Organizational success hinges on balancing unity and autonomy within its structure. The development of leaders is crucial to ensure both autonomy and unity in a movement. By focusing on leadership development, training, internal democracy, and strategic thinking, organizations can cultivate deep, strategic leaders who can effectively unite and act together in key moments. This emphasis on developing people as strong leaders not only enhances individual capabilities but also enables movements to be more than the sum of their parts, fostering success and network effect through capacity building.
The relationship between structure and impact is an important one for organizations to explore. The same goes for social movements. The Sunrise Movement is a youth-led coalition on a mission to stop climate change—and recently, they placed their own OS under a microscope: How should the org make decisions? How should its principles evolve? How could it balance centralization and decentralization? Sunrise asked itself these questions to help design a structure capable of meeting our current climate moment.
In this episode of Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans chat with Aru Shiney-Ajay and Dejah Powell from Sunrise Movement about the connection between internal and external change and how org design can help contribute to tackling the climate crisis.
Learn more about Sunrise Movement's principles: https://www.sunrisemovement.org/principles/?ms=Sunrise%27sPrinciples
Learn more about Sunrise Movement's DNA: https://www.sunrisemovement.org/campaign/sunrise-re-launch/
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