an anchor what that means is things tend to vary but they vary around a particular point. So you can say for certain that it's going to be near this point, near this phenomenon but in real life things buzz around it as you might say. In other words there's a signal, there's something that's critical and really important in the system and there's a whole load of noise around it because it's a real world and there's always noise, there's always stuff going on. You might have a meeting, it's usually say two hours, it could be an hour, it could be three hours, it's not going to be 20 hours, it's not going to be two minutes. So you have this anchor and this signal, the basis or the structure of it and then you've got all this variability around it. I'm going to talk about tipping points which is part of the whole complexity thing in the next talk. So we'll leave it like that as a basic definition. Now you're probably, if you've listened to my other talks, you've probably got in the back of your head or hope you have that this is juxtaposed, like it's fundamentally different to this Newtonian mechanical deterministic system. Now there's a background here which is in the 17th century, Newton discovered all this mechanical mathematical basis of physical reality and it was enormously powerful and enabled things to predict things really well. And of course like human beings do, they thought of over ectopoding as you might say and decided this is how society works as well. So you've got this massive surge of theory around the mechanical relations of society. But dare I say it was all rubbish because society is fundamentally different. Society is a general rule, it's a complex system, there's loads of self-reflective individuals interacting with each other, it's complicated, people react to each other, we're not talking about apples falling off trees, we're not talking about gravity. So you can see this is, as you've probably noticed by now, an ongoing structural theme through these talks is to try and get all you guys to move away from this cultural inheritance you've had, this theory that you've grown up with, you don't realise you've got it, but you're going around making all these mechanistic assumptions and predictions and consequently having big conflicts with people because you're making assumptions that are just not sustainable. All right, so let's just throw ourselves into another sort of theory, this is network theory. Again, you know, there's books on it and you can read lots about it, but there's a few fundamental elements. The idea here is that there are nodes, there's things, and then there's links between those things which are sometimes called bridges. And of course there could be a few of them or there could be a lot of them, they could be really strong links, they could be weak links. So this is a new way of looking at things. The fundamental point here is that it prioritised the analysis of the links rather than the things, the nodes. So for instance, there's a famous paper which said the way people get on in life is by having lots of weak links at the beginning of time, but of course it's not just been made up in a historical period for certain purposes. The way to look upon categories, to be more smart, is to look upon them as having a family of characteristics. So it's not like there's necessarily a foundational element to a category. Usually there's a whole bunch of things. So just as a little example, I'm in court at the moment and the prosecution is trying to make out that a burglary happened when some people broke into some office and disrupted it and caused some damage. And I said, well, I'm going to say, well, burglary covers an altitude of sins, right? It's got a load of different elements and it's like breaking into a place, it's about stealing things, it's about causing a lot of damage, it's about being secretive. There's a whole bunch of things. Now if a lot of those things aren't actually in existence in that event, then it's questionable, of course, whether it was a burglary. So we need to be quite flexible about concepts and categories. It's not that they're not useful. Obviously they're useful and inevitable. It's more that you just hold them in some sort of pragmatic headspace. Does this make sense? Could we pull this category apart? So you can see the beginnings here of why people get their heads around complexity. They tend to be less in conflict. If you're working with a bunch of people, everyone understands complexity. If someone comes up with a concept, they already know that someone might challenge them and say, yeah, yeah, that's cool. But what does the concept mean? What's actually in this category? Okay. And related to this is the notion then of some sort of continuum. So I'm going to use a concrete example here. Let's take direct action. So someone comes into your group and they go, direct action is great, we should do it. Or someone says, direct action is terrible, we shouldn't do it. Now this is classic. I know it's a simplification, but this is a classic reductive category situation. And instead of thinking about the category, you should think about what's called a continuum. In other words, you have a line, and you have some things that are definitely not direct action. You have some things that are a some things that are really full on, and you move along that line. Now when you're deciding what to do, a key analytical tool is to choose a point along that continuum. So for the sake of argument, you might say most campaigning, most sort of radical political action is about three out of 10. It's three points along the line. So zero is nothing, 10 is off scale, bad, sort of awful lot. So let's say it's about three. Now when people take direct action, they sit in a row or something, you might say that's five. And as we'll be discussing in future talks, my general orientation is you want to be at eight out of 10 for optimization of effect. In other words, you want to be doing direct action, but you want to up it quite a bit. But you notice that I've said eight out of 10, I haven't said nine out of 10 or 10 out of 10. In other words, it is possible to overdo it. And that obviously relates to, you know, becoming aggressive, sort of machismo, sort of approach violence and such like. So the top of the curve, arguably is eight out of 10. That gives you a lot better, a lot better methodology of actually optimizing what you do by thinking about this continuum. All right. So the last theoretical notion here, I mean, all these things are related, as you probably noticed. The last thing is about causality. And causality is really, it's a bit of a head-fuck subject, to be honest. But, you know, the general gist is A causes B, you know, something happens and it causes something else. In complexity theory, i.e. in complex social reality, that is almost never the case. In fact, I think I'd stick my head out