Do Something Small Together

Your liaison channel has been open for a while now. Maybe a week, maybe a month — the timeline depends on your groups’ pace and proximity. And something has already come through it. A community event both groups noticed independently. A school board agenda item that affects you both. A question from their group about something yours has experience with, or vice versa.

Pay attention to the shape of those early exchanges, because they contain the answer to the question this chapter is about: what could we do together?

Not what should we do, or what’s the most important thing, or what would make the biggest difference. What could we do — practically, soon, with the resources and relationships we already have?

The answer should be something small. I want to explain why.

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Your group completed a collective action during its work in Level 2. You know what it takes to plan something, execute it, and debrief honestly afterward. The other group has its own experience. Between you, there’s plenty of capability.

The temptation is to match that capability to the scale of the problems you see. The school board is making decisions that affect both your neighborhoods — shouldn’t you organize a coordinated response? There’s a housing development threatening a shared community resource — shouldn’t you build a real campaign?

Maybe. Eventually. But not yet.

The research on inter-group coordination is consistent on this point, and it’s worth hearing clearly because it runs against every instinct: trust between groups is built through doing things together, not through agreements about doing things together. Ranjay Gulati’s research on alliance formation found that repeated collaboration builds familiarity that functions as trust — and crucially, that this familiarity reduces the need for formal governance structures later. Val Krebs and June Holley, studying network formation in Appalachian communities, put the practical implication plainly: early collaborative projects should be “initially small, so they can learn to collaborate.”

Small doesn’t mean unimportant. It means scoped so that the coordination itself is the learning. When two autonomous groups try to do something together for the first time, every step surfaces questions you can’t anticipate in the abstract: How do we make a shared decision when our groups use different processes? Who speaks for the effort when we’re talking to someone outside both groups? How do we divide work when we don’t yet know each other’s strengths in action? What happens when the plan needs to change and we can’t all be in the same room?

These questions don’t have theoretical answers. They have practical ones, and you find them by doing something small enough that the stakes are in the learning, not the outcome.

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The Cowboy Indian Alliance understood this — though they might not have described it in those terms.

When Great Plains ranchers and Native American tribal communities first began working together to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, they didn’t start with a march on Washington. They started by showing up to the same places.

In November 2013, members of the Ponca Nation, the Ihanktonwan Dakota, and Nebraska ranchers gathered for a Spirit Camp on Art Tanderup’s farm near Neligh, Nebraska — land that sat on both the proposed pipeline route and the historic Ponca Trail of Tears. Faith Spotted Eagle, an Ihanktonwan Dakota/Nakota elder, and Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska were among those who came together to bless the land, raise a tipi, and begin building relationships across communities that carried a hundred and fifty years of painful history in that part of the country. The gathering was small, ceremonial, grounded in place. Nobody signed a coalition agreement.

Those early relationships made everything that followed possible. When the Cowboy Indian Alliance organized the “Reject and Protect” campaign in April 2014 — tipis on the National Mall, thousands marching past the Capitol, national media attention — it grew from trust that had been built in a field, face to face, doing work that mattered in each community’s own terms.

And the relationship kept deepening. In May 2014, members of the Ponca Nation returned to the Tanderup farm to plant Sacred Ponca Corn — the first time the tribe’s ancestral seeds had been planted on their Nebraska homeland in over a hundred and thirty years. The action was ceremonial, grounded in place, and small in every measurable way. It didn’t stop a pipeline. But it gave people something to do with their hands, side by side, on land that mattered to both of them. The annual plantings of Sacred Ponca Corn continued on the Tanderup farm for at least eight years — long after Obama rejected the Keystone XL permit in 2015, long after the political urgency had shifted. The practice that started as relationship-building became something more durable: a connection sustained by a shared act, not by a shared enemy.

That’s what “small” means in this context. Not trivial. Foundational.

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Now contrast that with what happens when groups have massive shared energy but no mechanism for doing things together.

Occupy Wall Street, at its peak in October 2011, had spread to over nine hundred cities. Hundreds of thousands of people shared a common analysis — the 99% versus the 1% — and a common physical presence. The energy was extraordinary. And the movement could not convert that energy into coordinated action, because it had built no structure for groups to plan, execute, and learn together.

