Visionary Pragmatism: A Third Way for Animal Advocacy

This work is my own, written in my spare time, and doesn’t reflect the views of my employer. Less than ~3% of the text is AI-generated. Thank you to Laila Kassam, Haven King-Nobles, Lincoln Quirk, Tom Billington and Harley McDonald-Eckersall for their feedback, which doesn’t imply their endorsement of the ideas presented.

Summary

• Most animal advocates want sweeping change — to end factory farming at the very least, and often to go even further. But across the movement, we rarely talk in depth about how we'll actually achieve these kinds of long-term goals.
• Instead, I believe much of the movement has adopted a mindset I call short-term pragmatism: a focus on measurable, near-term wins that has delivered real victories, but which risks leaving us without a path to our ultimate aims. I suspect the convergence towards this mentality is a reaction to another dominant mindset, passionate idealism.
• This post argues that to achieve the long-term goals we truly aspire to, we must think differently. I make the case for visionary pragmatism — a third way that starts with an ambitious end goal and applies clear thinking to achieve it.
• To illustrate how animal advocates can position ourselves as a winning movement, I break visionary pragmatism down into six core qualities I believe we should cultivate. These include having a clear vision, orienting towards building power, operating according to credible and transparent theories of victory, and taking a perspective of building an ecosystem over multiple generations.
• My aim isn't to claim I have all the answers, but to open up a conversation about how we can genuinely maximise our chances of winning for animals over the long haul.

Introductory Context

Hi, I’m Dilan^[1]. I’ve been deeply active in the animal movement since 2015, across the UK, Australia and the USA. I’ve been a full-time staffer at various levels of movement organisations for the last six years. I’ve spent time in both radical and moderate corners of the ecosystem: I’ve stood on steakhouse tables yelling animal liberation now at confused diners, organised thousands-strong protests, spent five years at a movement think tank, and now work in operations at an EA meta-charity.  

Over this time, I’ve nursed an ache in my gut — a feeling that we’re missing something in the animal movement. This has been validated by recent conversations with several people in the Effective Animal Advocacy community, including founders of successful EA animal charities. These conversations suggested an appetite brewing for a different approach to not just how we do animal advocacy, but how we think about it. 

In this post, I explore why it’s important that we think differently in the animal movement, and how we can go about it. Throughout, I include practical frameworks readers can play with and adapt to their own work.

Two caveats:

• My examples don't include references to advanced AI's potential impact on animals, not because I don't think it's important, but because my thoughts are still nascent on the topic. I'm curious to see how those thinking about AI & animals apply the ideas below.
• My approach here is primarily grounded in first principles thinking and exposure to many ideas over a decade of experience, and less in empirical research. I expect others with stronger research leanings will be able to give more robust takes on the ideas in this post. 

Importantly: my intent in writing this is not to assume I know best. There are plenty of smart and sophisticated thinkers leading the way in this movement. Rather, my aim is to nurture dialogue and take us another step forward in our ongoing conversation about how animals can win.

1. The problem: our current way of thinking risks long-term failure

Most animal advocates I talk to, deep down, want sweeping change for animals. They usually want to end human exploitation of animals or, at the very least, end factory farming. These are long-term goals — most people expect they will take decades to achieve, if not centuries. But if you were an outsider observing the movement, you wouldn’t always know that these are our ambitions.

We have a lot of good habits as a movement. Organisations deliberate deeply about their campaigns. Funders increasingly require grant recipients to present strong theories of change and rigorous metrics. We invest in a relatively broad array of tactics. These are all good behaviours that foster a resilient, capable movement ecosystem.

However, these practices often happen in a scattered fashion because they lack the connective tissue of long-term thinking^[2]. In most movement spaces I’ve observed over the last ten years — both radical and moderate — it’s seldom articulated how our actions today cohere with the world we want tomorrow. I’ve spoken with multiple founders of animal charities who have similarly observed a distinct lack of conversations about long-term goals and how we might achieve them.

1.1. Short-term pragmatism: our dominant mindset

How we talk indicates how we think. As a movement, I don’t think we’re thinking — and therefore acting — in a way that will end factory farming, let alone achieve bigger goals. Instead, I believe we’ve taken on a mentality I call short-term pragmatism: a way of thinking that’s optimised for quick, easily observed wins.

