by Greg Satell
The next year, in December 1970, the employees at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk decided to walk out on strike in order to protest the austerity measures. They stopped work and marched to the provincial party headquarters in the center of the city chanting, “We want bread! Down with Gomułka!” (Communist Party boss Władysław Gomułka). The next day, they returned in even greater numbers, and before long, the demonstration turned into a riot. The workers first began throwing stones and, later, Molotov cocktails at the party headquarters, setting it ablaze before returning to the shipyard. By this time the regime had had enough and sent the army in, and soldiers shot into the crowd, killing 4 workers and wounding 15. The ones that survived barricaded themselves in the shipyard and vowed that they would remain until their demands were met.2
It was, as Srdja Popović would say about the 1992 anti-war protests in Belgrade, an “Occupy moment.” Much like the early version of the Serbian movement, the striking workers in Poland had grievances, but no real vision for what change should look like. Sure, they wanted higher wages and lower prices, but who doesn’t? They also neglected to make a clear plan. There were no efforts to identify a keystone change, mobilize a Spectrum of Allies in order to influence Pillars of Support, build a genome of values, or network the movement. They simply expected that by causing a commotion they could achieve their aims. Their efforts, perhaps not surprisingly, failed.
Over the next decade, discontent in the country grew. An intellectual movement, led by Jacek Kuron, an ejected party official, Karol Modzelewski, a university professor, and Adam Michnik, a student at Warsaw University, began to envision a new path for change. Instead of fighting the regime directly, they aimed to mobilize the Polish people against it. “The immediate task of opposition intellectuals,” Michnik wrote, is to build “a real day-to-day community of free people.”3 They also recognized, much as Popović and his friends at Otpor would later on, that there was little intellectuals and students could do by themselves. Change would only come when they built an alliance between the disaffected elites and the workers. To attract the workers, they would also need the Catholic Church, which even after decades of Communism remained tremendously influential in the country. Based on those crucial insights, the contours of a plan began to form.
The intellectuals formed the Workers Defense Committee, known by its Polish acronym, KOR, to act as a platform for collaboration with their Spectrum of Allies and to attract constituencies with higher thresholds of resistance to change. When strikes broke out in the latter half of the decade, instead of ignoring them as they did in 1970, the intellectuals pledged solidarity with the workers and opened a new front in the struggle. Knowing the regime was sensitive to its global image, they also began courting allies in the international community, giving interviews to foreign journalists, and establishing committees made up of Polish expatriates living in cities like London, Paris, and New York. Another action they undertook was to establish a “flying university” that would hold lectures to help indoctrinate a genome of values among its growing dissident network. Before long, KOR was achieving small victories, proving itself to be effective at mobilizing allies and pulling in pillars to build increasing political clout.4
By 1980, the regime was in deep trouble. It had borrowed money from abroad in order to placate the demands of the workers and was now deeply in debt. At the same time, productivity had plummeted, capital was scarce, and corruption among officials was rampant. The Polish government, after decades of mismanagement, had become both financially and morally bankrupt. Once again, food prices were raised to cover the debt, and the regime braced itself for the inevitable public discord. Strikes immediately broke out and, thanks to the Western media allies that KOR had built up over the years with outlets such as Radio Free Europe and the BBC, the unrest was widely publicized throughout Poland.5
The underlying forces had been building for years. The incompetence of the communist regime and the now extensive linkages between the workers, the intellectuals, and the Catholic Church had created the conditions for a network cascade to erupt. All that was needed was a trigger to set things in motion, and it was about to come from an unlikely and unexpected place.
Anna Walentynowicz arrived in Gdansk as a war orphan in 1945 and began working at the Lenin Shipyard in 1950. She was a hard worker and well liked, but she also had a rebellious streak, helping to organize the ill-fated strikes in 1970 and tirelessly advocating for her fellow workers on issues both large and small. In 1978 she joined a group of activists who were working to establish private trade unions (previously, all unions were controlled by the Communist Party). Over time, she emerged as a nexus between the disaffected workers and the nascent dissident movement.
It’s not exactly clear why the regime chose, with tensions already running high in 1980, to fire Walentynowicz in August of that year after 30 years of service. Maybe the officials thought that by removing her from the picture they would break the link between the workers and the activists. Or maybe she just finally wore out their patience. Whatever the reason, it was a foolish blunder and one the Communist Party would quickly regret.
