NGO Educator Jiri Mäntysalo, DSL Study Centre:
The DSL Study Centre course Organize to Change the World – Leadership in Movements is based on organizer and sociologist Marshall Ganz’s understanding that leadership is an essential part of organizing and a skill that can be learned. What is most essential, above all, is how leadership enables people to act together in a way that builds long-term power and changes the world.
I myself had the honor of participating in the pilot of the Leadership in Movements course in Autumn 2025. In this text, I will open up my observations on leadership, its significance in communities, as well as my personal experiences of applying Ganz’s teachings in an organization where I am active in my free time.
The idea of the Leadership in Movements course is to implement the lessons and exercises covered in the meetings and course material into the community in which one operates. A course project is carried out within the community, and its goal is to achieve a change whose intermediate steps and final outcome can be concretely defined and measured. The project can be thought of, for example, as a problem encountered in the community that you want to solve.
Many have surely been in a situation where everyone basically agrees on the importance of something, but still no one does anything.
I chose Vantaan Rauhanpuolustajat (Vantaa Peace Committee) as the community for my course project because I thought it would be a suitable organization for applying Ganz’s teachings and for quickly evaluating the effects of changes in ways of operating. Vantaan Rauhanpuolustajat combines two interesting elements: the organization has a long history and established ways of working and culture, and at the same time the group of active members is close-knit and sufficiently flexible to navigate a changing operating environment.
The guide Organizing: People, Power, Change, compiled based on Marshall Ganz’s teachings, serves as the material for the Leadership in Movements course. The guide is excellent. It is extremely well structured, clear, and the topics are approached through illustrative and clarifying examples. The guide is also well suited for self-study, but the lessons and exercises only come alive and become useful when they are applied in practice within a community.
Many may wonder what leadership means, for example, in communities that aim to operate horizontally or in a way that dismantles power structures. In some communities, leadership as a concept has been consciously avoided. An important perspective to consider is that leadership is ultimately inevitable, and that leadership exercised through individuals in fact exists even in communities whose structures do not officially recognize it.
This may be visible, for example, in that a certain person or persons are valued more than others in the community due to their previous influence or position, and in that case their views carry more weight in decision-making. They may also possess such (tacit) knowledge that others in the community do not have, and this can lead to the concentration of power, even if the person in question does not themselves feel that they are exercising power.
The purpose of the Leadership in Movements course is to recognize the existence of leadership in the community so that situations like those described above are easier to resolve. Above all, in the Ganz’s sense, leadership aims to increase the operational capacity of the community. This means greater power to influence the course of events in the world, as well as structures in which leadership can be taught, learned, and shared. Organizing based on such structures is not dependent on individual achievements and enables more sustainable and more scalable activity.
Ganz’s approach is based on the idea that people commit to meaning: to why something affects them personally and why it should be addressed now rather than at some later time.
At the core of the course are Ganz’s five leadership practices: telling stories, building relationships, structuring teams, strategizing, and structured acting through measurable goals. The concepts and teachings truly gain substance when their impact and the renewal of ways of operating begin to show in practical activity.
Larger changes require time, but even the application of individual methods produces visible change.
Stories carry weight
Storytelling rises to a central position in Ganz’s thinking on leadership and organizing because information or analysis alone is usually not enough to move people to action. Many have surely been in a situation where everyone basically agrees on the importance of something, but still no one does anything.
Ganz’s approach is based on the idea that people commit to meaning: to why something affects them personally and why it should be addressed now rather than at some later time. When this can be built, discussion shifts from abstract to concrete. Suddenly it is no longer just about an opinion, but about a shared experience and a common reason to act.
Many international experiences also support the importance of stories in advocacy, in promoting the visibility of a community, and for example in recruiting members and building new connections and alliances.
The mode of operation and communication style of Vantaan Rauhanpuolustajat has largely emphasized information and research. There is nothing wrong with that, but it must be admitted that with those alone it has been difficult to raise the organization’s local profile, to make the organization known through its themes, or to engage new people in influencing work.
We have organized excellent discussion events on diverse topics with expert speakers, but they have not been enough to elevate the activity to a new level. The core group of active members has remained fairly constant in recent years. The personal experiences of the active members and interesting details of their agency have been missing from communications.
Simply saying “Join us!” is rarely enough, but when meaning, emotion, and the sense that this matters are included, the threshold for participation is clearly lowered and identification begins to emerge.
As part of my course project, I set out to test the implementation of storytelling in a meeting of the organization’s active members, where we practiced together by creating our own stories using Ganz’s three-part structure:
- Story of Self – What does this issue or community mean to me and why have I decided to get involved?
- Story of Us – What values does the community share and what kinds of experiences have shaped it?
- Story of Now – What urgent challenges and tasks does the community currently have, and what does it encourage people to do and choose?
About one minute was allocated for each part of the story, so the full story lasted about three minutes. The shared experience of telling these stories to each other, as well as giving and receiving feedback, was very positive for us.
Stories surely have many everyday uses in any community. It is, for example, about how new people are invited to participate. Simply saying “Join us!” is rarely enough, but when meaning, emotion, and the sense that this matters are included, the threshold for participation is clearly lowered and identification begins to emerge.
A good story works like an “elevator pitch” that helps both familiar and unfamiliar people understand the meaning and necessity of the activity and that invites them into something. Stories can also be flexibly adapted into different styles and formats depending on the target group and situation.
The power of conversation
A community cannot function without people and the relationships between them. Ganz emphasizes that, for example in campaigns, building relationships is more important than platforms. The idea makes it quite undeniably clear that without trust there is no commitment, and without commitment there is no sustainable action.
In practice, this means that organizing cannot rely solely on general messages, social media posts, or campaigns, but requires genuine interaction with people. In both the forms of activity and internal ways of operating in a community, it is particularly important to develop interaction and contact with people.
