I have been looking over the story of my inbox. I am not talking about each email, each word, each chapter but the novel as a whole. What does my inbox say about the movement?

My inbox is 894 emails. It spans a month or two. Most of the messages likely need to be filed, stored, deleted. A few really valuable ones teach me something new, require I act or connect me with a project or fundraising opportunity. The very best connect me with friends and family, the best emails inspire me to do something different. However, in aggregate most of these emails are useless but I will scan them all to find the ones that matter most.

In many ways, my inbox and yours tell the story of dysfunctional movement. We have an over abundance of stale and highly edited emails telling us what someone wants us to hear. We have all the success stories but none of the failures. We have the edited and clean public versions of the campaigns going to nowhere. We have the stale data of yesterday with actionless briefings and stories unrelated to our capacity, context or campaign. We have little movement of key information and data across the movement. The best peer-to-peer information is mostly in listserves. They continue to be the backbone of coordination.

The gems in my inbox are personal . The professional gold in the inbox are the proposals from others, the draft documents that I can influence, the editable content, the leaked versions of stuff passed among friends. Some of the best stuff says “do not forward” and is forwarded to me cause I am not on the lists.

My inbox is not uncommon. It is the story of the movement and it needs to change.

Inbox Insights…

Why do I subscribe to so many emails and listservers? To find trends, to be able to see what is going on to find the opportunities and threats to my issue and my organization. This is the most inefficient way any of us can do the work of organizing . It is terrible for trend spotting but lacking an alternative all of us will continue to stay hooked and looking at inbox for a perspective that never emerges.

What I see at the inbox level …

I see names of people and groups. I see subject lines and threads of conversations related to each other. I can scan the list evaluating what to open by relying on reputation, skills of the writer, big ticket needs, interests and actions. I can make out some groups working on climate change that should be working together, I can at a glance scan of my inbox dates, subjects, senders to see an aggregation of activity knowledge, traffic and movement.

What I can not see at the inbox level…

Without opening the email I am missing lots of details. I miss the nuance of the asks, the fine grain language of goals, the richer stories and access to supporting documents. I can’t get what is really going on and can’t tell if the people that I think are talking about the same thing actually are. Are they really replying to the same message or are they just using the same email message subject lines?

My inbox and the movement

The flow of information in my inbox is mostly useless. Like my inbox the movement lives on a fire hose of communication that is unengaging , not actionable and of little use. Like the data that we see in the reports and exchanges from official channels our communication is broken as a network:

1. Most information going up to donors, public and the media is cleaned and missing the lessons learned from failures.

2. Most information coming “down” from donors and the media on the stories of the movement and activities is old and unactionable.

3. The volume of communications makes the best of the information that is public hard to find.

4. The best and actionable workable data is peer to peer, guarded and hidden.

I would imagine that there is nothing new in this analysis. I assume that in the 80’s some foundations funded a big study to prove that information analysis is a problem for the movement. The foundations were flying blind and not doing enough measuring and evaluating so they could make their choices. The philanthropy evaluation wave of the 90’s reinforced the reporting work and compounded the volume of reports being edited and thrown around without the guts of lessons learned form failure, without drafts and opportunities for groups to change behavior. The great and valuable information was pushed underground into informal channels “do not forward”.

Shifting to Traffic Control

When I think about information sharing and actionable information. I like to think of traffic reports. My inbox is a traffic jam. The flow of information across the movement like the cars moving through LA. Our campaigns , staff and issues stuck in bottlenecks for attention unable to connect with right people.
Traffic management is not about asking each driver what they are doing, why they need to go into high traffic areas as well as a some central command dictating who should avoid what and moving them all along. Traffic management is about revealing the information about traffic to the individual drivers so they can adopt and optimize the way they travel. Traffic managers look at trends over large areas and manipulate intersections and green light pathways or red light a sections of the grid. They don’t control the cars but merely in the control intersections and pathways on the network. They build roads or lanes. In such a complex system of moving parts with such a complexity of outcomes it is the only way to manage the system.

We need the opposite of the data and information system we have now. The next evolution of our movement is going to take place when leaders hand in the command model and move more into a traffic management roll. When our campaigners have the traffic maps and data to self-organize we will see more campaigns get where they want to go.