To unpack this further, I see short-term pragmatism as constituting three thought-patterns:

1. A focus on shorter-term, tangible goals that aren’t necessarily linked to longer-term visions. For example “reduce the suffering caused by practice X”, “phase out egregiously cruel practice Y”, “improve the situation of species A”.
2. Heavily weighting direct, easily observable impact when choosing interventions. A common driving question is: “How many animals does this help?”
3. A search for the (one) most effective approach. For example it’s not uncommon for advocates to say the movement should converge on one specific approach, such as alt-proteins/cage-free campaigns/legal advocacy/whatever — with an implication that we should significantly discount other approaches.

Short-term pragmatism has many clear benefits. It’s helped us step into a sense of agency and take concrete action. It pushes us to carry out measurable interventions with tight feedback loops. Importantly, it’s helped us win real battles — from freeing tens of millions of chickens from cages, to reducing the suffering of millions of fishes and billions of shrimp, to passing and defending legislation like California's Prop 12, and much more. On a meta-level, these victories generate momentum, raise movement morale and attract funding, all useful fuel for future skirmishes.  

However, over-relying on short-term pragmatism, to the exclusion of a long-term vision, carries critical risks. The very structures that foster our movement's good habits — metrics, feedback and funders holding us accountable — create a powerful force. This force can pull us into focusing on racking up short-term wins, with the implicit assumption that we’ll eventually build up to our long-term goals. This assumption could be true. But it’s also very unlikely. We can’t simply assume that winning a series of battles will hand us the war, because that’s simply not how wars work. If we don’t bring in sharp long-term thinking that accounts for the complex challenge ahead, we risk not even giving ourselves a chance to end factory farming, let alone go further.  

I think this proposition, that one must think long-term to win long-term, is fairly straightforward. So why do we gravitate towards short-term pragmatism and neglect long-term thinking? It’s worth unpacking this question to reflect on our own tendencies before we talk about alternative mindsets.  

1.2. Why (I think) short-term pragmatism draws us in

I suspect short-term pragmatism is a reaction to another mindset more prominent in early-stage advocates: passionate idealism — a way of being that believes transformative social change is relatively easy, and if we just raise awareness then the world will go vegan^[3]. At some stage, many advocates realise that change isn’t quite so simple. Prior to adopting short-term pragmatism, I think they likely experience some combination of the following:

• Overwhelm. Working towards a long-term ideal is hard. The world is complex, and typical planning and measurement tools don't translate easily to ending a system. Focusing on short-term goals is far more straightforward, and the numbers are easier to grapple with.
• Futility (of the long game). Long-term social change involves a lot of variables — corporate activity, world events, consumer trends, technological developments, and so on — many of which are beyond our control. It’s easy to believe that any long-term strategising is therefore impossible, and that we should primarily focus on what’s in front of us.
• Disillusionment (with the idealists). As we engage with the passionate idealist approach — or simply observe from afar — we find that it just isn’t working. We observe that people striving towards idealistic goals might make overly lofty demands like “animal liberation now”, and engage in protest actions that seem illogical. We don’t see the sense in these idealists, so we distance ourselves from idealistic thinking.

I suspect these feelings, as well as a desire for results, pushed people to create an alternative mindset that eventually became short-term pragmatism. As this mindset became more widely adopted, it came to be seen as the only viable alternative to passionate idealism.

1.3. The strategic limitations of short-term pragmatism

Feelings of overwhelm, futility and disillusionment are valid in the context of our movement. But I think responding to these feelings with short-term pragmatism is strategically unsound.

• We shouldn’t respond to overwhelm by de-emphasising long-term goals. Even if working towards them is hard, they’re a strategic necessity. While short-term goals are essential building blocks towards larger change, if we don’t tie them to a longer-term direction, we’ll be at major risk of getting stuck at local maxima of impact without discovering what’s needed to reach our true goals.
• A feeling of futility shouldn’t make us write off long-term strategising as an impossible task. Ample historical precedents show it’s possible to strategise towards monumental social change. Consider the abolition of human slavery in the US and Europe, the trend towards marriage equality, or the spread of neoliberal policies across the world. These paradigm shifts weren’t accidents — they’ve resulted from people working deliberately towards long-term visions. That isn’t to say it’s easy, or that the chance of victory is high. But success is possible, and if we want it to also become probable, we need to get good at strategising for the long game.
• Disillusionment with passionate idealists shouldn’t make us throw out idealism. It should lead us to break down our ambitions into more tangible subgoals so we can take pragmatic actions towards them. To get what we actually want, our short-term efforts must be informed by our long-term vision. Otherwise we’ll just be reacting to whatever the landscape throws at us without any assurance that we're going somewhere meaningful.

