Exercise 12: The Life of the Thing

The Life of the Thing

Who is this exercise for?

A group that is trying to achieve something in particular (a membership drive, a bestselling pamphlet, getting other people to do something) and wants to anticipate or elucidate problems through criticism.

Problems:

Thinking about strategy can be dizzying. There are so many possible outcomes! and it can become hard to think more than one step ahead at a time. Sometimes you need to force yourself to put things in time a little more. Many organisations don’t have a plan that stretches ahead more than one year. In fact, at many points in our history, we’ve been guilty of this ourselves. This exercise helps to narrow down a particular future and allow careful consideration of it.

It’s hard to think about the future and possible outcomes as a group, without some kind of structure to work from.

When thinking about the future, sometimes some people’s instincts, observations, hopes, fears and dreams dominate the group. That can be expected. But there are ways to even it out. Let everyone’s panic be heard! And everyone’s analysis.

When the group is doing something together - making a pamphlet, encouraging an activity, recruiting members - you can end up in a situation where some people are always ‘pro’ and some always ‘anti’. As in, you have some naysayers who don’t think the pamphlet is great, and some people who tend to gloss over any problems with it. This exercise forces people to evaluate the activity based on a predetermined outcome. That means that even the most fervent supporters of the activity have to say why they think that it might fail. And even the most critical have to say why it might succeed. It helps even out the tendencies in the group for some people to take on the (necessary) role of critic, and others to take on the (necessary) role of encourager. In this sense, the exercise is a criticism exercise. It pulls people into criticism roles.

The premise of the exercise

The premise of this exercise is to think backwards, not forwards. Imagining you have reached a certain stage, each member of the group will explain what happened to get to that stage. In doing so, each member of the group will explore the things they think are likely to happen, or should happen, or are unlikely to happen.

To run this exercise, you need to think about something, an object or a conceptual object, that can take on a life of its own outside the organisation. For physical objects, this might be a book, pamphlet, leaflet, phone number of an organiser (we are sure you can come up with more examples). For more conceptual things, this should be something that the organisation tries to proliferate, like an activity it encourages in others. For our organisation that’s easy, we try to encourage people to run exercises.

Games where cards are laid out to set up a story are very common in narrative-forming - you could think of this as an extremely limited form of story-cards or tarot, in the sense that it is helping people to investigate different possibilities. The difference is that in this game we don’t tend to leave a lot of room for the interpretation of what happened in the story, the focus is very explicitly on why it happened.

How to run this exercise:

Make the cards. You will need to have as many distinct piles of cards as there are stages in the story, so you should mark the back of each card with a 1/2/3/4 etc. to keep the piles distinct.

Distribute as many packs of cards as there are groups. We suggest group sizes of maximum 6.

Player 1: One person in the group should draw their cards and tell the story.

Player 2: Someone in the group should take notes.

All other players: Everyone else should play devil's advocate - they should push the person who is telling the story if they feel that the narrative doesn’t match up, ie ‘You said that they put it in the bin because they couldn’t see the immediate relevance to what they were doing, but why didn’t they hang onto it in case of future relevance?’

Rotate through the roles so that everyone gets a chance to be the storyteller at least once.

Example

Let’s give an example. Imagine you are an organisation that is trying to get people to join. You are having a membership drive. You can imagine that there are distinct phases to someone joining an organisation, let’s say for the sake of the game there are five. And let’s call the person who may or may not join Healey.

Someone will draw a card from each pile at random, placing it face up in front of themselves in order. If they draw a certain card, they don’t draw any more cards (the story ends).

Each of the boxes in the table below represent a different card with the scenario written on, and they have been arranged in columns according to how they would be laid out step by step, with each set of three cards in its own stack.

Step 1 Cards	Step 2 Cards	Step 3 Cards	Step 4 Cards	Step 5 Cards
H hears about the organisation from a friend.	H asks some friends about the organisation	H goes to a meeting of the organisation	H goes to a meeting of the organisation	H joins the organisation
H hears about the organisation on the news.	H writes to the organisation	H studies some of the history of the organisation	H gets to know someone in the organisation well	H doesn’t join the organisation
H gets a leaflet about the organisation at a protest	H doesn’t think about the organisation again.	H doesn’t think about the organisation again.	H doesn’t think about the organisation again.	H doesn’t think about the organisation again.

One person in the organisation draws cards, one at a time, starting from the stack called ‘Step 1’, and places them face up.

If they draw the card ‘H doesn’t think about the organisation again’ they don’t draw any more cards.