You’ve already encountered OWS’s internal structural problems — the consensus paralysis, the general assemblies that consumed hours without producing decisions. The inter-group problem was different and in some ways worse. When Occupy groups in different cities wanted to coordinate — a shared day of action, a response to a policy proposal, a mutual aid exchange — there was no mechanism. No liaison structure. No shared planning process. No way to make a decision that applied across groups without running it through each group’s own consensus process, which could be blocked by any individual.

The result was that coordination happened informally — whoever had the most energy, the most social connections, or the most time ended up making decisions that affected everyone. Jo Freeman’s diagnosis applied at every level: the absence of formal structure didn’t eliminate coordination. It made coordination invisible, unaccountable, and fragile.

Political scientist John Ehrenberg captured the core failure in his analysis of OWS: process became the same as content. The movement treated the act of deliberating together as equivalent to the act of doing something together. But deliberation without joint action doesn’t build the inter-group trust that Gulati’s research identifies. Only doing things together does that.

OWS changed American political discourse permanently. The 99% frame endured for a decade. But when the police cleared Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011, the movement — with no organizational infrastructure independent of the physical occupation, and no inter-group coordination capacity — could not reconstitute.

The lesson is specific: doing something small together, with clear roles, a shared plan, and an honest debrief, builds more coordination capacity than any amount of shared analysis or values alignment. Agreement is not action. And trust is built in the doing.

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So here’s a planning tool. The Midwest Academy — a training institute for community organizers operating since 1973 — developed a strategy chart that forces specificity. Organizers have used it for campaigns. You’re going to use it for one joint action.

The chart has five questions:

What’s your goal? For a first joint action, the goal should be specific and achievable. Not “improve our neighborhood” — that’s a direction, not a goal. “Attend the next city council meeting on the proposed zoning change with members from both groups present and prepared to speak during public comment” is a goal. “Host a skill exchange where each group teaches something the other group needs” is a goal. “Conduct a mutual aid delivery that covers a geographic area neither group reaches alone” is a goal. The specificity is the point — it forces you to agree on something concrete before you start coordinating.

Who has the power to give you what you want? For a first joint action, this might be straightforward — the city council, the school board, the community center director who controls the meeting space. Or it might not apply at all, if your action is internally focused like a skill exchange. But asking the question builds the habit of thinking about targets and decision-makers, which matters for everything that follows.

What organizational resources do you bring? Between two groups, you have people, skills, relationships, knowledge of your community, and whatever physical resources you’ve accumulated. Map them. The overlap is your foundation. The gaps between groups — where one has strength the other lacks — are where the collaboration adds value. If both groups bring the same things, the joint action is just a bigger version of what each group could do alone. The point is complementarity.

Who are your allies and opponents? For a small first action, this might be a short list. But the exercise of thinking about it together — across groups, with different community knowledge — often surfaces information neither group had alone. Their group knows the council member who’s sympathetic. Your group knows the neighborhood association that’s been pushing back. The joint picture is richer than either group’s individual view.

What tactics will you use? Tactics are the specific activities you’ll undertake. Show up. Speak. Deliver food. Teach a skill. Host a listening session. The tactic should match the goal, fit your resources, and be something both groups can execute together. For a first joint action, simpler is better. The coordination is complex enough without adding tactical complexity on top of it.

Work through the chart together — both groups’ liaisons, or if both groups agree, a small planning team of two or three people from each group. The conversation itself is valuable. You’re making a shared decision for the first time, using a structured tool, and the process will reveal things about how your groups work together that no amount of conversation alone would surface.

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Then do the thing.

The logistics matter more than they seem to. Who handles what? Who confirms the meeting space, or the supplies, or the transportation? Who communicates with any external parties — the council clerk, the community center, the families receiving mutual aid? Divide the responsibilities explicitly, based on each group’s strengths. Don’t default to whoever volunteers first — that’s how informal hierarchy forms between groups, the same way it forms inside them.

Execute the plan. It doesn’t need to go perfectly. First joint actions rarely do. Someone will miscommunicate a detail. A timing conflict will require last-minute adjustment. One group will feel like it did more of the work. These are not failures. They’re data — and they’re only useful if you capture them honestly.

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Which brings us to the part that matters most.

The debrief.

Your group already knows how to debrief — you’ve been doing it since your Level 2 work. The joint debrief uses the same foundation, adapted for the inter-group context. Run it within forty-eight hours of the action, while the experience is still fresh. Both groups together. A facilitator from one group — not the same group whose member facilitated the action, if possible. Notes taken and shared with both groups afterward.