I believe we need to evolve our thinking to achieve our actual endgame. That means considering an alternative approach beyond passionate idealism and short-term pragmatism^[4].

2. The solution: visionary pragmatism

To win long-term, we need to think and act so that our behaviours today are as likely as possible to create the world we want tomorrow, while minimising suffering as much as we can along the way. This means embodying something I call visionary pragmatism.

2.1. Defining visionary pragmatism

I define visionary pragmatism as “a way of making change that orients towards an ambitious end goal and then applies clear thinking to achieve it.”

Let’s briefly unpack those two parts.

The ambitious end goal helps us aim at what our hearts truly want, and fuels creative thinking.

Clear thinking helps us figure out the right actions to move towards our end goal — for example, by evaluating evidence, reasoning with others, and using robust frameworks to make bets on the best ways to spend our resources. It also recognises that the thought-patterns needed to strategise towards big, long-term goals differ significantly from those we use for short-term goals.

A visionary pragmatist outlook deviates from short-term pragmatism in ways probably not apparent at first glance. In the next section, I’ll make visionary pragmatism more concrete by breaking it down into key qualities we can cultivate.

2.2. Six core qualities of visionary pragmatism

If we were to become a movement headed for long-term victory, I think we’d embody six qualities. These form the core of visionary pragmatism:

1. Most players would have a strong, clear vision.
2. As a whole, we would be oriented towards building power.
3. Actions across the movement would be guided by credible & transparent theories of victory.
4. Organisations and funders would use holistic criteria to decide what to work on.
5. Players would execute rigorously on their projects, ensuring work stays focused on furthering their theory of victory.
6. Most key decisions would be informed by a big picture perspective that stewards the movement ecosystem and builds capacity across generations.

Below, I’ll unpack each of these qualities.

Quality 1: Strong, clear visions

If you started hiking on a long, treacherous mountain path without first clarifying that you indeed want to summit the mountain, you probably won’t end up anywhere satisfying.

Likewise, to take useful action that meaningfully changes the world over a long period of time, we need to have in mind an ambitious end goal — a vision. Something that speaks to our authentic ambitions, while also feeling like a reality we can grapple with.

This first quality is perhaps visionary pragmatism’s most fundamental one — it’s right on the tin.

To address some common objections up front:

• We don’t all need to share the same vision. Realistically, the animal movement will consist of different groups working towards different end goals, whether it’s ending factory farming, ending all animal farming, or fundamentally restructuring laws and culture to support all animals to flourish. This is fine — differences are to be expected.
• We don’t need to announce our vision to the world. In fact, in some cases it’s best not to, or at least we should frame it strategically. But we should have it clear for ourselves. Otherwise our actions could go in all sorts of messy directions.  

A vision has three major benefits:

1. It allows us to coordinate our efforts. A vision allows us to work backwards and figure out the preconditions required to make it happen. We can then coordinate our resources to make those preconditions arise. Preconditions can take the form of either instrumental milestones (for example, “the chicken industry won’t go down unless we ban practice X”) or capacity milestones (“we need to increase the strength of pro-animal lobbying by 20x”). We’ll revisit these later when we discuss theories of victory.
2. It allows us to build unity. Clarifying and talking about our vision allows us to find others who share it (wholly or partially). With more people explicitly working towards the same direction, we have a greater capacity to actually achieve the thing we want. It’s important that people know that the others alongside them are working in that direction; otherwise they won’t be clear about where it makes sense to dialogue and collaborate.
3. It allows us to dialogue productively. For some reason, the animal movement seems to walk on eggshells when talking about our ultimate goals. We seem hesitant to ask other advocates what their endgame is, as if it’s taboo. But there are huge benefits to understanding “which way people sway” in regards to this particular topic:
   • If you and another advocate are aiming towards the same destination but think we should take different routes, then you can each share why you’re choosing your preferred route. You might then come to a better understanding of how your approaches can complement each other, or perhaps one (or both!) of you will change your mind on how to go about things.
   • If you and another advocate are actually aiming towards different things — for example, maybe you want to end all animal farming, and your conversation partner actually only cares about abolishing the worst practices in chicken farming — then you can still build understanding, share knowledge and identify ways to work together. In some cases it’ll make sense to share knowledge or collaborate. For example: “our radical group will blockade a chicken farm and release footage to get the public up in arms, and then your moderate group can play ‘good cop’ and push through a reform that damages the economics of chicken farming”. There will also be cases where it’s clear that groups are pursuing very different aims, and there isn't room to work in synergy — and that’s okay. 

