Summary
A Commons Library planning tool — a five-pointed star (goals, resources, audience, timing, risk) for choosing and assessing tactics.
Body
A Commons Library planning tool — a star-shaped framework for evaluating a tactic on five points: goals, resources, audience, timing, and risk.
The Tactic Star asks a team to score a proposed tactic on five points: how well it serves the goal, the resources it consumes, its fit with the audience, the timing, and the risk. The Commons Library publishes the framework under a CC license so it can be quoted and adapted [source: the-tactic-star-tool]. The Tactics Toolkit on the same Commons Library site provides the menu of named tactics that the star is applied to [source: commons-tactics-toolkit]. The star is most useful when used before an action to surface trade-offs that one-off brainstorming hides, and after an action to document what worked and why. The tactic star is the tactical counterpart to the theory of change: one decides what to do at the strategic level, the other how to evaluate any specific move.
The Tactic Star is hosted on the Commons Library site alongside the broader toolkit collection [source: commons-library].
Use it for
Choosing between two candidate tactics; debriefing an action with a structured visual; training new strategists.
Related
- methods-of-nonviolent-action
- the-campaign-cycle
- dilemma-actions
- commons-library
- the-tactic-star-tool
Open Questions
None yet.
Sources & verification
- sources/the-tactic-star-tool — grounding: secondary — RAW (4204 chars)
- sources/commons-tactics-toolkit — grounding: secondary — RAW (4531 chars)
- sources/commons-library — grounding: secondary — RAW (5257 chars)
Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.