In the spirit of full disclosure I need to tell you I'm a Democrat.
I have been my entire adult life. It's a choice I made. Some people prefer to say "I'm an independent; I vote based on the issues and candidate." To which I say, God bless and please do real research before casting your vote. But I believe in the Democratic party, for better or worse.
I chose a different course-to work within one party, attending caucuses, ringing doorbells, making phone calls. I vote in every election. I even vote in primaries. I attended my most recent precinct caucus in 2008, supporting Barack Obama.
I learned a lot in 2008 about political organizing, because the Obama campaign was very good at the organizing art in two very different ways.
First, they had a lot of experience in how to organize and turn out supporters "on the ground." This is the traditional way of running a campaign: find enthusiastic volunteers, open campaign offices, get people out in neighborhoods ringing doorbells, call people on Election Day and make sure every supporter has a ride to the polls. Obama and his staff learned all about this as community organizers fighting for elections on the streets of Chicago, where getting out the vote through door-to-door organizing has been raised to a brilliant, Byzantine art form.
But the second way they knew how to organize was new and brilliant: how to use the Internet and online social networks (including e-mail) to find angry and passionate voters, reach out to them, and convince them Barack Obama should be the next President of the United States.
As Keith Olberman said, "Hilary Clinton ran the last great campaign of the 20th Century. Barack Obama ran the first great campaign of the 21st Century." Clayton Christensen has written about the difference between how traditional companies engage in "sustaining" innovation that creates only incremental value, while real change comes from "disruptive innovation" that creates exponential value. That was the difference between the Clinton and the Obama campaigns.
The way the Obama campaign brought their two types of political organizing came together-"high touch, high tech"-I think describes the best attributes of Agile marketing: people over process, outcomes over inputs, customers over contracts, and responding to change over following a plan.
I attended Obama organizer training in December of 2007 at a cramped headquarters on University Avenue in St. Paul. It was a cold night and by the time I arrived a cramped conference room was filled with more than 40 people in folding chairs. A few had small children with them.
A young woman named Micah led the meeting. She was an organizer from South Carolina. Tall, African-American, with a southern twang, she called the meeting to order in a no-nonsense manner. After explaining that we would each be assigned to a specific precinct to organize voters, she began the evenings training session in what I thought was a pretty typical way of beginning meetings: she asked everyone to introduce themselves.
But she asked more: she said, "Tell us your name, where you're from, and why you're supporting Barack Obama."
I looked around the room at the 40 people here. The first few people spoke. Each one was different, somehow-young, old, suburban, white, Somali, mom, student. Each person spoke passionately about why they were there. The stories were unique, though the reasons were all similar-most of us were sick of eight years of Republican administration. Some were angry about the war in Iraq. Some wanted to pick a leader who would truly represent and bring change, and they thought Barack Obama was that person.
One elderly man explained he was from Chicago and had driven up to Minnesota and was staying with a nephew, sleeping on the sofa, so he could organize for the February caucuses in Minnesota. Then he would go on to another state.
After ten minutes I did the math and realized that this process was going to take more than an hour, if each person was allowed a minute or two to tell their story. (And I was towards the end of the group, getting impatient thinking about what I was going to say.)
But after 20 minutes I noticed the room had gone still. Everyone was really listening. The passion and intelligence of each person was clear as each stood and told their personal reasons for giving time to Obama's campaign. The stories were each unique, but the reasons were common.
This was the first big lesson from that meeting: each person on a team understanding each other person, but all in service of a common goal. By explaining in our own words and listening to each other explain we were building a common vocabulary and consensus.
The second big lesson came after all the explanations were over. Micah said, "When you go out to organize, when you ring doorbells and talk to your neighbors, tell them the same story you just told us. That's all you have to say. We don't have "talking points" or "ways to overcome objections." If someone wants to know Obama's position on a particular issue and you're not sure, send them to the Website."
"But the single most important gift you can give is that explanation you just gave."
I was blown away. Looking back, what I think we were doing is a lot like Agile management. What time we spent organizing was done in a Scrum zero meeting, getting alignment and empowering each team member. Everyone walked out of the meeting as I like to say, "highly aligned and loosely coupled." Like a Lean start-up, we had just followed the rule, "Nail it, then scale it." We just nailed it, and now we were going to hit the streets and scale it.
I took our daughters out ringing doorbells with my wife and I in our neighborhood as we organized people for the February caucus meetings. On the night of the caucus I stood on the median strip of Hennepin Avenue in blistering cold weather, with a 6-foot life-sized cardboard cutout of Obama, waving my sign "Change We Can Believe In."
At our precinct caucus the final vote was 512 votes for Obama, 141 for Hilary Clinton. Obama won the Minnesota caucus with almost two-thirds of the vote.
The 2008 Obama campaign organization was about as flat as it could be. We each did what we could. I wrote passionate blog posts on local news Websites, and held house parties and went to the state convention in Rochester, Minnesota as a delegate.
As it happened, it was during the state convention that Hilary Clinton announced she was withdrawing from the race-Obama had won the nomination. I remember sitting in a huge room of Obama delegates at the state convention, watching her speech on televisions. A huge cheer went up when she announced she was getting out of the race.
R.T. Rybek, the mayor of Minneapolis, and a leader of the Obama caucus stood up and called for quiet.
"We need to bring the Clinton delegates together with us," he said. "No gloating or cheering-this is about getting democrats elected in the Fall, and we need everyone to unite behind Obama."
It was the only time during the campaign I ever heard an order from the top. That's about as lean as it gets.
There's more about the "disruptive" model of the Obama campaign here, in a post Aaron Shaw wrote just before the 2008 election.
Pal Mark Gibson has a great blog post today about the Lean start-up movement and the work of Clayton Christensen.
And David Plouffe's book, "The Audacity To Win," is a terrific read. Plouffe was Obama's campaign manager, and he ran the campaign as a "$1 billion start up."