Ultimately, a clear vision gives us something to aim our activities at, something to rally around, and something we can use to work better with others — even when those others have a differing vision.

Clarifying a vision is a first, essential step for a visionary pragmatist. But to go further, they need other qualities, the next of which is…

Quality 2: Orientation towards building power

As we set out on our long, treacherous hike, in addition to knowing we want to summit the mountain (having a vision), we then need to have the means to make that happen — food, water, sturdy shoes, weather-resistant clothes, sufficient physical fitness, and so on. In social change, the means can be summed up as power.

Earlier in the piece, I mentioned three lasting, monumental shifts in society: the abolition of slavery, marriage equality, and the spread of neoliberal policies. These shifts didn’t simply come about through a series of instrumental interventions. They came about after the movements behind them built power: the ability to create and defend change in society.

We don’t often talk about power in animal advocacy. But if we want big, long-term change, we must orient towards accumulating power. This is a core discipline of visionary pragmatism.

There are many models out there for thinking and talking about power. Below, I’ll outline a simple framework to help us grapple with it. Overall, I see four key types of power: institutional power, people power, narrative power and network power.

• Institutional power is the power we need to actually create instrumental outcomes. It’s the ability to directly influence societal structures and their behaviour — to get governments to change laws, companies to shift practices, the market to invest in new products, schools to change curriculums, the press to change its story, and so on.

  We can build institutional power by:

  • Advocating within the rules of existing institutions — for example, waging legal battles, meeting with local politicians, or by building companies that promote an alternative (for example, alt-proteins).
  • Forging relationships with individuals in institutions–for example, parents influencing school boards, or campaigners getting chummy with journalists.
  • Getting pro-animal people into high-leverage institutional positions such as political office, policy roles, corporate boards or student councils.

When we typically talk about power, it’s easy to fixate on institutional power, because a lot of change flows down through society from institutions. But there are three other forms of power that make it a lot easier to (a) build institutional power; and (b) maintain any instrumental changes we achieve.

• People power is the ability to leverage individuals to shift norms and impact the world. People are our movement's most fundamental asset. Without them, nothing else comes together. The more people on our side, the more we can push institutions and public discourse in a certain direction. The more diverse, skilled, and influential those people are, the more angles we can work from. People power isn’t always about having a lot of people — it can be just as much about having the right people working in the right ways. 

  Building people power takes various shapes, including:

  • Recruiting volunteers to local grassroots groups.
  • Mobilising people to take action, such as door-knocking, engaging with local representatives, or protesting.
  • Building existing advocates’ leadership and strategic abilities.
  • Influencing people to use their careers to help animals.

  Ultimately, people power allows us to apply pressure on institutions and embed ourselves within them. 

• Narrative power is the ability to influence society’s conversations. To get institutions to shift towards us, those institutions’ constituents need to be on board with our aims. To make that happen, we need to shape the conversations people have — at dinner tables, in boardrooms, on hikes, on train journeys. The US Marriage Equality movement is often used to demonstrate what's possible when movements engage in marketing, communications and public relations. This movement experienced a huge shift in momentum after pivoting from campaigning for "rights" to asking for the "freedom" to marry. This reframe resonated with Americans, enabling conversations that changed millions of minds. 

  We can build narrative power through strategies like:

  • Crafting campaigns with striking tactics and evidence-backed messaging, to spark conversations.
  • Building grassroots networks of volunteers who then go on to influence their family and friends.
  • Gathering artists, marketers and media professionals who hold pro-animal values, and organising them to increase their output of pro-animal messaging.

