The Green Hockey Stick

How the Green Party can go from start-up to scale up over the next few years

At this point in time, we in the Green Party have some tough choices to make to ensure that the next phase of our development is one of increasing growth in support and electoral success. In this article, I will set out what those choices are and what will drive them.

2021: The start of a new Green era

In 2021 the Green Party has achieved it’s highest ever average polling over the course of a year (so far)

We have a had a successful set of local election results, increasing our number of elected councillors to an all-time high of 453. But, we have also experienced a steady and stable increase in polling figures throughout the year (see below)

This time, the growth in support looks and feels more certain than before. If this growth is maintained, it presents us with an opportunity to look forward and examine what potential lies beyond this point

Common patterns of growth

In order to understand what types of growth are possible, we need to recognise common patterns of growth and decide which one provides a useful model for the Green Party.

The most common experiences of growth tend to be:

Incremental growth is a linear and simple progression. Imagine building a wall one brick at a time. You can plot the progress as a simple, upward line

WiIth Logarithmic growth you see big advances early on, but they taper off quickly and future growth becomes difficult to maintain

Exponential growth presents a slow start, followed by gradual/incremental progress, but upon reaching a point of critical mass there is a sudden explosion in growth

In political terms, each of these patterns of growth can occur.

The Green Party in Brighton and Hove grew incrementally from 1996 to 2011, slowly building at each election until becoming the largest party on the City Council and winning Brighton Pavilion at the 2010 General Election. But it was a long hard slog that required a significant chunk of the national party’s resources.

The SDP, in just 3 years, went from nothing to 26% in the General Election of 1983. However, they were unable to maintain that momentum and it took another 27 years to turn that support into political power. Their experience of logarithmic growth turned out to be a tough gig, despite high hopes early on.

Very few disruptive political parties achieve effective exponential growth over a prolonged period. The Labour Party in the 1920s/30s and the SNP from around 2003 to 2015 both managed to break through to political power after a prolonged period of relatively slow growth. UKIP achieved a more modest 12.6% of the vote in 2015 after a slow but steady 20 year rise, but if this were enough to achieve its objective (which it appeared to be), it is probably fair to say that their progress also moved along an exponential growth curve

This type of growth starts to look like a more desirable model for the Green Party, which has had a long slow journey to the political stage, but is now experiencing a modest but sustained increase in support.

Although still early days, we can see from the growth in the number of Green councillors over the years, that it resembles the first 80% of the exponential curve:

It might seem like we are already at the peak of our exponential growth, but this is something of an optical illusion borne out of lack of context. If we assume an aim of winning 10% of all council seats (2000 Cllrs) by 2030, then this curve would look a bit like the one below up to the black dot

As you can see, although the exponential growth stage might have started (the inflection point on the graph in 2019 is clearly identifiable), it’s still in its early stages. There is no cast-iron law of physics (or elections) to say that our continuation along that curve is inevitable or guaranteed. That is why the choices we make next are so important.

The remainder of this article will focus on how that strategy of aiming for exponential growth can be achieved.

The Hockey Stick model

If our aim is to grow exponentially, how do we prepare for that journey and ensure that it happens?

In his review of 172 start-up businesses that had achieved exponential growth in revenue, Bobby Martin identified a model he described as a “Hockey Stick” (so called due to the shape of the revenue growth curve).

In this model, Martin describes 4 key stages of development for these start-ups:

1. Tinkering: where startups look at their business idea more seriously. This phase ends when you take a leap of faith and fully commit to the business. For a political party this phase might include standing candidates in some seats, but not all, or developing initial policies or manifestos, but not yet having a full policy platform
2. The blade years: The first few years of serious activity, where they are operating the business full-time. They might not be generating much revenue or showing much growth in this period, but they are establishing a market presence and operating as a serious entity. For Greens this might be best represented as the era of having Greens elected to high profile roles (MEPs, London Assembly Members, Members of the Scottish Parliament and, of course, an MP in the House of Commons), but still not seeing much electoral progress more broadly.
3. The growth inflection point: This is where something in their offering “clicks”. Sales or revenue start to climb which pulls them towards a point of critical mass in the marketplace. From this point they start to see a much higher return on investments and innovation. In political terms, this would be the point at which voters view Green candidates as a serious option in all elections, or view Green Party policies and opinions as directly relevant to their decisions or political outcomes.
4. Surging growth: The final stage where business revenues grow rapidly and the business starts to operate at a much greater scale. The political precedents for this are few and far between (only a couple mentioned above), but clearly these are the examples we wish to emulate.

