Richard House (RH): Can you say something about how your previous activist work might have prepared you for, and helped lay a favourable foundation for, the phenomenal success of XR to date?
 
Gail Bradbrook (GB): I struggle with your word “success” because we haven’t achieved our goals and we have quite a way to go and time is so short. There are so many of us motivated to try, though, to give it our best shot.
 
What previous work has done has, of course, taught me a lot. And mostly through failures — many of them! I’ve tried quite a few approaches to social change, got really hopeful that something might be a very effective cause to pursue — and then found out that it wasn’t! 

I think one of the best things I learned was from Roger Hallam, which is to be very careful in thinking about your theory of change, to learn from others about what works and to be systematic in applying techniques and practices.
 
I hope I’ve also learned a lot about working with other people. I’m at my happiest when I’m in a team with other people who are just as dedicated and driven. 

Many of us behind Extinction Rebellion worked together on Rising Up projects. We fell in love with each other, got annoyed with each other, worked out our strengths and weaknesses, and kept trying because — well, it just seems to be in our blood.
 
RH: Can you tell us a bit more about Roger Hallam’s background, and how that has effectively fed into XR’s work? And can you summarise for readers what you’ve distilled from your researches into the necessary and sufficient conditions for sustainable social change to happen?
 
GB: Roger has been doing research at King’s College London into social change, and he is also an organic veg farmer. He was involved in setting up things like the Radical Think Tank and Radical Routes, and has spent his life thinking about how societies change. He’s a phenomenal energy; I sometimes call him our engine room — it’s meant as a compliment!
 
Roger was doing research into conditional commitment, which is the idea that people might do something if they knew others might, too. He used this approach to help organise a successful rent strike at University College London, for instance.