  Ultimately, narrative power performs the key function of changing public opinion so that institutions can contemplate change that otherwise wouldn’t be accepted. It also helps shift people’s values so they’re less likely to want to backtrack on progress. 

• Network power is the ability to leverage connectedness to create change. It hinges on the idea that relationships allow complex ideas and behaviour to spread. Stronger relationships between different players in the movement allow greater collaboration and sharing of ideas. Likewise, the more connected we are to the different parts of society we’re trying to influence, the better we can spread complex ideas and behaviour throughout society^[5]. Network power is an amplifier of other forms of power — through connection, our base of people can be more collaborative and resilient, our narrative can spread more effectively, and our institutional wins can be achieved faster and with greater support.  

  We can build network power by:

  • Building grassroots networks that organise different constituencies.
  • Cultivating connections between diverse movement groups and organisations through conferences, workshops and co-working spaces.
  • Nurturing relationships between advocates, and especially between organisational leaders who think differently to each other.

Let’s bring these different forms of power together by looping back to the Freedom to Marry campaign. Marriage Equality was embedded through institutional power — through a build-up of legal and legislative wins. But that change was precipitated by:

• Building people power through grassroots organising;
• Amassing narrative power through market research and public relations campaigns, including the “Freedom” pivot; and
• Cultivating network power — the campaign got its message heard by relying on not just LGBT+ people, but also their vast network of sympathetic friends and relatives, among others.

All of this created an environment where something that once felt impossible became law — seemingly all at once, but actually enabled by the gradual build-up of power.

From here, if we accept the task of building power to achieve our vision, we need to next figure out the how.

Quality 3: Credible & transparent theories of victory

If our aim is to summit the mountain (vision), and we understand we need to gather the means to get there (power), a visionary pragmatist then needs to map a route to the top. What are the paths available? Which one will we take? To make good guesses about what action to take, we must grapple with the big black box of uncertainty sitting between our end goals and our current reality. In other words, we must try to form some kind of credible theory of victory — a model of what must happen for us to win.  

Here, we need to hold the mountain metaphor more lightly, because summiting a mountain is a simple problem — one we can plan towards relatively easily; whereas building victory for animals is a complex problem — one impacted by many unpredictable, interacting variables, contested by many parties with competing interests, and involving vast amounts of unknown information. To create a step-by-step plan to end animal farming would be foolhardy. No such plan would survive contact with reality. 

However, we can still build a workable theory of victory by identifying what we can be confident about. Whatever one’s end goal — whether it’s abolishing the worst of factory farming, or fully embedding antispeciesist values in society — we can ask ourselves: What absolutely needs to become true to make our end goal possible? Seeking answers to this question can surface pre-conditions that are required to win, or in other words, major milestones on the path to victory.

We can identify two essential types of milestones:

• Instrumental milestones refer to shifts in policy, market conditions, institutional practices, and people’s behaviour across society. They’re what most people gravitate towards when they think about milestones, because they track whether we’re actually winning. Examples might include:
  • Major parties have adopted anti-factory farming positions
  • Cow-calf separation is banned
  • Alt-proteins have achieved price-parity with animal products
  • Government subsidies are restructured away from animal agriculture
• Capacity milestones. These are about our movement’s ability to act, adapt, and defend our wins. Capacity milestones essentially allow us to track our power. While these are easy to overlook, they’re critical to a theory of victory because they track whether we’re building the engine that makes winning possible. Capacity milestones might include outcomes like:
  • Pro-animal lobbyists are connected with 50% of top political figures → tracks institutional power
  • 200+ active local groups with trained organisers → tracks people power
  • 65% of the public support ending factory farming → tracks narrative power
  • 50% of movement organisations are connected to a coordinating body → tracks network power

Once we identify milestones, we can choose to focus our resources on select ones. We can brainstorm credible pathways to achieving those milestones — for example, we could use causal mapping techniques as shown in Animal Think Tank’s report on Mapping the Path to Animal Freedom — and evaluate those pathways using reason, evidence and dialogue. Having identified milestones and potential routes to those milestones, we can form a credible theory of victory which can inform us about the best projects and campaigns to engage in.

