Campaigning Wiki

3 min read

Summary

Force-field analysis (Lewin) tallies the driving forces pushing toward a change against the restraining forces holding the status quo, and asks the campaign whether the change is winnable now — and where to apply pressure.

Body

Force-field analysis is the diagnostic that answers the question is this change winnable now, and if so where? The People Power Manual lists “forcefield analysis” as one of its situational-analysis process guides alongside the SWOT and the problem tree [source: people-power-manual].

The structure is two columns:

  • Driving forces — factors pushing toward the desired change. An election, a leaked document, a coalition on the verge, a sympathetic media moment, the target’s own internal dissent.
  • Restraining forces — factors holding the status quo. The target’s allies, fear of backlash, donor pressure, an unfavourable legal environment, an apathetic base.

Each force is weighted — by likelihood, by size of impact, by what it would cost to shift. The Commons Library’s organising modules pair the analysis with SWOT and problem-tree so the same forces appear across all three diagnostics and the team sees them converge [source: commons-library].

The discipline is that strategy is not just add drivers — it is also weaken or remove restrainers. The People Power Manual’s force-field process guide is structured to push the team to identify which restraining forces can be removed cheaply (a leaked counter-narrative, a defection from the opposing coalition) and which require expensive drivers to overcome (a new law, a hostile court) [source: people-power-manual]. The Commons Library adds that force-field analysis is most useful at decision points — is now the moment to escalate? — rather than at the very start of a campaign, when the driving and restraining forces are not yet visible enough to score [source: commons-library].

A common failure mode is to use the analysis as a vote: which side has more forces, which side wins. Force-field analysis is not a vote; the size of a force matters more than the count. The Commons Library treats the weight step as the entire point of the exercise — without weights, the columns are decoration [source: commons-library].

Use it for

Deciding whether to launch, escalate or pause; identifying which restraining force is cheapest to remove; aligning a coalition on which side of the dynamic the campaign is actually pushing against; re-running at each re-evaluation point of the the-campaign-cycle.

Open Questions

None yet.

Sources & verification

  • sources/people-power-manual — grounding: secondary — RAW (7977 chars)
  • sources/commons-library — grounding: secondary — RAW (5257 chars)

Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.

Graph View

Backlinks