Where there’s a will, there’s a way, till reality has its say— Ekho
There are three pillars of activism, only 3 things I need to get better at: creating a pool of questions or answers, prioritizing them, and execution (which is a very thin layer). Here is an example of how those pillar play out in one particular project. I view my failures, in my impact carrier, in light of these pillars.
Failures are so underrated. Hearing stories about them is more important than about successes. Luckily, I have been blessed with many failure stories 🙂🙂 I will tell you the how and try to analyze why.
My achievements are so much sweeter in the company of failures, or are they?
Good management stands on exceling at human resources work, fundraising, a fine strategic process, and a good system; knowledge management system, rituals, tools. I try to get better at Systems Thinking.
Steering towards anything, from going to the bathroom to wining a Nobel Prize, stand on three pillars: 1. The creator. Creating a pool of questions or answers, which are both ideas. Ideation and creativity strengthen this 2. The Prioritizer. Choosing and scripting the ideas, could be a commination of several of them, parts of ideas, some blend, and different investment effort into different ideas. Analytical thinking, bias mitigation, and tools like Weighted Factor Model can strengthen this. Prediction capabilities. 3. The executor: It's a bit tricky to define what exactly execution is, because usually after the prioritizer and the creator stage, usually one goes back to the priortizer again. See this example for more details. I define this stage as a robot stage, unaware, uncreative, unopen to change only automatic actions based on prior work. Strengthen it by attention to everything you decided, focus, and calm. Those things depend mostly on the result of all the Q&A and prioritization you have done before in your life: your working system, your inner investigation, your knowledge and skills.
Meditation comes in handy for all stages.
Pool of questions and pool of answers: Going back to the world of questions can bring to life what was never asked, lightbulbs that didn't go on (like at the end of a meeting that you thought you understand but don't, you can never be too clear...)
Order, standing on the shoulders of yourself in the past, enables this. I could do this website since I have a knowledge management system for several years.
1 and 2 should be done ideally in different time and location
Many People skip stage 1 and 2, leave it to the automatic mental processes that are outside awareness. If you start in the third stage, and live in the world of answers. It is important to often go back to the world of questions. One way to do it is to ask questions about the questions.
Creating the pool in ongoing always. If your in a process that doesn't have an idea list and you keep in for a later stage, you're doing it wrong
That's it. Get better at those is the only thing you need.
let's say you're organizing a conference on Urban animals. You created a pool of questions: who is the target audience, when should the conference take place, and so on. You prioritize the target audience for today, so you had a pool of questions, prioritized one of them, and now you go back to step one and create a pool of answers to the question "who is the target audience": architects, local politicians, wild animal activists, environmentalists, comedians, welfare biology academics, crazy cat people, and so on. You decide to prioritize activists, academics and three local politicians. Now for execution: how should you invite them? It goes back to a pool of options: Post on social media, a newspaper ad, a private message etc. When you're writing the private message, that is the execution, but actually goes back to the process of creating a pool of questions and prioritizing them: what opening would get him excited? Like AI, you can think about every next word as a pool of options you create and prioritize from.
Obviously many of these processes are subconscious and automatic, and many questions and being prioritized and answered without you even been aware of it. It is good to be more aware of what we are not aware of, so we can tweak it a bit.
So where is the execution part? I think the best way to define execution is where you have no pool of questions or answers in awareness, you just focus on what you already decided to do, without any creation or prioritization. You've decided we are going to call the vice mayor of our small town to personally ask him to give the keynote at the conference. If in the middle of the call you think "what should I say now, it is going really bad and he doesn't understand how this could help him look better in the eyes of the animal lovers", you're out of execution, because you're now creating a pool of answers to a raised question and prioritizing them.
I define execution by absence: It is only following orders, no thinking. A skilled performer adjusts constantly without any question reaching awareness, so if it is automatic, then you're not stepping out. Intervention in your own process is what makes you step out of the execution stage, which is exactly being "the robot": unaware, uncreative, unopen to change. That is good, sometimes, it keeps our energy. An emotional intrusion like fear or ego or fatigue can get you out of the robot. Turning awareness onto your own execution makes skilled people choke, so awareness is not always to the advantage. The target is not maximum it, but to calibrate it, fine tune it, which is itself a trained skill.