In an ideal world, we would have many researchers and analysts working on developing credible theories of victory. But even absent of that, we can still capture our goals, subgoals and assumptions on paper so that we can choose sensible actions, and perhaps even convince others to change their activities for the better.

Similarly to vision, we don’t all need to share the same theory of victory. What’s important is that each group operates according to a theory of victory, and are transparent with others about what that theory of victory is. That transparency can open up discussion and analysis so that our theories can improve, and so the most sensible and effective theories of victory can float to the top.  

Finally, a big red caveat on this whole section: we must always remember that our maps are not the real world. All models will miss things, and we should always be open to learning and revising our theories of victory. This is especially true in the animal movement, both because we’re relatively nascent, and because we face the unique challenge of our beneficiaries being unable to represent themselves in our society. There is still so much we don’t know about how social change works in our context. For this reason, it’s critical that we also invest in campaigns and projects (and, of course, research) that yield learning value — knowledge that allows us to model better theories of victory.

When armed with a credible theory of victory, we’ll typically be in a far stronger position to brainstorm and choose strategically sound actions. Which brings us to...

Quality 4: Use of holistic criteria to choose campaigns and projects

With a theory of victory in hand, the visionary pragmatist’s next core task is brainstorming and choosing between potential paths forward. 

Long-term change is fuzzy territory. To evaluate options with clarity, we need robust holistic criteria. These criteria should be grounded in our theory of victory, and help us deliberate what makes sense to implement given all the relevant factors of our current context. 

A strong list might include:

1. Milestone impact: Would it contribute to our current target milestone in our theory of victory?
2. Power: Would it build power? Which form? Is that the form we really need right now?
3. Need: Is this already being done? Is more of it needed?
4. Feasibility: Is this actually doable given our current capacity and context?
5. Resource-efficiency: Is this an efficient way to deploy our resources (time, skill, knowledge, money, infrastructure) to work towards our target milestone?
6. Learning value: What assumptions does this project test so that we can strategise better in the future?
7. Flow-through: Does it make other work in the movement easier or more effective?
8. Direct impact on animals: How much do we expect this to directly help animals? Does it risk harming them? How might short-term harm weigh against long-term benefits?
9. Any other relevant factors: Does this intervention make sense given everything else we know (and don’t know) about our current reality?   

Let’s apply these criteria to two examples to get a glimpse of how they could be used. 

Example: Comparing (1) Pro-Animal Communities against (2) End Factory Farming Digital Campaign

It’s important to clarify the overarching vision and theory of victory before evaluating campaign and project options — otherwise comparing them gets messy. An intervention's effectiveness can look completely different under the light of different theories of victory.

For this scenario, let’s assume that the vision is “a world without any animal farming”.

The theory of victory can be summed up as: “To end all animal farming, we must instigate strategic institutional and policy shifts that gradually erode animal farming. In order to make those shifts possible, we need to build sufficient active public support for ending animal farming (milestone 1) and influence institutions to change key practices (multiple milestones). Our current priority is milestone 1: cultivating active public support.” This is a relatively simplistic theory of victory for the purposes of the example.

Within the frame of this theory of victory, we then want to compare two projects:

• Pro-Animal Communities: A project aiming to broaden our active base of supporters by capitalising on the public’s care for animals. The project involves recruiting a small group of organisers in five major cities, and having them build “Pro-Animal Communities” (PACs). Modelled on best practice organising strategies^[6], the PACs will target the large number of people who are sympathetic to animals’ plight, but who are otherwise not connected to the animal movement. The PACs will draw people in through no-pressure social events, and through well-documented organising techniques will gradually nudge them towards taking moderate actions — for example speaking to their MPs, or lobbying local businesses to change their practices. Success is measured by the number and activity level of community members.   
• End Factory Farming Digital Campaign: A campaign aiming to rapidly shift public opinion on factory farming by investing heavily into digital media marketing. It will produce viral videos, run targeted social media ads, and work with high-profile influencers to get millions of people to watch content exposing factory farming and sign an "End Factory Farming" pledge. In addition to shifting public opinion, the campaign also aims to build a large national email list of sympathetic members of the public. Success is measured by reach, media impressions, and pledge signatures.

The table below demonstrates how we might compare these two projects against a list of holistic criteria. This is a back-of-the-envelope exercise for demonstration purposes only — I’d expect actual evaluations to be much more rigorous.

