Cascades

by Greg Satell

  Even Al Qaeda has been disrupted from within. As political expert Thomas Rid noted in The Wilson Quarterly, the interests of local and global jihadi elements diverged over time.12 In America, so-called wave elections are usually followed by a countermovement. The massive support for Barack Obama in 2008 helped inspire the Tea Party victories in 2010. Many of those trends, however, were reversed again in 2012. And all of this was just a prologue to the unlikely rise of Donald Trump in 2016 and the reversal of his political fortunes in the midterm elections two years later, in 2018. As Moisés Naím has noted, power has become easier to gain and harder to use or keep.

  And even when leaders recognize the danger, they are often powerless to effect the change needed to counter it. For example, after John Antioco of Blockbuster addressed the danger that Netflix posed to his company, his plans encountered strong opposition within his organization. Carl Icahn, a business icon renowned for his vision and acumen, replaced Antioco with Jim Keyes, who reinstated late fees and refocused the company’s strategy on brick-and-mortar stores. Investment in the online platform was decreased.13 Within three years Blockbuster was bankrupt.

  Our existing mental model is that strong governance drives change. Wise leaders who sit atop hierarchal organizations recognize the need for a shift and make it happen. They confer with advisors, formulate plans, and execute them. Many of us were raised to believe in the “great man” theory of history, that movements succeed only when a charismatic leader like Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi inspires them. Clearly, that model will continue to fail us in this new age in which cascades increasingly drive events.

  Cascading movements don’t follow the “great man” script. If there were great leaders driving the Orange Revolution and the Arab Spring, what happened to them in the aftermath? What happened to the Pora activists of the Orange Revolution? Why were they powerless in the aftermath? Why was it Mustafa Nayyem, a relatively unknown journalist and activist, who sparked the Euromaidan protests and not some greater personage? The charisma of Barack Obama seemed to inspire as much backlash as it did devotion. His successor, Donald Trump, seems even more divisive.

  One of the important differences between watching a revolution on CNN and actually being there is that the significance of self-organizing cascades becomes abundantly clear when you are on the ground. While during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine the eyes of the world were fixed on the celebrities gracing the stage at the Maidan, it was obvious to those of us who were there that the true power lay in the tent cities, in the homes of those who housed protestors from across the country, and in the myriad communications that buzzed around new forms of electronic media and old-fashioned word of mouth.

  The truth was that no one was in control. There were no marching orders or chains of command. Someone you knew received information through an online bulletin board or a text message about, say, a protest in front of Parliament or the Council of Ministers, and off you went. The no-drinking rule, the horn protests, and the chants of “Razom nas bahato” weren’t the results of orders from a prevailing authority. Instead, people did the things they did because other people were doing them. Joining in was an act of membership in a collective, rather than one of obedience to authority.

  Today’s reality is that hierarchies have lost their power not because they have suddenly become illegitimate, but because they are slow and the world has become fast. In a world pervaded by digital technology, connections form much faster than we can keep track of them, much less plan their formation. We now live in a world where networks trump hierarchies and cascades form whether we want them to or not.

  And the ramifications of cascades are profound. A generation ago, we would expect a dominant model in an industry to last an entire career, whereas today, we can’t depend on a business model lasting even a decade. In the future, we can expect little respite. In fact, if history is any guide, disruptive cascades will become far more frequent, intense, and far-reaching.

  In witnessing the events of 2004 and 2005 in Ukraine firsthand, from the almost unique vantage point of the country’s leading news organization, I found myself confused more than anything else. How was it that so many people, who would ordinarily be doing so many different things, could all of a sudden stop what they were doing and start all doing the same thing at once? What were these mysterious forces that seemed to drive everything? I admit, I hadn’t a clue.

  I remember two prevailing thoughts I had at the time. The first was awe and respect for the courage and discipline of the protestors, who not only overcame overwhelming odds, but did so with dignity and restraint. The second was far more selfish. I wondered how I could bottle the mysterious forces I had witnessed and put them to some useful purpose. Leading a media company, I often wished I could get people to stop doing certain things and start doing something else. I wanted employees to embrace new initiatives, for customers to stop buying competing products and start buying ours. I wanted other stakeholders, such as advertisers and investors, to embrace where we wanted to take the company. If I could mobilize just a small fraction of the forces of change I saw on the Maidan, I felt I could do wonderful things, but I had no idea how to make that happen.

  Yet as I have learned in the years since those heady days in Kyiv, we can harness those forces to create transformational change and make a positive impact on the world. We can learn to understand how networks function and how they give rise to cascades. There are reasons why some ideas become movements and others sputter out, just as there are concrete principles we can apply to increase the likelihood of a cascade forming or to prevent one from harming us. But to uncover them, we need to leave the tumult and turmoil of Ukraine in 2004 and 2005 and go back to 1998 in Ithaca, New York, where a young graduate student in mathematics had become fixated on the chirping of snowy tree crickets.

  CHAPTER 2

  Fireflies, Snowy Tree Crickets, and the New Science of Networks

  I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet.