One-on-one conversations between members of the community, listening, and mutual understanding are central here. It is slow and hard work, but this is where the foundation is built upon which everything else rests and whose importance becomes visible in the long term.
In the guide compiled based on Ganz’s thinking, one-on-one (1:1) conversations play a major role. These one-on-one discussions, held either remotely or face-to-face, are of three types:
- Recruitment – when a new person wants to commit to the activity.
- Maintenance – conversations that go through past and upcoming activity with someone currently involved.
- Escalation – when a person is ready to take the next step on the ladder of commitment, that is, to move into a new role, area of responsibility, and task.
One-on-one conversations are worth the effort. Through them, information is gained about the successes, challenges, resources, and goals of a person joining, continuing in their current role, or committing to a higher level. At their best, the person receives support and perspective for their work from the conversation.
In the context of Vantaan Rauhanpuolustajat, the introduction of one-on-one conversations is the next development project. So far, discussions have focused on joint conversations within the organization’s leadership, i.e. the leading committee, but the journey toward the snowflake model described in the course material is underway.
There is power in a committed group
Building teams is the next step, where these individual relationships begin to form something more sustainable. In many activities, one encounters the situation where the work accumulates on a few (or even one!) active individuals, who eventually become exhausted or frustrated. The same pattern easily repeats itself. Ways of operating that accumulate responsibility or remain fragmented reproduce themselves, even if people in decision-making bodies and positions sometimes change.
As strange as it may sound, many organizational activists can surely relate to how great it feels to realize that you are unnecessary and that things run smoothly in the community even if one person is temporarily or even for a longer time out of action.
Ganz’s model directly challenges this. The idea is that a leader’s task is not to do more themselves, but to enable more and more people to do. This requires consciously sharing responsibility and giving people clear roles in which they can grow. Role descriptions and responsibilities must be documented and agreed upon so that changing roles – taking on greater or lesser responsibility – is possible in a controlled manner.
When a team functions well, it is not just a group of people working in parallel, but a whole in which people support each other and learn together. This also changes the nature of the activity: it becomes continuous and evolving, and no longer dependent on the endurance of individual people. As strange as it may sound, many organizational activists can surely relate to how great it feels to realize that you are unnecessary and that things run smoothly even if one person is temporarily or for longer out of action.
No activity without a goal
Strategic thinking brings direction to the whole. Without it, it is easy to end up in a situation where many things are done, but nothing actually moves forward. In the Ganz’s sense, strategy does not mean complex plans, but clarity and the ability to make choices.
In short, strategy means identifying the community’s resources and harnessing them as the power needed to achieve the desired change. To create a strategy, it is important to set aside time and think concretely about what the community’s resources are (not only financial, but also for example informational, skill-based, logistical, etc.) and who the allies and opponents are.
It is also extremely useful to outline a concrete path toward the desired change – what clearly defined, measurable intermediate goals can be envisioned along the way.
Reflecting on all this and putting it into practice also requires acknowledging that not everything can be done, even if many things would be good in themselves. Strategy forces prioritization, and it is precisely through this that activity begins to build power rather than scatter it in many directions.
Measurable goals bring together the leadership practices discussed above in concrete action. Without them, even good ideas easily remain vague activity that is difficult to evaluate or develop. When goals are made concrete, activity becomes visible: it is possible to monitor how many people join, how many commit for a longer time, and which ways of operating produce results.
In practice, Ganz’s teachings carry the idea that leadership should not be seen as an inherent trait of individuals but as a learnable skill and a force needed to organize action, which we can develop together as a shared process in a community.
Measuring results is, above all, a way to understand the state of the community and to learn. When something is measured, it can be discussed, changed, and improved. Activity does not remain static, but develops continuously through experience. Clarifying the goal and the actions leading to it also helps evaluate to what extent results depend on one’s own actions and what can be learned from that.
Forward together
In practice, Ganz’s teachings carry the idea that leadership should not be seen as an inherent trait of individuals but as a learnable skill and a force needed to organize action, which we can develop together as a shared process in a community. Even if a community or teams have separately designated leaders, world-changing and organized action is not built solely on their contribution. It emerges through interaction and is visible in how people are able to act together and achieve wins.
Ganz’s teachings are particularly useful in environments where activity is largely or entirely based on volunteering or a shared set of values. At the same time, they provide concrete tools for situations familiar to many: why people do not commit, why responsibility accumulates on the same individuals, and why activity does not seem to progress even when there is will.
Reflecting on these questions and renewing ways of operating is also very important for the future of communities that receive state subsidies and/or whose activity relies on the work of paid employees. If, for example, funding from the state were to cease one day, a community might not collapse due to the loss of funding thanks to stronger volunteer commitment and teamwork.
Perhaps the most significant contribution of the course is that it makes visible things that often remain unclear or unspoken. The course provides language and structure for how to build effective collective action. At the same time, it challenges participants to think about their own role in leadership in a new way: not as performers, but as enablers of success who help others find their place and grow into actors.
The combined sum and impact of the steps described above and their components have the potential to build the kind of power that organizing and changing the world can be at best.
Jiri Mäntysalo
NGO Educator, DSL Study Centre
Useful links
A concise introduction to Ganz’s teachings, on which this text is also based:
https://commonslibrary.org/what-is-organizing-an-introduction-based-on-the-work-of-marshall-ganz/ and https://leadingchangenetwork.org/resource_center/what-is-organizing/
Course material:
https://commonslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/Organizers_Handbook.pdf
All essential course content in one guide! The purpose of the course is to practice skills in a safe environment and to receive support for applying them in one’s own communities.
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Organizing for Power online course:
https://organizing4power.org/news/power-up-level-1-november-2026/