Whether or not you agree with the table's reasoning, it shows how holistic criteria can help us make more coherent choices about ways forward. When we've clarified our destination (vision) and mapped the landmarks we must pass to get there (theory of victory), holistic criteria can help us rigorously evaluate different paths in front of us.

Then, once we’ve chosen a path, our attention must go to walking it.

Quality 5: Rigorous execution

We’ve decided what to do after grounding ourselves in a vision, theory of victory and choices informed by holistic criteria. The rubber’s hitting the road. At this point, as visionary pragmatists we need to ensure three things are true of whatever project we’re taking on: focus, efficiency, and quality. I’ll only go deeper on the first one, because I think our movement already has a good grasp on efficiency and quality.  

Focus

When we launch something, it’s easy to get swept away by the ensuing activity, and eventually forget the project’s underlying purpose. This dynamic leads many projects to drift from their original intent, carry out activities that aren’t actually that useful, and unnecessarily consume huge amounts of time and money. 

The antidote is focus. In this context, focus means measuring whether a project is actually advancing our theory of victory, and responding appropriately. This involves defining success indicators drawn from the theory of victory, using these indicators to shape every part of the project, and gathering data on those indicators. If the data shows we’re succeeding in moving our theory of victory forward, we can celebrate and double down on what’s working. If we’re not, then we ought to change our approach; and if we find that, despite changing our approach, the project is still not producing the desired effects, we should consider scrapping it. 

Let’s apply this idea to the hypothetical Pro-Animal Communities project from the previous section. This project’s immediate aims are to increase active public support by engaging large numbers of previously inactive people. Thus its main success metric might be the number of these people who become highly active in the community. Every aspect of the project, from its messaging to its events to its recruitment practices, would be informed by this metric. Then, data on this metric can help the project decide whether to tweak its approach, make a major pivot, or stop running entirely. 

I could say a lot more about rigorous execution, but I’d be covering a lot of ground that I think our movement is pretty aligned on already. 

Across the board, I think we’re good at taking thoughtful action, and this is especially true of the EA side of the movement. My main recommendation is that we can do even better if our execution is consistently tied to a clear theory of victory.

Quality 6: A big picture perspective

So far, we’ve talked about high-level thinking and focused execution. Now, I want to touch on the emotional side of visionary pragmatism — namely, the cultivation of a big picture perspective. By this, I mean an outlook that allows us to strategise and execute from a place of clarity, with a wise understanding of the scale of the challenge before us. I believe this perspective is critical if we want to work effectively over the long haul.  

Cultivating a big picture perspective starts with acknowledging our harsh reality and processing the ensuing emotions. The neglect and exploitation of animals is deeply ingrained in human society. It’s arguably our planet’s most ancient injustice. The challenge ahead is steep. For most people, contemplating it triggers grief and anger. It's key that we process these emotions, whether that be through connecting with others, therapy, meditation, solo contemplation, or other avenues. Although we can rarely vanquish these feelings, we can reach a place where they don't overwhelm us, and where we can see increasingly clearly. 

Having begun to grapple with our emotions, we can develop a wiser understanding of the world. I think this generally leads to two realisations: the need to cultivate an ecosystem, and the need to build across generations. 

Realisation 1: The need to cultivate an ecosystem

To create big change for animals, it almost certainly won’t be enough to build a few effective campaigns, projects, or even organisations. Winning will require work from many organisations, groups and individuals working from different angles. To be able to adapt to changing economic and social tides, that ecosystem of players will need to be diverse, with healthy norms (like dialogue and inquiry) and inoculation against harmful ones (for example, violence). A visionary pragmatist movement needs to regularly ask itself: how can we build the capacity of the ecosystem? 

Realisation 2: The need to build across generations

Secondly, a big picture perspective acknowledges that we must build for the long haul. Changing animals’ position in the world is almost certainly going to be a multi-generational struggle that will take decades at minimum. That means our task is to ensure we leave behind a stronger ecosystem for the next generation.