and say it's never the case. In other words, if you, you know, if A causes B, you'll probably find it causes a lot of B and it causes a lot of the opposite of B. In other words, it causes one effect, a good effect, as you might say, but it also has bad effects. They can see how conflicts happen all the time, because someone focuses on all the good effects and says, we should do this because you have lots of good effects. And because they don't understand complexity, they get really annoyed if someone says, oh, I have bad effects, because they don't realize that things have good effects and bad effects all the time. So it's not a question of whether things have good effects or bad effects, it's more a comparison between the good effects and the bad effects. And obviously, if the good effects are on balance going to outweigh the bad effects, you should go for it. So again, you've got this more sophisticated analysis, which enables people who understand the theory to work together without too much shouting, as you might say. So I'll just give you a little example here, Liz, is, you know, there's advertising on smoking. So he's saying, you know, you shouldn't smoke because it'll do your lungs in and da da da. And it's really effective. You know, there's pictures, people go, oh, my God, that's terrible. I'm not going to do it. However, there's also people who go, what the fuck, you know, I don't care about death, I want to be oppositional, I have a self-image, which is I don't take orders from people, blah, blah, blah. So some people, most people are going to go, yeah, okay, I'm not going to smoke, I'm going to smoke less. But a minority of people are going to go, oh, I'm going to smoke more, believe it or not. So you can see how that works. All right, so let's look finally then at three sort of practical applications. So the first one is what you might call prototyping or piloting. Now, a lot of people do this, and so you may be familiar with it. But the general rule of thumb is you've got an idea, right, you've got a plan. You've been listening to my podcast, and you go to your group and go, haha, got this great plan. And they go, no, no, no, no, it's not going to work. And you go, no, no, no, it has to work, it has to work. So again, the conflict-reducing, complexity-esque approach here is to go, look, let's try it, you know. If it doesn't work, it's not the end of the world, right, I've put loads of time, money and resources into it. And also, if it doesn't work, it's going to give us loads of data. It's going to give us the failure of it isn't not useful, because it will give us loads of information about what fails, which is a big idea in complexity, by the way, you know, people, I mean, failure isn't the greatest thing in the world. But you know, the fact of the matter is, you do learn from it. Okay, so what you do is you try it out. So you've got the general idea. And this connects with this notion of iterations. So what you do is you do a pilot, and then you decide you're going to go for it, because it's good enough to go. Notice that phrase, good enough, no one's saying it's perfect. And then you iterate. And you know, you learn from that iteration is 75% successful, 25% unsuccessful, to 25% unsuccessful is useful. And then you iterate again, and it gets bigger. And obviously, the system's changing. So it's not like you're going to reach perfection, it might get a little bit worse again. But this is what's called design engineering. You're just continually iterating. It's not some out of time and space abstract sort of idea. You're in there, there's time, there's space, and you're influencing it through this iterative process. So you can see, this can sort of get complicated when some people interpret complexity as you can't replicate. So I'm totally against this notion. That's not what I think complexity is at all. Having said that, I did talk to a lecturer who used to do courses on complexity. And it was a bit interesting, because I was studying at the time, bottom up organization to get people to stand in local elections. And the guy who originated the method of doing this, I thought it was really cool. It's really exciting. He wrote a little book about it. I looked at it, I thought, here's what we can do is systematize this and start iterating it and rolling it out in other towns and cities around the UK. And this woman who was the complexity lecturer, she said, no, no, no, it's a complex system out there. You can't replicate it. Everything's different. So to my mind, that was wrong. I'm pretty sure it was wrong. What I said was, no, no, no, it's not chaos, right? That's chaos. What complexity is, is you try it, and it's not going to be totally successful. And you're going to have to build your model over a few iterations, and then you roll it out. And yeah, sure, not every town in the UK is going to come up trumps, maybe 80% or something. And you can't really wish for better than that. So when we set up Extinction Rebellion, a similar sort of situation, a few groups were set up, and myself and the people I worked with were going, okay, we're going to systematize it, we're going to find out what the key things are, the best practice, and then we're going to roll it out. That's what we did. And, you know, within six months a year, there were 200 groups, and it became like, pretty predictable, not totally, of course, because it was a complex situation. Okay, so the next one is like a balance of logics, which is really one of the more difficult conflict areas in a group to deal with. Because let's say you're, you know, in a mobilization group, and you meet together with the people in the actions group, and you've got a logic, right? Mobilization, the system for mobilization, recruiting people to do direct action is, you know, X, Y, and Z. And it has a number of priorities and needs and organizational principles and all the rest of it. And you go into the whole system meeting, you go, look, this is the logic of mobilization. And then the action people come in, and they've got their, you know, X, Y, Z system, how they get people on the road, you know, blah, blah, blah. They've got their priorities and their logic. You can see the problem here is they don't coincide. I mean, they might coincide slightly, but they're not, they're not the same thing. And obviously, people fall out about this and have a conflict. And the name of the game is to say, look, it's a complex system, we're going to look at the whole system, we're going to have to optimize the whole system. And that means that the action people are going to get the whole, the whole of their priorities and the mobilization system. So we need to go through the different logics and see how we can combine them in the best way we can. And without wishing to get overly intellectual about this, there is a sort of philosophy that this relates to called pragmatism. And there's