People keep doing the tactics they enjoy, and drift away from the ones they do not.
Rule six of Rules for Radicals, paraphrased. Alinsky held that participants will sustain a tactic they find enjoyable and that fits their experience, and will quietly abandon one that feels like duty. He treated morale as a resource to be managed like money or numbers.
In practice
- A volunteer group that replaces its monthly leafleting with a street party keeps twice as many people through the year.
- A runner who swaps treadmill intervals for a weekly club run with friends stops missing sessions.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is intrinsic motivation: enjoyable activities sustain themselves without outside reward. Another is social: enjoyable tactics create the friendships that keep people involved.
- In its favour
- Consistent with research on volunteer retention, in which satisfaction and social ties predict continued participation.
- Against it
- Enjoyable tactics can drift away from the goal, and enjoyment of confrontation can escalate a conflict. Some necessary work is tedious and has to be done anyway.
- Standing
- Compare Alinsky's drag rule and flow.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Rules for running organisations, and for pressing them