Over the next few days allies of Walentynowicz began planning a strike. This time, they would avoid many of the mistakes made in 1970. Instead of rashly walking out, they made sure to prepare the ground beforehand, quietly building support and printing out thousands of leaflets detailing Walentynowicz’s years of service, explaining the injustice of her dismissal, and underlining the need for workers to advocate for themselves. “Anna Walentynowicz has become unacceptable,” the text read, “because she defended others and could organize her co-workers.” It then continued, “If we are not able to resist this, there won’t be anybody who will speak out against raising work quotas, breaking safety regulations, or forcing people to work overtime.”6
When the strike began, many of the workers wanted to march down to the party headquarters in the center of Gdansk, but the organizers had learned from their experience in 1970 that would lead them nowhere. Instead, they announced that everyone would remain in the shipyard. Delegates would be elected to form a negotiating committee, and no further work would be done until they got satisfaction. Their first demands were that Walentynowicz would be brought to the shipyard (in the director’s car), and that the negotiations would be broadcast to the workers through the public address system. Lech Walesa, an electrician who, like Walentynowicz, was fired for political reasons, would lead the negotiations.7
It was to be the trigger that would set a cascade in motion. Unlike during the ill-fated strikes of 1970, the workers were no longer an island unto themselves, but linked into a larger network. They immediately notified Jacek Kuron and the KOR in Warsaw, who quickly got the word out to foreign journalists. The news was then broadcast back to Poland through Radio Free Europe, Voice of America and the BBC, which allowed the movement to navigate around government censorship. They had also identified a keystone change: instead of merely asking for better working conditions, higher wages, and lower prices, they demanded the creation of their own trade union to represent them. They were no longer just shouting for bread, but demanding justice for all Polish workers.8
It resonated. As the news filtered out, thousands of workers began striking to support their brethren at the Lenin Shipyard. At first, it was mostly among neighboring factories in the Gdansk region, but before long workers in other cities, following developments closely on international media, started walking out too. As the dominoes began to fall and the regime was confronted with a nationwide strike, it was forced to negotiate. Outmatched by a united opposition and an already crippled economy, it had no choice but to give ground. The Solidarity trade union would be established, first in Gdansk and then throughout Poland, with Lech Walesa as its chairman.9
In the years that followed, Solidarity grew in power. As its membership swelled, it began to include not only industrial workers, but also professionals, such as doctors, teachers, engineers, and even police officers. By cal
ling a nationwide strike, it could paralyze the entire country. This was an unprecedented situation in the Eastern Block, which undermined Poland’s party leaders with their overlords in Moscow and created a delicate situation for Solidarity’s leaders.
Beyond Poland’s borders, the Soviet tanks always loomed large. If the trade union pushed too hard, it risked an invasion, like those that had already taken place in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Yet at the same time, after feeling the first taste of political power in decades, its membership was constantly agitating for better conditions and more freedoms. Eventually, Solidarity’s constant push for greater reforms proved to be too much, and on December 13, 1981, the regime declared martial law. Public gatherings and strikes were banned, most of Solidarity’s leadership, including Walesa, were arrested, and the ones who somehow eluded the authorities were forced to run and live in hiding.10
The flame sparked by Solidarity could not be extinguished entirely. Although the trade union could not operate openly, it retained its moral power and was able to continue many activities surreptitiously. An underground press sprang up. Church groups formed secret committees that would help maintain a dissident infrastructure, and the “Flying University” began its lectures once again. The activists also turned to a new weapon, boycotts, which were focused on the unions that the regime formed to replace Solidarity as well as the government-run media.11
The media boycott proved to be problematic. It called for people to protest the government’s propaganda and lies by not watching the evening news. But ordinary Poles sitting at home with their TV sets turned off could achieve little. Sure, it might give them some personal satisfaction, but it lacked the power to signal their disapproval to their neighbors or to the regime. It also did nothing to build connections, and without connections, there could be no cascade.
Yet the residents of the small city of Świdnik found an ingenious way around these constraints. Every night when the newscast started at 7:30, they went for a walk and placed their TV sets in the window facing out so that everybody could see that they were refusing to watch. Others took the idea even further and brought their TV sets with them in baby strollers and wheelbarrows, which added to the fun, satirical spirit of the protest. No signs were held and no chants rang out, but the message being sent was unmistakable. It was a quiet “walking protest,” and it was fun, cost little, and had minimal risk of provoking a crackdown by the regime. After all, who could object to getting a little fresh air? Certainly, it was not a prosecutable offense, even under martial law.
Before long, similar “walking protests” spread across the country, and the country’s rulers began to look ridiculous. With thousands of its citizens openly mocking it, eventually the government felt it had to respond, moving the evening curfew from 10 p.m. to 7 p.m., before the evening news came on. Yet that made an already weak regime seem even more hollowed out and illegitimate. Who could be afraid of a regime that was scared of people going out for a leisurely evening stroll?
