On April 22, 2016, one day before the end of the legislative session, the Mexican Congress presented an anticorruption measure that allowed for voluntary declarations of conflicts of interest by public officials.
For civil-society organizations that had long been pushing for mandatory declarations, it was a serious setback. The timing of the bill’s passage — over Easter break — seemed intended to catch activists off-guard. As the news hit, a colleague shook her head and said, “We didn’t see this coming.”
A year and a half earlier, Uganda’s parliament used the same tactic to pass a bill that, among other things, made same-sex relationships subject to the death penalty. The measure had languished for years, in part due to significant international pressure, but in December 2014 its supporters took advantage of the fact that opponents had already left Kampala for the Christmas break and rushed to pass it.
The most direct lesson to draw from this is that when it comes to preventing the passage of harmful laws, holidays are a time for social-justice advocates to be extra vigilant. But more broadly, it’s that those working in social justice need to take into account how change actually happens — not just how we think it ought to happen — when devising strategies.
In other words, we are too easily caught off-guard because our own confirmation bias leads us to give more weight to evidence that supports our work and discount as aberrations that which does not. Understandably, we tend to ground our social-change strategies in deeply held principles and to believe that one good step will lead, logically, to another. But this can cause us to overlook or underestimate obstacles to progress — obstacles that are both familiar and foreseeable. Then we let ourselves off the hook: We avoid interrogating our assumptions of how change happens and give ourselves permission to continue with our original plan of action.
Convictions Too Strong
As the senior director of strategy and learning at the Ford Foundation, I’ve seen the challenges of confirmation bias repeatedly, including among some of the most strategic and seasoned staff.
A couple of years ago, I met with a program officer in Cairo who had been working on housing rights. The officer told me she had funded research aimed at informing policy, and people working on the issue had labored to get those recommendations into the hands of the federal housing minister, who seemed supportive. Then abruptly, the minister was replaced. With great effort, the housing activists, researchers, and others again worked to engage the new minister, who also eventually supported their recommendations — only to see him get sacked as well.
Around the time I was visiting, they were gearing up to engage yet another new housing minister, and the officer was optimistic.
I was there to help this team get clarity about its strategy and related theory of change — and to make sure the strategy reflected how change really happens. I suggested the team might effect more significant and lasting change by identifying policy and implementation interventions that civil servants — and not influential but highly replaceable housing ministers — were responsible for. Doing so would require different tactics — and perhaps a different way to measure success — but might ultimately have greater impact. The program officer left our conversation reflective, open to possibilities she had not yet considered.
Our convictions about how change will happen can be so strong that they eclipse actual experience. The Cairo example was a reminder of the opportunities we have to rethink strategy by asking: Is what we call unexpected in fact predictable?
Alternative Plans
For me, there was no greater illustration of this form of confirmation bias than a September 2016 meeting of Ford program staff working on inequality in the United States. In discussing how nonprofits were thinking about the upcoming U.S. presidential transition, most program officers presented priorities that assumed they would be dealing with an administration led by Hillary Clinton — an assumption that jibed with most of the current data and media analysis.
But as each officer spoke, I grew more uneasy. I noted that conservative foundations had likely planned for two scenarios: one for Clinton and one for Trump. At the time, Trump’s policy priorities were unclear and full of contradictions, creating openings that would quickly be filled if social-justice advocates did not have their own recommendations to offer.
My suggestion that we plan for that possibility went over like a lead balloon. The conversation did not shift, and the group returned to scenario planning for a Clinton presidency.
After the shock of the election, many progressives doubled down on their belief that their original strategy was the right one. They continued to focus on the rising American electorate — some 133 million unmarried women, people of color, and young people who are eligible to vote — that many in the media and much evidence had suggested would build a broad coalition of voters who rejected xenophobia, racism, and sexism. But a lot of factors — white men and women who felt unheard, the flaws in the electoral system, foreign influence, the corrosive aspects of social media, inherent sexism, the media’s own confirmation biases, and many other factors — told a different story.
The rising American electorate is vital, but in progressives’ disproportionate focus on it, they can overlook critical complicating factors. If the courts continue to be stacked at all levels with young, deeply conservative judges; if corporations continue to “capture” the government; if the census continues to be politicized and undermined; and if a deeply broken tax system ensures that government programs are underfunded and extreme wealth lands in the pockets of a few, this rising electorate will not have proportionate influence — even if, as is predicted, it becomes a majority.
Question Assumptions
We tend to view the bad things as temporary and the positive shifts as stable and permanent. Only with distance can we see that both bad and good are all phases. For progressive advocates, it was hard not to see the Obama era as indicative of fundamental, stable change, but we overstated the extent of its power and ignored the backlash that was brewing.
Ultimately, reducing inequality means changing the balance of power. It is not enough to establish good policies — which, as we have seen, can quickly be undermined by a new administration. What matters is making a meaningful, sustainable change in what is valued and who decides — and in ensuring a strong civil society that holds government and private interests accountable, regardless of who is in charge. To get there, we’ll need to continue to question our own assumptions and biases. We can do this, in part, if we make a point to:
Learn from the unexpected. In building a strategy, we need to consider right from the start the possible hurdles and then check in regularly to assess what did not go as anticipated and how we are adjusting. In the face of setbacks, we should resist the impulse to double down on what we have been doing and instead be prepared to adjust interventions based on new evidence.
Plan for backlash. As we design effective strategies and see success, we must not assume our work is done. We have seen with so many issues (including LGTBQI, reproductive rights, migration, and corporate power) that wins can generate backlash, and we need to be prepared to respond in a way that can help make our case and discourage further obstacles.
Ask why it hasn’t happened yet. There is often a long history of efforts similar to ours, and we need to understand why they fell short. Often it is because they ignored the fact that those in power are reluctant to relinquish that power. It’s our responsibility to ask: What do we know about instances of success as well as failure? When and where have we seen power balances shift? What can we factor in that those before us have already learned?
Pay attention to structural institutions. We must pay close attention to the structures and institutions invested in preserving power and design strategies with them in mind. Focusing on long-term social change means paying attention to the military, courts, tax systems, data collection, media, and independent agencies, among other bodies. It is our job to figure out how to engage and strengthen their ability to be agents of positive change and protectors of the fundamental cornerstones of democracy.
We already know how to get better at achieving social change, and we can find an example in Sudan, where protesters helped end the ruthless 30-year rule of former President Omar al-Bashir and found themselves negotiating with the transitional military government.
Rather than pushing for immediate elections that could reflect popular will, they asked for a longer transition, citing the Arab Spring and the quick transitions to democratic governments that resulted in military rule. Even now, as they seek to navigate a sudden crackdown by the interim military government, they are carefully considering their moves. The protesters want to learn from previous unsuccessful transitions to democracy. They do not want to say in a year or two, “We didn’t see this coming.”
Bess Rothenberg is senior director of strategy and learning at the Ford Foundation.
