ORG Sunrise

Readiness
PLEASE give your comments on this topic!
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Copy of an email sent to Mae Kim at NEA TOD.

It was good to see you again, if only briefly, at the recent NEA training. Of the sessions I have taken at NEA, yours have been the most beneficial. It was due to your preparation and style. It was also due to my readiness to learn the material.

If I had to name ONE thing I learned from you, it is that adults learn best when they are ready to do so. This readiness may be caused by a number of things. For example, I really did not want to know about Medicare and elder care until 2002. When my Dad died suddenly and I had my Mom to care for, suddenly I was ready to learn these things. Another example for me was when my son placed third in the state science fair as a high school freshmen. His field is physics and math. I did not take much math in school nor did I take physics. However, I knew that if I was even going to be conversant with him, I HAD to learn at least the basics.

In 1991 I attended the Harvard Trade Union Program. Among our instructors was Bill Urey (as in Fisher & Urey the authors of Getting to YES!). I learned interest based bargaining from some very accomplished people.

This was around the same time I learned the readiness principal from you and some basic organizing theory from John McKaharay and Jon White. Since then I have been working on organizing more than anything else.

In that time I have merged the IBB and the organizing to an effective model for "non-bargaining states". I have applied it to the southern suburban area where I have worked and it has been successful. During the last couple years I did some training for NEA. In preparation, went back to some stuff you had given us long before and was reminded of the readiness idea again.

Since then I have tried to merge the readiness concept into the IBB/Organizing model I already had. Now, two years later I can truly say that this has improved the model.

I believe that the readiness issue applies to organizing as it does to training. People become organized when THEY are ready AND when we present them with organizing as an option. The history of the labor movement supports this theory. The car plants (and steel mills and coal mines, etc.) were organized because the people were ready AND someone showed them how. It did not happen prior to that because of unreadiness. AND, it did not happen because some organizer decided to go to Fisher Body and convince them they needed have a sit down strike. The strike occurred because the workers themselves initiated it. The organizers, being smart people, saw a parade and jumped in front of it.
Similar stories exist within the NEA. Unfortunately, some of the organizers decided the victory was a result of THEIR efforts and not dependent so much on the readiness conditions already existing.

Folks will do stuff when they are READY. Readiness occurs due to factors organizers may be able to influence but do not really control. It can be a gradual process of lower wages (as we are seeing now) or it can be one precipitous event. On December 6, 1941, no one was really ready for war. Two days later they were.

I know that sounds like DUH!! But, it is not. We (NEA) are still using "Action Plans" that assume that WE can predetermine what is going to happen in a given area and that WE can go out and MAKE it happen. This is false. However, some folks have had success with this model either because they were lucky or because they were smart and looked for an existing parade and jumped in front of it. The problem is that this intermittent reinforcement of success has been credited to the ORGANIZER and the model without regard to the real situation. And, of course, the organizer is not going to say, "Hey, they did all the work I just helped them see how they could do it." while they are receiving all the glory from their bosses for a job well done.

My point to all this is, what do you think or what do you know? Do you have any evidence from what you know or what you think, that not just learning, but action as well, takes place only when there is a readiness on the part of those being organized? And, if that is the case, how can we build this into the processes we use and share with one another? And, how can we restructure the reward systems to encourage this?

Thanks for you time in reading this. I hope you can share what you know and what you think. If not then I am pleased to just have raised the questions.

Peter Toggerson
toggerson@post.harvard.edu

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