Lessons Learned from the Hockey Stick experience

Apart from identifying the shape of success, what else has this review of successful start-up businesses taught us about how to achieve exponential growth?

The first, and most important, lesson is that not all start-ups make it along this curve.

The good news for the Green Party, is that the toughest phase, and the one where new entrants are most likely to fail, is ‘the Blade Years’. This is broadly speaking the phase from 1999–2019, when we consistently contested elections at both local and national level, but with very little progress.

Businesses survive this phase partly by having a good plan, partly by responding effectively to events/the marketplace and partly by having plenty of ‘patient capital’ to invest in their operation. The credit for getting the Greens through this phase probably lies with those who have worked to build up the party in terms of policy and electoral capacity in that time, and all those patient members and supporters who have dug in to establish the party in all corners of the country.

While we appear to have passed the ‘Growth Inflection Point’ in local elections, we are probably still approaching it in terms of Westminster elections.

Before 2010 our general election results were in the region of just 1% or less (we almost never appeared in opinions polls). From 2010 until 2020 our polling averaged between 2% and 5%, often fluctuating to either end of that range. In 2021, for the first time in a non-parliamentary election year, we are consistently polling over 5%.

The next few years are our opportunity to reach the inflection point (probably 10%+) and begin to enjoy support at rapidly increasing levels beyond that.

Building the ‘Goldilocks’ organisation

These ‘hockey stick’ business successes are rare, and their success extremely difficult to replicate. So how does a small political party achieve it?

It would seem that there are a couple of key elements to their success, the first of which relates to the maturity of the organisation.

It’s not all about the money

Research into these new business success stories found that the amount of funding enjoyed by start-ups that moved into this ‘hockey stick’ phase of growth was not a particularly important factor.

Getting their timing right and launching when they were both ready and able, but not waiting too long, seemed to be a far greater indicator of success than financial backing.

Being ready and able to move at the right time was more important than size, funding or market positioning at the time.

To transpose this idea on to the political world, UKIP or the SDP were unable to sustain their growth spurts because their offering lacked the maturity that was required, whereas the SNP was able to use its growth opportunities to full advantage, because it had spent as much as 40 years preparing for them. It had had parliamentary representation for virtually all of that time, including, since 1999, a substantial group in the Scottish Parliament.

At the other end of the spectrum is the experience of the Labour Party. After 2015 it experienced a massive surge in membership after the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. But rather than fuel a renaissance in its fortunes, the party machinery (‘long in the tooth’ and primarily focused on protecting legacy power structures), went into full rejection mode plunging the party into a state of all-consuming internal conflict.

The Green Party doesn’t quite have the political depth or experience that the SNP possessed by 2014, or even 2007. But neither does it suffer from the embedded power structures and debilitating rigidity of the Labour Party. So, we still have the opportunity to respond to an increase in support effectively if or when it arrives.

Achieving Peak Maturity

So how do we achieve this ‘Goldilocks’ organisational state?

The challenge for the Green Party is that we currently have autonomy, but little alignment; we have freedom, but almost no discipline; and we have flexibility, but barely any scale.

We confuse anarchy with democracy and local responsiveness with national effectiveness

In order to win, we need to be an aligned political machine that can deliver effective policies and winning campaigns; we need to be disciplined in order to gain credibility with voters; and we need to expand our operation to meet the demands of a party of power.