Seeing ourselves as stewards of a multigenerational movement can create a collaborative, patient mindset with many cumulative micro-effects on how we strategise. For example, it can allow us to recognise:

• That it’s worth pausing for a moment to figure out where we’re going, because choices now could have decades-long knock-on effects.
• That different approaches are dependent on each other, and we should take care to cultivate the ecosystem from multiple angles. For example, consider how bold grassroots networks can build the pressure that helps lobbyists push reforms.
• That we should consider investing in capacities with less short-term payoff, but which are critical for the long-term. For example, litigation, community organising and political influence.  
• That the world is full of swings and shocks, and our task is to build an ecosystem that is skilled, connected and powerful enough to adapt.

Building a resilient ecosystem is hard work, and there will always be tensions. But cultivating a big picture perspective can move us to prioritise dialogue, mutual respect, and strategic decisions grounded in the needs of the many. In other words, it can help us build a more powerful movement in the long run.  

2.3. Summarising visionary pragmatism  

Visionary pragmatism offers a third way beyond the limiting binary of passionate idealism and short-term pragmatism.

It starts with a clear, long-term vision that keeps us oriented towards our deep ambitions. Then, further qualities — an orientation towards power, credible theories of victory, holistic criteria for choosing interventions, and rigorous execution — give us tools to work pragmatically and strategically towards victory.

Finally, a big picture perspective, which grapples with the scale of our task and the need to build an ecosystem across generations, lends us the emotional grounding to build for the long haul.   

3. Next steps: cultivating visionary pragmatism

If we wanted to become a visionary pragmatist movement, or at least bring a little more visionary pragmatism to how we do things, what should we do from here?

One thing you as an individual can do immediately is put your own vision and theory of victory on paper. You could capture it in writing, as a diagram, using this online Theory of Change Builder, or whatever mode makes sense for you. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be something you can look at, question, analyse, talk about with others, and improve. As an example, see this quick theory of victory outlining my interpretation of the approach taken by Project Phoenix^[7], a UK social movement organisation.

Capturing and communicating your theory of victory is also my primary recommendation to organisations and funders. Define your end goal and your theory of victory. Ask others to challenge and add to them. Ask whether your organisation’s activities and funding priorities make sense in light of them. Even a rough first draft shared internally can shift how teams prioritise and coordinate.

Other things we can do to increase our movement’s capacity to win include:

• Investing in research and analysis to develop robust theories of victory.
• Seeding an initiative to regularly track and share metrics which are common across many theories of victory — for example public opinion stats, number of active supporters, or number of supportive politicians.
• Convening leaders (for example via annual strategy forums or working groups) to dialogue about theories of victory, share which ones they’re aligned with, and how we ought to therefore allocate resources.

4. Over to you!

This post aims to be a starting point, rather than a final word. To help refine its ideas, I’m curious about your perspectives, especially:

• Did this post change your mind in any way, and if so, how?
• Which bits did you disagree with? What weaknesses did you spot?
• If you're not persuaded by the framework of visionary pragmatism, but you still aspire towards an ambitious end goal for animals, how do you think we can maximise the chance of achieving that end goal?
• If you did find this framework compelling, what’s one small thing you or your organisation might do differently to integrate it?

Thank you for making it this far, and for your interest in helping animals as best we can. If you're called to share a response, I look forward to reading it!

1. ^{^}

   Rhymes with Milan. 

2. ^{^}

   I’m using the popular understanding of "long-term". Think 50 to 200 years. 

3. ^{^}

   My framing of “short-term pragmatism vs passionate idealism” is often referred to as “welfarism vs abolitionism”. I’ve opted for this alternative framing because I think it better captures the crux of the respective mindsets. The “welfarism vs abolitionism” framing has never felt right to me, primarily because many people who use welfare tactics hold abolitionist end goals in their hearts. 

^{^}

There are some people who would still be better served by short-term pragmatism, for example: (a) people who are highly pessimistic about our ability to enact long-term change; (b) people with a very strong preference for smaller, direct, quantifiable impact now versus bigger, fuzzier impact later; and/or (c) people who would be comfortable with a world where we significantly reduce farmed animals’ pain and discomfort, but still continue to commodify and kill them. 

^{^}

For more on the idea of spreading behaviour change through relationships, see Change: How to Make Big Things Happen by Damon Centola (2021).

^{^}

For more on best practice organising strategies, see How How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations And Leadership In The 21st Century by Hahrie Han (2014). 

^{^}

Learn more at project-phoenix.org.uk.

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