Reflections on Organization

I am convinced more and more that effective organization combined with a vision for the future are essential to changing this society. Nothing short of this will have the ability to shift the debate decisively toward justice. My college experience has taught me this vital lesson.
The first student group I started in college failed because it was all vision and no organization. I learned so much about organizing by doing that, and taking that responsibility. It was a crash course in organizing, and I am so glad that I had that experience. The next clubs I helped found showed me the importance of organization. Operation Iraqi Freedom (Brown's anti-war group, abbr. as OIF) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) gave me a good contrast to look at what effective organization can do. As much as I love OIF, it does not have as much of a vision as SDS, mostly because it is narrowly defined as an anti-war group. SDS is multi-issue and is able to articulate a much broader and more compelling dream of a better world. OIF was able to draw alot of attention to the war issue, but I think it has been unable to significantly shift the debate about the war in the Brown community (yet!). It is almost like preaching to the choir. Brown students already mostly agreed that the war was terrible and needs to be ended, so raising awareness did not need to be the primary goal. The primary goal would have needed to be trying to mobilize people, creating a forum for people to discuss what they could do, and setting goals to achieve. I feel that OIF has not managed to do that, and I think that is because its politics did not embrace a vision for the future that would have spawned goals.
SDS was better able to push the public dialog because it could look at a problem, apply its vision to the problem, and come up with a novel goal that was generally new to the dialog on Brown's campus. Presenting new ideas and giving people a concrete, local goal to "hope for" and work toward will mobilize people. And if there is effective organization behind that mobilization, it can really do amazing things (like signing up 1/6 of the student population into a new student union in two weeks. YEAH SDS!).
So, having had experience with groups that had vision, but no organization; organization but no vision; and one with both organization and vision, I have found that having both is far more effective at changing things. These groups are also more appealing (to me).

Governments are an interesting entity to analyze through this lens. They have plenty of organization, but no vision. Even when certain politicians have vision, and actively express it, the organizational inertia of the government often seems to be unmovable. This may be why so many people are cynical about government, because even if you have strong organization, you cannot do much without the proverbial compass of vision to point you in the right direction. However, like all organizations, governments are movable through outside pressure. A large movement of people can push a government toward doing something.
But this is not the way governments are supposed to be. Theoretically, a government is supposed to be a forum to discuss the issues on people's minds, a representation of the collective will of the society, and the organ which is supposed to act on that will. People always blame the government when social problems arise and/or continue to exist. That is because
the government is the institution charged with protecting, reinforcing, helping and stabilizing society (and the people within it). It seems that the current governmental structure in these United States does not fulfill its goal. I think that part of the reason for this is because government is no longer defined as just another institution in society that has a specific purpose.
I am not sure what the government is now defined as, but I have the feeling it varies between different groups of people.
Anyway, I want to figure out how to structure a government so that it can really be what it is supposed to be.