We’ve been discussing radical changes to our constitution (usually known as ‘the Holistic Review’) for about 4 years. Now is the time to get on with it. Without getting into the excruciating detail of some of the proposals, it is crucially important that we move to a party organisation that is robust, responsive and agile at the centre, but effective, empowered and fully informed at the local level. We cannot scale up the Party and its activities with a set-up that

• Is slow to make decisions (or makes poor decisions and is then slow to change course)
• Cannot (or is unwilling to) remove bad faith operators, ineffective performers or those members who are actively working against the party and/or its candidates
• Keeps most members completely in the dark about what’s going on

We are still functioning like a start-up, but we need to behave like a market leader.

So, we either pass the Holistic Review soon, or we accept a ‘quick and dirty’ overhaul to be completed and agreed in the next 12 months. For those holding out for the new constitution to be perfect, please reflect on the ‘Goldilocks’ organisational advantages: it is actually preferable for our processes to be flawed, but rapid and flexible, than perfect, but slow and rigid.

We can avoid the naivety of the SDP, the chaos of UKIP and the rigidity of contemporary Labour when each of them struggled to manage their growth surges, but we must be honest with ourselves in terms of what we need to do and accept the need for some personal and operational compromises.

In order to make use of our current and future growth in support, we need to reach our ‘Goldilocks’ organisational state in the next 1–2 years. If not, we will fail.

It is now a matter of urgency.

Becoming a ‘Category King’

But organisational readiness was not the main component of successful growth, according to this research.

That was the establishment of those businesses as ‘Category Kings’: i.e. businesses that focused on specific gaps in the market, or new markets, which they then dominated, rather than try to squeeze out competitors in existing markets. (I’ve also heard this explained as “Find the gap in the market, and then build the market in the gap.”)

These niches or gaps, if successfully filled, brought in as much as 76% of market share for the ‘Category Kings’, and it is this that provided the exponential growth demonstrated in our ‘hockey stick’.

But becoming a ‘Category King’ is the challenge that will prove the most difficult for us as a movement because it involves an approach that we are not used to.

As one commentator puts it, “[becoming a Category King] is a gruelling journey that requires killing your competitors and uncompromising focus. Today, taking on an existing market with a well-established leader is verging on suicidal. The prospect of trying to overthrow the [current Category King] by beating them at their own game just doesn’t make sense.”

This is a much more aggressive outlook than we are used to, or naturally disposed towards (we would rather avoid violent metaphors!), but it also relies on a singular political focus that we have historically lacked.

All too often, we in the Green Party treat Politics as a game of designing an ideal society on paper (I have been as guilty of this as anyone). In reality, it’s about going into (nonviolent) battle for the values you believe in. As a small party, we are, in effect, a guerilla outfit trying to topple much bigger forces (apologies again for war metaphors!). For this reason, we need to focus relentlessly on the very few leverage points that we have, because everything else is a waste of time. We need to be clear and focused around our Category Kings, core messages and principles, and not hamstrung in both time and attention by gigantic shopping lists of policies that have developed over many years, and are often the equivalent of trying to beat the dominant parties at their own game.

In addition, our continuing efforts to become co-opted by Labour (and maybe the LibDems) under the umbrella of a “Progressive Alliance” are the opposite of the focus that is needed to achieve the kind of explosive growth that we should be aiming for. Our attempt to coalesce with Labour is the equivalent of Facebook launching itself as a plug-in for MySpace. It will only help Labour maintain its dominance among progressive voters.

Pursuing a ‘Green Hockey Stick’ approach requires us to abandon a current strategy that invites voters to view us as just one in a line-up of parties occupying a similar space. Being a Category King means that we don’t want voters to compare us with, or view us as an extension of, other parties: we want them to see us as a standalone offering. If they feel that they can get what we offer from another, more well established party, then that is exactly what most of them will do.