Joint Debrief Protocol

The questions build on what you know:

What did we try to do? Start with a shared account of the plan. This sounds obvious but it matters — you’ll sometimes discover that the two groups had subtly different understandings of the goal, even after planning together. Naming that gap early prevents it from distorting the rest of the debrief.

What worked? Be specific. Not “it went well” — what specifically went well? The coordination on logistics? The division of roles? The way one group’s community knowledge complemented the other’s? Specificity is what makes the success repeatable.

What was hard? This is where the debrief earns its value. The question isn’t what went wrong — it’s what was difficult. Communication gaps. Timing mismatches. Moments where one group’s process conflicted with the other’s. Places where autonomy and interdependence pulled in different directions — where one group wanted to make a decision and the other group hadn’t been consulted. Name the friction honestly. You are not evaluating each other. You’re evaluating the coordination, which belongs to both groups.

What would we do differently? Concrete adjustments, not abstract commitments. “We’d confirm logistics through the liaison channel 48 hours before, not 24” is useful. “We’d communicate better” is not.

What did we learn about working together? This is the question that only applies across groups, and it’s the most important one. Not what you learned about the issue, the community, or the action’s impact — what you learned about coordinating across the boundary between two autonomous groups. Where was the coordination smooth? Where did it chafe? Do your groups’ decision-making styles complement each other or create friction? Would you want to do something together again — and if so, what would need to be different?

Write the debrief findings in your field journal. Both groups keep a copy. This document is the foundation for everything in Phase 2 — it’s your first shared record of what coordination between your groups actually looks like in practice, as opposed to what you hoped or planned it would look like.

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In Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, the early Battle Room exercises weren’t designed for Ender’s team to win. They were designed to teach a group of individuals how to coordinate under pressure — to move together, cover each other, adapt when the plan broke down. Ender understood something his commanders didn’t always grasp: the victory was secondary. What mattered was whether the team learned to function as a unit. And the place where that learning actually happened wasn’t the battle. It was the conversation afterward — what worked, what didn’t, what to try next time.

The analogy isn’t perfect. You’re not in a battle, and your joint action isn’t a test imposed by someone above you. But the structural insight is sound: the action is the exercise. The debrief is the curriculum. What you learn about coordinating together — through the friction, the adjustments, the honest assessment of what worked and what didn’t — is worth more than the action’s outcome. The outcome is temporary. The coordination capacity is what you keep.

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Challenge

Plan, execute, and debrief one joint action with the other group:

1. Using the strategy chart framework above, plan a joint action small enough to succeed. Adapt to your context — the options include co-attending a public meeting with coordinated presence, hosting a joint skill exchange, conducting a mutual aid delivery that draws on both groups’ networks, or organizing a community listening session in a neighborhood where both groups have connections. Choose something that requires genuine coordination between your groups, not just parallel attendance.

2. Divide responsibilities explicitly. Assign logistics, facilitation, external communication, and any other roles based on each group’s demonstrated strengths. Document the division so both groups share the same understanding.

3. Execute the action.

4. Run a joint debrief within 48 hours using the protocol above. Both groups together. Honest about friction. Notes shared afterward.

5. Write the debrief findings in your field journal. What did you learn about working together? What would you change? What did the action reveal about your community or your shared interests that neither group knew before?

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After the debrief, you’ll have something you didn’t have before: a shared experience with a documented assessment. You’ll know whether your groups can coordinate, where the friction points are, and — just as important — what the coordination revealed about the terrain you share.

Pay attention to what surfaces in that debrief and in the liaison conversations that follow. The shared concern that turned out to be bigger than either group expected. The community connection made during the action that opens a door neither group could have opened alone. The moment when someone said, “We’d need more than just our two groups to actually address this.”

That realization — that some things require more than two groups, that some questions don’t have answers without governance structures, that some problems connect to institutions neither group has engaged with directly — is where Phase 2 begins. You’ll recognize it when it arrives, because you’ll have earned the vocabulary to name it. The coordination capacity you just built is the foundation for everything that follows.

But first: do the small thing. Learn from it. Write it down.

The debrief is the curriculum. The field journal is the record. And the record is how the network remembers what it learned.

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