Our community’s struggle in regard to the larger society is very much like the situation described in the quote. Constant efforts at resistance, while necessary, and unavoidable, will not resolve those large forces that are gradually degrading the foundation of our current forms of personal and community support.
We need more than a set of advocacy and resistance techniques, and we need much more than any savior or ideology that might exist in the larger complex system could offer.
Our usual approach to big-picture barriers is an operational plan, with tasks and measurable outcomes. But an operational plan is not nearly enough. An operational plan simplifies and reduces potential outcomes by its very nature, and ignores available resources in the pursuit of apparent predictability.
We need an approach that actually fits our community, that values our freedom and choice in support of the unique dreams of each of us.
We need a Strategy.
A strategy is a way to organize our change efforts around two unavoidable realities:
- The unpredictability of the future.
- The relentless scarcity of resources (in all the forms those resources might take).
Aligning our change efforts means that we match all our available resources to all of the outcomes we dream of achieving and is called a Grand Strategy.
