How to Change the World (Or Your Corner of It): Planning and Working for Success

By Tracy Duvall

Do you want to change the world—or yourself? To improve your work? To make the best decisions possible? Then this brief but comprehensive guide to PLANNING, DOING, AND REVISING is for you.

By following ten steps, you'll maximize your chances of success. This short, practical manual shows you how to tailor your plans to your resources and desires, so the same basic approach will work whether your project is modest or grand, you're one person or many, your time frame is short or long.

You or your group will:
• Set a productive goal
• Identify the best way for you to reach it
• Ensure that you're properly organized
• Evaluate whether you're on track or need to revise your plan.

The process presented here is much like the ones in longer (and often less-complete) texts for aid workers or educational specialists—but in this primer you'll get the whole picture in plain language. This guide features examples from areas as diverse as education, weight-loss, sports, public health, revolution, and more.

So if you want to change the world—or just do better—start here!

TRACY DUVALL is an anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Arizona and an MA from the University of Florida. A former high school teacher and college professor, he has conducted research—and engaged in activism—in Indonesia, East Africa, the United States, and Mexico. He currently lives in Washington, D.C., where he has lobbied Congress.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracy Duvall
• Release date: Jun 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393611394

Tracy Duvall

Tracy Duvall studied Mexico for two decades. Having earned an MA in history and a PhD in anthropology, he has taught at universities in the United States, Mexico, and Indonesia and has conducted research in those countries and East Africa. His fieldwork in Mazatlán took place over several years and included lengthy stays in 1996 and 1997.

Book preview

How to Change the World

(Or Your Corner of It)

Planning and Working for Success

Tracy Duvall, PhD

How to Change the World (Or Your Corner of It): Planning and Working for Success

Copyright © 2018 by Tracy Duvall.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review. 

www.TracyDuvall.com

CONTENTS

Introduction

Section A: Identifying your mission

Step 1: Identify the problem you want to solve

Step 2: Learn what causes this problem

Step 3: Identify the elements of success and make them your goal

Section B: Analysis

Step 4: Learn about alternatives to the status quo and what has failed

Step 5: Evaluate your own resources

Step 6: Analyze how well you could enact each option and choose

Section C: Implementation

Step 7: Include evaluation in your plan

Step 8: Organize appropriately

Step 9: Implement your choices

Section D: Continuous improvement

Step 10: Periodically reconsider everything through strategic planning

Conclusion?

Practical considerations

More examples

Useful resources

Introduction

This is a step-by-step manual to help you change society—or your own life. The framework presented here will help you to identify your options and make informed choices in pursuit of a goal. You (singular or plural) can adapt this approach to achieve such diverse aims as reducing pollution, improving students’ learning, democratizing a business, avoiding the spread of HIV, or bettering your health. You start by transforming a complaint into a goal: turning a negative into a positive. Achieving that goal is your mission, and the rest of the process flows from identifying it. You must learn to apply your resources effectively, and you must be willing to change your approach in the face of new conditions, better information, or failure.

The process described in this book is the opposite of ‘trusting your gut, intuition, or instincts.’ Following these steps will ensure that you make the most conscious, informed decision possible.

This is a practical, how-to manual. In this sense, it’s unlike most other works on social change. Many of those other books identify principles for influencing other people—for example, through marketing—which is not this work’s purpose. Here you will find a start-to-finish process for planning, implementing, and revising a program of change. In other words, reading those other works would fit into one of the ten steps detailed here (usually Step 4). Also, this manual is more comprehensive than other works on social change. It will take you from the initial step of turning a complaint into a positive goal to the long-term process of evaluating your results and adjusting accordingly.

This guide focuses on achieving positive change. Instead of emphasizing opposition—saying ‘no’ to something—it teaches how to get others to say ‘yes’ to your proposals. Experience shows that you need to effectively promote your own beautiful vision—to start something good more than to end something bad.

The text is comprised of four sections: identifying your goal, strategizing, implementing your plan, and continuously improving. Each section contains a small number of chapters, whose focus should be clear from the table of contents. It is essential that you implement all ten of the steps. Wannabe world-changers are most likely to neglect organizing appropriately (Step 8) and ruthlessly evaluating and reorienting their work (Steps 7 and 10). These steps require that you shift your source of pride from appearing infallible to demonstrating flexibility in pursuit of a valuable goal.

The sections and chapters generally follow the order in which you should first focus on them. Nonetheless, maximizing your success will require some recursion (going back and forth)—for example, organizing appropriately (Step 8), might require that you return to evaluating your resources (Step 5). Above all, your efforts will literally be pointless unless you start at the beginning—identifying your mission and keeping it in sight throughout the other steps.

This book stands alone. While it’s a complete guide, I’ve kept the explanations and examples brief to make it easy to use. You can find more information in the Useful Resources list and at my website, TracyDuvall.com.

The centrality of educational planning

The framework for action presented here derives to a large extent from educational planning: setting standards (goals), designing and implementing a curriculum, evaluating the results, and periodically revising one’s practices. I learned—and learned to appreciate—this approach while teaching high school and college. Sadly, this was several years after beginning my pedagogical career.

Whatever you might think of U.S. educational achievements, I assure you that the minority of teachers who understand and implement this algorithm for improvement are doing the best work possible.

The same basic model is common in other fields, too. International development stands out as an example, as the Useful Resources section shows.

Diverse examples

This book is about planning successfully to change almost anything—from ‘the world’ to your athletic performance. So the examples are diverse, and they come from disparate sources, from the news to my experience. I use personal examples in part because the discussion depends on the details of what really happened, which is difficult to know secondhand, but also to help you to see how the ideas apply to your personal circumstance.

In addition, lessons come from various arenas of life, from political activism to education to personal health. Sport provides a wonderful test bed because it’s simpler and more open than other activities, making the process of improvement relatively easy to analyze.

Why me?

Finally, you might wonder why you should heed my advice, especially since I’m not a famous reformer, à la Ralph Nader or Mahatma Gandhi. My answer is two-fold: First, I do have a great variety of experience in this field as an activist, volunteer, worker, and researcher. Sometimes