I don’t really know anyone who loves debriefing after an organizing or advocacy campaign.
I know I don’t.
I mean, how can rehashing what worked, and what didn’t, possibly compare with the excitement of planning your strategy, or the intensity of implementation?
But I don’t know that that’s really the point.
What I do know is that we skip over the debriefing part of the process at our own peril; that, to the long-term viability of our organizing efforts, it’s every bit as important as the other phases; and that skillfully facilitating a debriefing session is far from easy.
The best news?
Social workers are naturals at this part.
Key to a successful debriefing are some of the skills that social workers hone, both through our professional education and through our work with clients: attending to both affect and content, eliciting participation from all members, monitoring intragroup relationships, and utilizing active listening that can lead to corrective action.
I remember one debriefing session, for example, that revealed that my decision to skip one part of the agenda because we were running more than 20 minutes behind (and our guests of honor had a cross-country bus to catch!) resulted in some feelings of betrayal among some of our coalition. Some damage was done, but we were able to repair it much more quickly because we paid attention to it.
Another debriefing session discovered that my leaders thought that we weren’t aiming high enough in our legislative goals, and that they wanted to ramp up the next phase of the campaign. Without taking the time to talk through the work, I could have missed this huge step.
And, of course, I’ll never forget the coalition debriefing where one member let slip that her organization was receiving significant grant funds to support the work, while the rest of us were adding the work to our existing loads. Needless to say, some renegotiation ensued.
I’d love to hear your own stories about debriefing in advocacy, how you make it work, and what it has meant for your progress (and your process). Here are my top five debriefing tips, mostly learned the hard way:
You shouldn’t always be the facilitator: Especially if you’re the lead organizer, taking the lead on the debriefing can stifle honest discussion by maintaining the power imbalance present in the work itself. Also, facilitating debriefing sessions is an important learning activity for organizers, so giving your leaders a chance to take this on can be critical to their development.
Make it automatic: If you have to call people together for a special event, or pull people away from the next campaign, in order to conduct a debriefing, it’s less likely to happen, and less likely to have your leaders’ full attention when it does. I found that a short debriefing immediately following event (like in the bus on the way back, or on the phone that evening), followed by another brief session at the beginning of the next, regularly-scheduled meeting, often worked well. Find the schedule that works for you, but institutionalize it.
Follow through: Nothing extinguishes people’s energies like feeling that their concerns are ignored. When people raise ideas about how to improve future actions, or how to select the next target, make sure that someone is assigned to be accountable for making that happen. Or, be honest about the limitations that will make it impossible to achieve everyone’s expectations.
Transparency rules: Here, among your core leaders, you can’t afford to be anything less than totally honest. If you made certain decisions because of pressure from your organization, say so. If you sacrificed certain ideals because of lack of consensus among your leadership, talk about that. No action is ever perfect, but you can be sure that the next one will be worse if you don’t deal openly with this one’s problems. This also requires being clear about the criteria by which your work should be evaluated: are you mostly concerned with leadership development? turnout? media coverage? progress towards policy goals? Your group can decide the measuring stick by which they will be evaluated, but you need to be transparent about how you define “success.”
Be selective: A mass public meeting is not the place for a no-holds-barred debriefing. Especially in the early stages of a campaign, you don’t want to air all of your secrets in a public forum, and you can’t expect leaders to grow and take risks if they fear that they’ll be completely exposed. That’s why I like debriefing at the beginning of a planning session; those who regularly play an active role in putting together campaigns are those with the most say in how they should be shaped, and evaluated.
How do you “debrief” in macro practice? How do your social work skills come into play? What lessons would you add to the five above?
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