a guy called Richard Rote, if you want to read some philosophy and read it. So what he says, and it sounds a bit naff, but what he says, it's got a long story short, is some things you cannot be reduced to some logical proof, particularly in social affairs. And at the end of the day, the best you can aim for is, is a bodge. I've got a feeling he doesn't use that word. But basically, he says, you've got to bodge it. And usually when people, you know, I'm a great bodger, by the way, but usually people will come to me and say, oh, you've bodged that, you know, you know, you should be more thorough, you should be, do more consultation, you should be more objective. And I'm going, no, basically, there's a limit to your knowledge of a social system. You do a certain amount of work on it, you get a certain amount of data, and then you go for it. You're not sitting there for weeks and months on end. Because you simply will never get to an objective analysis, right? You're just going to have to intuitively go for it, try it out, and then react to it. In other words, there's limits to theory, right? And this is the big theme of these podcasts, right? You've got theory, and you've got to go and do the practice because otherwise, you're not going to get anywhere on the theory and vice versa. All right, so the last one, which is one of the major themes we're going to come back to over and over again, particularly when we're looking at small scale design, is social space, the concept of social space. So I think I've touched on this before, but let's just remind ourselves. So traditionally, in politics, there's two genres, as it were, there's two main approaches. So one is the individual approach, which is, there's these things called individuals, and they make individual decisions, and you influence those individuals. And this traditional liberal approach, as it were, is sort of atomized individual situation. Then there's this macro analysis. So the macro analysis is traditional left wing approach, sometimes called political economy, you know, it's top down, let's look at the whole of society, let's look at top level political dynamics, you know, capitalism, Marxism, all that type of stuff. Now, both of those, you know, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, both of those have some functionality. But the main purpose of these podcasts is to say that is not the center of social causality, which is a technical phrase. What I mean by that is, the thing that basically influences the success or not of a social movement or of a social or political project is mid-level design, otherwise known as the design of the operations of a social group. So notice this connects with this idea of norms, roles, and rules. You're not going into this mid-level space to influence individuals, you're not trying to influence the space as the space, you're trying to get in there and look at how it works and how it operates. And that's a big deal, put it like that. So the proposition is, if you get that right and you iterate on it, you can roll it out and it will, through an emergence process, as you might say, massively influence things on a macro level. So let me give you an example. So there's a guy called Owen Jones, as you may know if you're in the UK. And I heard him, he's a cool guy, and I heard him give a speech and he said, what we need to do is to go and mobilize Cornwall. I think he was talking about the Celtic fringe or something. You know, we need to organize Cornwall. And of course, on a rhetorical level, that's fair enough. But like with a lot of left-wing organizing, it doesn't really tell you anything about how effective or otherwise you're going to be. So for instance, if you're going to mobilize Cornwall, what exactly are you going to do? You're going to have rallies, are you going to do canvassing, you're going to have workshops, blah, blah, blah. And then the real question is, how are those organized? So if you're going to do canvassing, what do you say when they open the door? What piece of paper do you give them? What's the follow-on process? There's probably about 20 elements in canvassing, all of which are really influential, massively influential on how successful you are. And as someone who's done canvassing for 20 years and various things, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, if you know what you're doing, you'll be doubly as effective as someone who doesn't know what they're doing. And you only need to spend about 15 minutes with someone to get them to be pretty good at it. But if you can't spend that 15 minutes, then unfortunately Owen Jones is going to mobilize Cornwall. You can see what I mean. No disrespect to Owen. The other example I will look at is, yeah, the other example is my award-winning research. Sounds very dramatic, doesn't it? My award-winning research at King's College. So what I did was I organized a meeting around Red Strikes, and I organized it in a participatory way. You don't need to know the details in this talk. I'll be coming back to it. But basically it was participatory, you know, people enjoyed it. They could talk about stuff. They were sitting around tables, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the meeting, through various methods, an 80% level of empowerment, okay, as a generalized output from that meeting. So a fortnight later I went to another meeting, again around a similar campaign aim, to have four speakers and 15 minutes each talking, 20 minutes for questions, you know, two or three blokes of a particular type sort of asked the questions, if you know what I mean. People looking at their social media, blah, blah, blah. You know, ran around with my questionnaires afterwards, 20% empowerment, 20% empowerment, all due to the design of that social space. So needless to say, this is the revolution. You know, this is one of the big aspects of this designing the revolution, which we'll be talking about over and over again in the coming talks. So just to finish off on this, the point here is there are not good or bad people, and they're not good and bad groups. You know, this is really boring. It's a sort of pathology that we are brought up with. It's what is drummed into us by our culture. You know, that person over there, Joe, he's useless, he's bad. You know, someone over there, Louie, she's great, she's amazing. That group, they're terrible. You know, that political group, blah, blah, blah. That's not true. What we're saying here under complexity theory is it's about the design. If you put bad people into a good design, they turn into good people in inverted commas. If you put good people into a bad design, I can guarantee they'll start shouting at each other. So that's our job as revolutionaries, as you might say, is to be smart enough to know the system is complex, and that's pretty foundational to our success. Okay, that's it. I'll speak to you again soon. Bye.