Of course there can still be comparisons, but for a Category King, they need to be in the other direction; i.e. competitors compare themselves with us. Below are good examples of this (Ed Davey and Luke Pollard reminding people that we are the Category Kings when it comes to the environment):

This is a sign that we’re on the right path. When other Parties attempt to steal your policies, slogans or objectives you know you are challenging for the role of Category King.

Examples of political parties managing to become Category Kings include the SNP with Scottish Independence, UKIP/Brexit Party with leaving the EU, Labour with the NHS, the Conservatives with delivering Brexit, or further back, policies like ‘Right to Buy’ or Privatisation. The point is not whether you agree or disagree with any of these policies, but that you instantly think of the relevant political party when they are mentioned. Trying to topple these Kings in policy categories that they already dominate is incredibly difficult — it is far better to find other policy areas that people care about, but where there are no clear contenders.

Here are some examples of challenging the Category Kings in ways that will almost certainly not work:

● “We’ll spend x% more on the NHS than Labour”

● “We’ll be even tougher on immigration than the Conservatives”

● “We will be clamp down on benefit scroungers even harder than the Tories”

● “We are a more socialist party than Labour”

This is because the single most important ingredient in owning a category is not to try to out-compete other providers, but to be distinct. So, it’s not “ours is a better policy than [other party]”, but “ours is the only policy that will deliver for you in this area”.

It’s not easy to achieve category king status, but in order to do it there are three important steps we would need to take:

1. Define the gap and explain how we would fill it. This means reviewing policy with a purpose. Making sure it is focused on voter concerns and presenting a distinct policy position that the voter believes will work for them. It’s not just about coming up with the most headline grabbing idea — it needs to be resonate with, and sound credible to, people leaning towards voting Green.
2. Establish the message early and keep repeating it. Persistence beats resistance! We can’t expect voters to absorb our messaging in the 6 weeks of an election campaign; our ‘manifesto’ needs years to sink in, be discussed and demonstrate its value. To be a category king, we need to live and breathe the message day in, day out, week in, week out, year in, year out. The reason 12.6% of voters supported UKIP in 2015 even though all other parties were promising a referendum on EU membership, was because they believed that only UKIP meant it. If we want to be believed on a range of popular issues, we need to be believed implicitly. Half measures, triangulations or bandwagon jumping will not do the trick.
3. Change the way people think about the issue. Engage with people in a way that resonates. Simply shouting that we’re right and everyone else is wrong (or that the world will end if they don’t vote for us) will not make people see the issues in a new light. To do that we need to

• Speak to people in their own language
• Be positive about their aspirations and our shared values
• Give people agency/choice. There’s a reason why ‘take back control’ worked with so many people. Let’s help them to make better decisions with their own lives by giving them more choice — telling people to travel less, or eat less meat, or insulate their home is not going to encourage people to embrace us or our proposals. But, providing them with better working/living/travel choices, or access to a wider range of foods, or providing low cost home improvement loans or grants, will make them feel positive about us and what we can offer them. We need to convince them that we are on their side, and that the Green agenda is about helping them with their choices, not imposing ours.

Building on current foundations

So, which category (or categories) do we choose that are most likely to deliver that ‘Hockey Stick’ growth?

We are already viewed as Category Kings in environmental matters. Issues viewed as ‘Green’ are automatically associated with the Green Party, and those issues are becoming increasingly important for voters. So, that seems like a reasonable starting point. Not that anyone has suggested it, but it would be foolish to vacate the one category that we do dominate. The trick will be to attach other categories (sub-categories?) to it.

On this front, we have already started to make some progress. ‘The Green New Deal’ framing has shown itself to be reasonably effective in attaching issues like

• economic renewal
• community building
• job creation
• land management
• business support
• housing standards
• an industrial strategy
• transport modal shift
• road safety
• redistribution of income

to our core objective of achieving zero carbon by 2030.

The testimony to our dominance in this category was Labour’s attempt to capture the crown in the run up to the last general election. Their own GND proposal was a far weaker alternative that soon faded away in the subsequent election campaign (and certainly after), but it reinforced the idea to commentators and voters alike, that such a large scale, government-led investment project was necessary.

