QuoteProject
The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
Saul Alinsky
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

One should not engage people in tasks or ideas that they are unfamiliar with, as it can lead to negative emotions and outcomes.

Saul Alinsky emphasizes the importance of aligning actions with the experiences and understanding of the people we lead. When initiatives or actions push beyond what they can grasp, it often results in confusion and fear, causing them to disengage or retreat instead of moving forward with confidence and clarity.

Themes

ExperienceLeadershipPeopleUnderstandingTrust

In practice

Example use cases

A team meeting where a manager introduces a new software tool that the team is familiar with and understands.

More from Saul Alinsky

The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
Saul AlinskyRead
Lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins - or which is which), the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer.
Saul AlinskyRead
The first step in community organization is community disorganization. The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization. Present arrangements must be disorganized if they are to be displace by new patterns.... All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.
Saul AlinskyRead
The threat is generally more terrifying than the thing itself.
Saul AlinskyRead
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
Saul AlinskyRead
An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth - truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing.... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations.
Saul AlinskyRead

Similar quotes

People really are our most important resource, and people who don't realize that and choose not to live that way, choose not to lead that way, are paying a price for that in many of our companies, many of our organizations.
Chesley SullenbergerRead
We also can't try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That's not leadership; that's a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It's the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq - and we should have learned it by now.
Barack ObamaRead
Never lead your soldiers to battle if you have not first confirmed their spirit and known them to be without fear and ordered; and never test them except when you see that they hope to win.
Niccolo MachiavelliRead
I don't just try to score. The challenge is elevating my teammates to be able to win a championship.
Kobe BryantRead
I have the people behind me and the people are my strength.
Huey NewtonRead
Where the stakes are the highest, in the war on terror, we cannot possibly succeed without extraordinary international cooperation. Effective international police actions require the highest degree of intelligence sharing, planning and collaborative enforcement.
Barack ObamaRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.