  —JOHN GUARE, Six Degrees of Separation

  When Steven Strogatz arrived at Cornell University in 1994, he was already an accomplished mathematician. A former Marshall Scholar, he wrote the standard introductory textbook on chaos theory, won a prestigious award from the National Science Foundation, and was even awarded MIT’s highest teaching prize. He also had an unusual penchant for plucking interesting mathematical problems from everyday life. When he was a student at Princeton, he wrote a paper on the mathematics of love, based on Romeo and Juliet. Decades later, it became the basis for a subplot for an entire season of the hit TV series Numbers.

  One of Strogatz’s primary research topics was a strange phenomenon called coupled oscillation, which occurs when a disparate group of entities act in unison, such as when pacemaker cells synchronize to make our hearts beat. It happens about once a second for our entire lives. A more spectacular form of coupled oscillation comes in the form of various species of fireflies native to Thailand, Malaysia, and other parts of Southeast Asia, where it coordinates their behavior to make entire jungles blink on and off as if populated by Christmas lights. Many species of crickets can coordinate their chirping in a similar way, providing a pleasant backdrop to summer barbecues.

  Coupled oscillation is important to our story about cascades as well. When you think about it, fireflies and crickets synchronizing their behavior is very much like the crowds of protestors chanting “Razom Nas Bahato” on the streets of Kyiv, drivers honking their horns as they passed the Central Election Commission, and ordinarily indulgent Ukrainians adhering to a no-drinking rule. Somehow people, just like fireflies and crickets, can coordinate their behavior across vast collectives.

  Yet it’s not just people in a political movement that can synchronize their behavior in a viral cascade. Sometimes, it’s people deciding to share the same cat video on social media. Other times, as in the case of Netflix and Bloc
kbuster, they switch ingrained habits. When that happens, markets are transformed and businesses rise and fall. We see long lines at Apple stores and sold-out movie theaters. Cascades tend to feed on themselves because they never stay localized. You may have no interest in buying a new iPhone or seeing the latest hit film, but you’ll notice the cascade that forms around them and, more likely than not, it will arouse your interest and you’ll be more likely to join in.

  As we will see in Part Two of this book, understanding the building blocks out of which cascades arise is key to creating transformational change. Whether you are trying to turn around a big company like IBM or Alcoa, cut down on deadly medical errors by improving procedures in hospitals, or even implementing lean manufacturing techniques at a major pharmaceutical firm, you need people to synchronize their behavior. In effect, you need to transform them into something much like those thousands of fireflies blinking on and off in unison. Perhaps most importantly, trying to force that kind of collective action is futile—people need to decide to do it by themselves. The role of leaders is no longer to coerce action, but to inspire and empower belief.

  So, you can see why Strogatz was so intrigued by coupled oscillators. There are very few natural phenomena that are both so widespread and still, at least at the time, so poorly understood. While scientists had been aware of the effect for centuries—Christiaan Huygens first observed it in 1665—no one could figure out how it worked. It remained a mystery.

  Soon after Strogatz began his tenure at Cornell, he passed by a graduate student’s office door and couldn’t help but notice a picture of the young man hanging by his fingertips on the face of a cliff 70 meters above the sea in Australia. To Strogatz, the image was a perfect metaphor for how he liked to do mathematics, and as he was already on the lookout for young talent to help him with his research, he was determined to learn more about the young adventurer.1

  The student’s name was Duncan Watts, and he was quite unconventional himself. A six-foot-two-inch former Australian naval officer with sandy hair, a wide smile, and an enthusiasm for extreme sports, Watts looked more like a California surfer than a brilliant mathematician. As luck would have it, Watts was looking for a thesis advisor, and Strogatz immediately agreed to take him on. Although neither of them knew it then, the partnership would not only make scientific history, but also help shed light on our story about cascades, such as those I witnessed during the Orange Revolution.

  In his role as Strogatz’s research assistant, Watts found himself spending his evenings climbing trees in search of a coupled oscillator indigenous to Cornell’s location of Ithaca, New York: the snowy tree cricket. During the day, Watts attempted to classify the insect’s behavior by translating the synchronized chirps into mathematical formulas.

  However, he soon became distracted by a series of questions. How were the crickets connected to each other? If they were each reacting to the behavior of others, maybe the structure of their relationships could explain how individual behavior scales up to collective behavior. Obviously, they were influencing each other somehow, but exactly how wasn’t clear. Was there a leadership structure? Was there some sort of conductor cricket, coordinating the orchestra? Or maybe some complicated web of influence?

  Watts looked for answers in the library and pored over all the literature he could find about coupled oscillators. His search didn’t yield much, but while chatting with his father back home he stumbled across a topic nobody had apparently seen fit to investigate—an urban legend about everybody in the world being separated by only six handshakes. Although he didn’t realize it yet, he had not only found a subject suitable for his PhD thesis, but one that would resonate throughout the scientific community.2

  Popularly known as “six degrees of separation,” the legend asserted that in just six steps, you could connect any individual on the planet to any other: a bus driver in Tokyo, a Turkish kebab vendor in Germany, a Hollywood star, or even the American president. The idea stuck in Watts’s head. Then, in a sudden flash of intuition, he wondered if the synchronized behavior of the snowy tree crickets and the six-degrees phenomenon could be related. Maybe, he thought, the same type of invisible bond that connected people also connected fireflies and crickets, and that’s what was behind the mysterious synchronizations of coupled oscillation.