The player now has a sequence of discrete events and they must now tell a story of the links between those events, so that they make sense. They must make a 2-5 part story. What happened? Why, for example, did the meeting cause the protagonist to join, or not to join? The player should be clear how each stage causes the next stage.

For this game to work, everyone has to agree that any of the events shown are plausible. And the game must be played with something specific and relatively small, otherwise too wide a range of causations will have to be drawn out, and people will feel they are making a simplified story. When the people running the exercise are making the cards, they will probably find out pretty quickly whether the activity they are considering is right for this game. Things like ‘steps towards union recognition (or not)’ are going to start producing more abstract stories, with less specific, actionable criticism contained in them, and something like ‘a sequence of events potentially leading to revolution’ is going to be more of a fun ‘see how we all think’ kind of exercise that won’t involve organisational criticism. The exercise will bring out many of the observations of the member about the organisation. For example, do they think the meetings are welcoming to new members. Do they think that there’s a reason people would want to join? Do they think that the administrative processes in the organisation are good (does the org reply to emails?)

Then the next person goes. They will draw a different sequence of events But even if they draw a similar sequence, they will probably have different reasons (a different understanding of how one thing leads to the next) for why things might go one way or another way. To be clear, each player draws and describes an entire story, while the other players ask them questions about it.

Here’s another example:

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4

The person tells their friend about the material.	The person takes the material along to a meeting.	The person changes their mind about something based on the material.	The person gets in touch with your organisation.
The person puts the material in their bag.	The person writes some notes on the material.	The material makes the person enthusiastic.	The material ends up in a pile of papers not found until the person’s death.
The person reads the material.	The person thinks about how they disagreed with something in the material.	The material makes the person despairing.	The person tells their own organisation to get in touch with your organisation.
BIN	BIN	BIN	BIN

This example is obviously about a pamphlet or piece of written material. In this example, the person playing the cards will have to delve into what the written material is doing, and what it might prompt the person who draws the cards to do.

October Sankara Memorial 2023 version
We first ran this exercise during a hybrid assembly we ran in October 2023. Some of us were in Birmingham, England and others were in Chicago, USA.

In recent months we had developed and fine-tuned the Cumbernauld Pamphlet as a production exercise. Later that weekend, to coincide with the unveiling of the Thomas Sankara Memorial, we were going to be running a Cumbernauld session producing Pan-African pamphlets. But we knew that just producing pamphlets was not enough, you had to do something with them, and so we wanted to investigate the life of propaganda once it is put into the wild, in a way that might help us guide the production of the pamphlets. What kinds or arrangements of squares will actually engage a stranger or a friend? What kinds of engagement?

Using the example of a tenants’ union pamphlet, we made a deck of cards charting its passage from completion to final destination. The cards covered various scenarios, such as the pamphlet being left and picked up on a bus seat, handed to a neighbour, or - and this was the only repeating card in the deck - thrown in the BIN, written in big capital letters.

Players continuously dealt cards from the deck until they turned over a BIN card, so sequences could be anything from a single BIN card to a long twisting journey of cards. They then had to tell the story through the cards.

As with many exercises, the full theoretical underpinnings were not fully understood, not even by its main inventor. We emphasise this to encourage you not to allow theorisation or problem identification to hold up the start of exercise production. Much of the theory of this exercise has been developed on the basis of critical reflection and repeated iterations. This is all to say that, at the time, running an exercise where all our propaganda inevitably and repeatedly ended their lives in the BIN was a bit of a downer, not helped by a hybrid format over Zoom or the pride and preciousness we felt towards the Cumbernauld technique at the time.

From this we gathered that the contents of the cards and the input of the exercise facilitators needs to ensure that the end of a thing’s life is not consistently dispiriting.

Chicago 2024 version

In our own work, we are often encouraging people to run exercises, as part of forming pedagogical organisations. So we ran this internally to talk about exercises. We talked about particular exercises, and the ‘whole pedagogy’. The bold cards are the ones that end the story.

Pile 1	Pile 2	Pile 3	Pile 4
Someone describes it [ie 30 Cabrals, or the whole pedagogy] to A	A runs it at something	B says yes and A runs it, it goes badly	A decides to try it again
A attends a workshop we’re running	A proposes to a committee that it gets run at something	B says yes and A runs it, it goes well	A decides to forget about it.
A comes across something we wrote online.	A proposes to person B that it gets run at something	B says no, A forgets about it.	A writes an article about us online
	A forgets about it.	A runs it and it goes badly.	A writes to us to learn more.
	A proposes it to organisation who are too busy atm to do anything about it, forgets about it.	A runs it and it goes well.