Our challenge now is to embed this Category as the most important issue of our time, while simultaneously co-opting other policy areas that resonate with voters. Ideas like:

• Universal Basic Income to end poverty once and for all
• Land Value Tax and housing market changes that will deliver affordable homes to all citizens
• Democratic reforms
• A platform of inclusion and anti-bigotry

probably still need to be sewn into the fabric of the Green New Deal in a way that makes our distinct offering more believable and appealing.

If this is the Category we choose to attach ourselves to, we need to bring it front and centre to our campaigning for the next few years, almost to the exclusion of everything else. We can of course, connect it to other issues, in the same way the SNP link Scottish independence, or UKIP linked EU membership/Brexit, to every key political issue, but we must always bring the attention of voters back to our ‘Category King’.

We must also stop telling voters that other parties are the real Category Kings, and that we are just the support act. All talk of “Progressive Alliances’ must stop. If it doesn’t, there is zero chance that we will be viewed as serious contenders and, therefore, ever achieve the kind of growth in support that the Hockey Stick model offers. The voters will never get to know that it is our vision alone that will deliver for them, if we keep telling them that the most important choice they face is which side of the Labour v Conservative grudge match they’re on.

The Next Steps

The changes we need to make to achieve our Goldilocks state and become Category Kings will need to be agreed amongst us, openly and democratically.

Some of these changes are already underway, or at least under discussion, but if we are to be ready for any upsurge in support, we must move with greater urgency.

As we elect new leaders and a new Executive we must press upon them the need to make the changes necessary to achieve ‘Hockey Stick’ growth.

In my opinion, there are 5 key strands of activity that the Party must undertake in the coming months to facilitate those changes.

1. Internal structures

• They don’t need to be perfect, but they do need to be responsive and accountable. We cannot remain as we are. We must simplify our governance, improve accountability and streamline our processes. Everything must now be focused on moving us forward, fast.

2. Policy focus and messaging (including discipline)

• We need to find our ‘Category Kings’ and build simple, effective messaging, that resonates with our key supporters, around them. Get it done soon and give ourselves 2 years to reach those voters. We all need to present the same message and repeat it till our potential voters are sick of hearing it

3. Centralised data and co-ordination

• We need a shared voter database across all active Green parties. It can be simple, but it must allow for consistent campaigning and collection of voter data. We can’t be a single team unless we have a single repository of data

4. Fundraising

• We must be spending several times the amount we spend currently to grow at the rate we need. It’s not all about the money, but we still need a lot more of it to operate at scale. Although this will take time, we must start soon and make it a national priority.

5. Scale up our ambition

• ‘Target to Win’ has been largely successful, but it is an incremental growth model. We shouldn’t abandon it, but we need a scalable national strategy to complement it. It’s time to go hard or go home. We all need to prepare for the enormous effort that lies ahead and the sweat, sacrifice and determination that is required.

Let’s establish working (or ‘Task & Finish’) groups involving our many brilliant minds and create clear proposals for each of these workstreams. Let’s harness the talent we have and direct it to delivering quick, positive transformation in all of these areas.

Our Challenge

I accept that writing this is easy, achieving it is not.

But, nonetheless, this is our challenge. Not just for the leadership, or the executive, or candidates, but for all of us.

Change is tough. It’s painful, stressful and time consuming. If we make the changes outlined above some people will cry, some will leave in protest and others will shout that it’s unfair or undemocratic. But that cannot stop us from embracing that change.

If we want the next period of our growth to follow the ‘Hockey Stick’ model, then we need to copy what other organisations have done to achieve it.

And we need to start now.

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Martin Farley is the Elections coordinator for Brighton & Hove Green Party, and convener of the Party’s Tax & Fiscal Policy Working Group. He has also spent 20 years working on corporate projects designed to help businesses grow revenue, capacity and customer responsiveness. He was an active member of the SNP from 1997 to 2004 and witnessed the party move through a key period of reorganisation and growth