  In the course of his journey to understand the six-degrees idea and its relationship to the crickets’ strange ability to coordinate their behavior, Watts came across the remarkable career of Stanley Milgram.

  STANLEY MILGRAM AND THE SMALL-WORLD PHENOMENON

  * * *

  Milgram was an innovative experimental psychologist who gained fame and notoriety in 1963, at age 30, when he conducted his “obedience to authority” experiments.3 The design was deceptively simple. The study involved three people: an administrator, a “teacher” who was the subject of the experiment, and a “student” who, unbeknownst to the “teacher,” was part of the study. The teacher and student were placed in separate rooms where they could hear but not see each other. The teacher would test the student, administering progressively higher voltages of electric shocks for wrong answers.

  The shocks were a hoax (prerecorded screams were played when the supposed shocks were delivered). Inevitably, the subjects playing the role of teacher would begin to protest after a few shocks, and the administrator would respond with a sequence of prearranged prods:

  1. “Please continue” or “Please go on.”

  2. “The experiment requires that you continue.”

  3. “It is absolutely essential that you continue.”

  4. “You have no other choice: you must go on.”

  The results were chilling. None of the subjects refused to “shock” the students until they had “administered” 19 shocks of increasing intensity, up to the dangerous level of 300 volts. Nearly two-thirds of the subjects didn’t refuse even at the maximum level of 450 volts. Despite hearing the screams and the sounds of the “student” banging on the wall in apparent agony, the subjects would comply with authority, even when compliance meant torturing an innocent person.

  This type of clever unmasking of human behavior became Milgram’s hallmark. Intensely interested in the psychological aspects of everyday human relationships, he studied real-world scenarios, such as whether people would mail a lost letter or give up a seat on a New York subway.4 (They would, but it caused considerable stress among those who asked.)

  In 1967, Milgram focused his formidable talents on the small-world phenomenon: the relatively common situation of meeting a stranger at a cocktail party and discovering you have a close friend in common. (“Wow, what a small world!”) Much like obedience to authority, it’s something that happens to all of us, but we rarely stop to think about it much. That made it exactly the type of thing Milgram loved to study.

  Milgram investigated the small-world phenomenon by asking randomly selected people in Wichita, Kansas, and Omaha, Nebraska, to get a letter to a stockbroker in Boston entirely through their personal social networks. They were given no information except the broker’s name and occupation, and they were only allowed to send the letter to people they knew on a first-name basis. On average, the letters got to their destination in six steps.5 More recent experiments with e-mail messages have confirmed Milgram’s findings.6

  Milgram’s results demonstrate that “six degrees of separation” isn’t just an urban myth, but an empirical result. If people so widely dispersed are so closely connected, then it seems reasonable that they can synchronize their behavior. Yet Watts was looking to establish more than conjecture, but to find a mathematical structure to explain the small-world phenomenon. His journey to solve that problem would take him far afield—first to St. Petersburg, Russia, where a mathematical genius encountered a strange puzzle and decided that he needed to create a new branch of mathematics to solve it.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF NETWORKS

  * * *

  Leonhard Euler was considered the greatest mathematician of the
eighteenth century and the most prolific in history. In fact, he produced a body of work that runs to 73 volumes. Although he was blind for the last 12 years of his life, he continued to publish at a furious pace. Dictating his work from memory, he completed a textbook on algebra, a 775-page treatise on the moon’s orbit, and a three-volume study of integral calculus, as well as a paper every week for the journal of the St. Petersburg Academy.

  In 1736, while still a young man, Euler turned his formidable talents to a mathematical curiosity that had become something of a craze among learned men. The puzzle involved the seven bridges in Königsberg (Figure 2.1), then a great city in the Prussian Empire (known today as Kaliningrad, Russia).

  FIGURE 2.1 The Bridges of Königsberg

  * * *

  The question was simple: Could someone cross each bridge once without crossing any of them twice? While it seemed like a childish riddle, none of the great mathematical minds of the day could prove an answer to be correct. Euler, however, was an unusually creative thinker. To solve the puzzle of seven bridges in Königsberg, he constructed a branch of mathematics called graph theory: the analysis of links and nodes in a system.

  Once Euler had framed the question in terms of a network, it became intuitively obvious that any system with an odd number of links cannot be continuous but must have a starting point and an end point (Figure 2.2). This rule is now known as the first theorem of graph theory.7 Eventually, an eighth bridge was built and residents of Kaliningrad today can travel a continuous route across all eight bridges without repeating any, just as Euler said they could.

  FIGURE 2.2 A Graphical Exposition of Euler’s First Theorem of Graph Theory