“If the resistance is done by underground activists, it’s not you or me,” one of the Solidarity supporters would later say. “But if you see your neighbors taking their TV for a walk, it makes you feel part of something. An aim of the dictatorship is to make you feel isolated. Świdnik broke the isolation and built confidence.” These and similar protests, such as people switching their lights on and off to signal that they were listening to outlawed Solidarity radio broadcasts, kept the movement going during the dark days of martial law. Poland’s communist regime finally crumbled in 1989.12
PLATFORMS FOR PARTICIPATION AND MOBILIZATION
* * *
In their book-length study comparing 323 violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan found that nonviolent activists are nearly twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent ones. At first glance this seems implausible or, at best, naive. How could a bunch of hippies in T-shirts outperform hardened and committed rebels carrying AK-47s?13
Yet take a closer look, and it becomes clear that nonviolent activists have distinct advantages over armed rebels. First, an armed group is mostly limited to men of fighting age, which greatly reduces the number of people who can actively participate. Those who do join the struggle must also have an extremely high level of commitment. Not only do they need to be willing to risk physical harm and even death, they also forgo the ability to participate in daily life. Unlike nonviolent activists, they can’t regularly go to work, take care of their families, or meet with friends. They also face moral barriers. Violent campaigns kill people. Those people have families and others that love them who will actively work to sway public opinion against the movement. Finally, armed resistance movements are far more limited in their actions. While nonviolent campaigns have a wide array of tactics available to them, including boycotts, street theater, marches, strikes, and many others as well, violent campaigns are mostly limited to military confrontations, which, given the superior resources of a nation state, they are unlikely to win.14
Nonviolent campaigns have very few barriers to participation. Everybody, from the youngest child to the meekest senior citizen, can join in. I personally witnessed this on the Maidan in Kyiv in 2004. Nobody hesitated to bring their families to demonstrations and, in fact, many wanted their young children to see history unfold. Pensioners would eagerly bring blankets and food to the “tent city” located just a few hundred yards from the Maidan. Middle-class professionals would attend protests when they could and then run back to the office to get work done. As I noted in Chapter 1, during the height of the Orange Revolution, many companies allowed employees to attend the protests in shifts, with half of the office going out to the streets and then returning so that the other half could participate. Those who didn’t sympathize with the movement had to sit and work quietly in a corner, feeling left out and isolated.
In the final analysis, it is this participation advantage that proves to be decisive. In fact, Chenoweth and Stephan show that “a single unit increase of active participants makes a campaign 10 percent more likely to achieve its ultimate outcome.”15 That’s why successful change efforts work hard to make it as easy as possible to join in. Clearly, deep commitment is essential for any change effort. However, before you can have commitment, you must have participation.
Let’s return to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and its “100,000 Lives Campaign” that was discussed in Chapter 6. The healthcare industry, populated as it is with high-status professionals and often conflicting stakeholders, is famously resistant to change. So a key part of IHI’s strategy was to lower barriers to participation, so that early adopters could not only join its movement but also easily recruit their friends and colleagues. It did so by identifying and eliminating points of friction.
First, rather than requiring an extensive application process, a simple fax from the hospital CEO, along with a commitment to share mortality data, was enough to join the movement. Instead of including every improvement it had identified during its years of research, IHI narrowed the list down to six procedures, which were chosen not only for impact, but ease of implementation. For each of these, IHI provided “change kits” complete with how-to guides. And the participating hospitals were not even required to adopt all six procedures, but were free to choose those best suited to their organization.16
A lot of thought was also put into the procedures themselves, and in some cases, simple but ingenious solutions were contrived. For example, one of the procedures that the team identified was to keep the heads of patients on ventilators elevated at a 45-degree angle to reduce the risk of pneumonia. The change kit suggested drawing a line on the wall behind the patient’s bed so that it would be obvious when it dipped below that level. That enabled not only doctors and nurses, but families, orderlies, and even janitors, to monitor the 45-degree standard.17 Much like in Świdnik during the Solidarity movement, you didn’t need any special abilities or supreme sacrifice to he
lp make change happen.
As the work of Chenoweth and Stephan suggested, IHI didn’t focus on recruiting hard-core healthcare warriors for its battle against preventable medical errors—it recruited everybody, and it worked. After the 100,000 lives goal was achieved, IHI launched a campaign to save 1 million lives and then 5 million lives. Simple things can sometimes have enormous impacts.
Or consider England’s National Health Service (NHS), a truly mammoth organization with 1.3 million employees serving 54 million citizens. Transforming an organization of that scale presents unique challenges. With that in mind, a group of change activists within NHS established a “Change Day,” on which employees pledge to do one thing to improve the lives of patients. When it was established in 2013, it immediately became a roaring success. In that first year there were 189,000 pledges for action, and that figure rose to 800,000 in the second year. Many of these actions were small. For instance, employees who work with older people at University Hospital Leicester wore continence pads for a day to see how it feels for their patients. Staff at Countess of Chester Hospital decided to change the paint on the walls to colors that would be more comforting to dementia patients. Each initiative made a small difference, and multiplied by hundreds of thousands, it created a real impact.18
Change Day was, in many ways, in much the same spirit as the Recruit-Train-Act strategy Otpor used to build the movement that resulted in the ousting of Milošević. Encouraging people to act, even if those actions are small, allows people to internalize and take ownership of a movement for change. Or, as Helen Bevan, Chief Transformation Officer for the NHS Horizons team, put it to me, “Programmatic methods have their place, but if you want to create change on a truly massive scale, a top-down approach on its own doesn’t work so well. You need to get people invested in change. They have to own it.”19