What can you do?
- Pick an Issue - you're not going to make sweeping changes, so find some things you can focus your time and energy on.
- Understand the Issue - most real issues today are complex and have mutliple, often conflicting dimensions. Make sure you know what you are talking about: causes, effects, conseuqneces, complexities.
- Decide exactly what you want to change - a programme of things that need to be changed. You have to be very specific (the whole SMART goals comes to mind here: specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and timed). Too often we see people who don't like the way the world is, but fail to say what they want changed and how they want it changed.
- Identify Allies - for most really important issues, there are other people who are (or will be) interested. Find out who they are, talk to them. If you can work with them work with them. Part of this is looking for people with resources (money, time and skills) to support your issue.
- Identify the Change Levers - who are the people who can actually make the decisions to achieve what you want to achieve? Can you effect them? If not, who can? Can you effect the people who can effect the people? Work out the chain between you and the solution. Then start pulling on it.
- Get in the Media - get your issue heard, by the media. The more wide-spread, the more vocal and the more visible you are, the more likely people are to listen.
- Be ready to negotiate - real solutions to real problems, particularly the kind of complex, human problems in our world, don't have absolute solutitons. Compromise and negotiation are necessary.
Basically, identify, understand, organise, vocalise and act. Don't believe the hollywood bullshit: most of the time the little guy doesn't win. But making a small change is better than making no change.
Remember, Martin Luther King started by trying to change one policy in one town.