You can be an executor in certain aspects but remain creative in others (for example, robot state while reading the speech, but creative in reading the audience's response, though not changing anything I say).
Questions for you: When are you in an executor state of mind? When do you need more of it, when do you need less of it? When are you "too much of" a robot? When are you too much of a creator? When are you too much of a Prioritizer? You can analyze yourself in light of those three pillars and questions.
Idea generation: I am good at generating pools of questions or answers. I have a broad superficial knowledge on many issues and go a bit deeper in some domains. I am a generalist, and I am OK, even good, at many things: I can write, lecture, fundraise, manage, go undercover, investigate a new issue, hire the right people , and more. Not an exception on any of those, but between OK and good. Yet, in hindsight I understand I wasn't broad minded enough in my first ~13 years of activism. I didn't read books on social change, I hardly knew anything about AI, I was only familiar with effective altruisms philosophy in a shallow way.
Prioritization mistakes, mostly in predictions:
Too optimistic prediction (falling in love with ones ideas), not enough feedback, and not working with prioritization methods (like Weighted Factor Model). Introspection, specifically meditation, helped my prioritization.
I have very basic statistical understanding. I know correlation is not causation, I understand a bit about Bayesian reasoning, but practically not much more than that.
I Didn't do enough checks before prioritizing a project. The Camera On Animal was hardly used by other activists, and the whole broader Spytech vision I had didn't work for our budget and the needs, plus willingness to put effort into new tools, of the investigative community. I also inclined too much for what looked shiny, fancy and exciting, setting a precedent, over simple and practical. Our best Spytech project this far came from the most common request investigators had and very mundane; just a regular camera that combines different features that were not there in the same product.
When the people you depend on, like journalists, don't want the main course, the essence of the story, "confetti" - creative angel, very high quality footage, interesting framing, can only help so much, because they just don't want the core of it, they don't want to tell the story of farmed animals. The first 360 undercover camera or really craze HD footage from inside the duck cones after slaughter, or camera on animal or personal story of me in Australia, the success or failures of there depended much more on the general willingness to tell the story in the first place. Getting creative within a narrative is enchantment, not a game changer.
And now, achievements. I recently started maintaining a document of clear successes , and I think more activists should do it, it helps and motivates. Here are the main things I wrote in it:
Mind: Shifted minds, helped the Israeli animal rights movement wave bringing more money and people, helped some specific animals along the way, helped global investigative community. Being an important part of the “vegan wave” that splashed Israel in the beginning and half of the 2010’s, Creating the investigative space for animals in Israel by Founding the investigative team at Anonymous and (kinda) Let The Animals Live, Doing major undercovers myself, Inspiring other orgs (glass walls and more) to do it.
Raising awareness via major high profile investigations inside Israel
Social media education, reaching hundreds of million of people (100M minutes views of our videos only in 2022-2023)
Successfully pitching many stories about animal rights to the media (as Anonymous spokesman and more)
Pushing people
Matter: Helped alternative protein grow in Israel
Reestablishing MAF and other AP related
Basis for the current community work by MAF, the accelerator, CMO and more
Alfred's was created due to MAF, and my and Noa’s interventions possibly saved SuperMeat
Meta: Global investigation services
Managed a lot thanks to meditation to improve relationships with fellow activists and be a voice of non polarization within the animal rights movement in Israel.
Contributing to more peace (relatively) in the community?
**Practical change for animals:
Repeal the reform that would have increased slaghter in Israel (but practically slaughter went up anyway, but still it did some good)
Painkillers for intrusive procedures in Australia
Major change in the TNR space in Israel
Governmental committee, legislation and more in Israel. First criminal convection of farmed animal abuse, millions to non-profits from class actions settlements (Adom Adom).
Systems thinking is about the emerging properties in systems that are part of bigger systems. You can be productive without it in certain cases, but in order to be effective in achieving an ethical goal, you need to look at the whole.
Without looking at the whole system, you just have a bunch of balls here, each one rolling in straight lines. This website is part of my systems thinking practice, a distillation of my Second Brain in Obsidian.
