Cascades

by Greg Satell

  Another initiative at NHS is the “School for Change Agents,” a free five-week online course addressing subjects like, “How to Rock the Boat and Stay in It,” “How to Tell Your Narrative,” and “Rethinking Resistance to Change.” Free to anyone who wants to enroll—whether they are employed by NHS or not—the course attracted 8,000 students in 2018. Each of those students can then recruit their friends and colleagues to contribute to initiatives or, even better, start their own. That’s how you create the conditions in which a cascade can arise.

  In a sense, this all may seem fairly obvious. The notion that to have a popular uprising you first need to be popular is so tautological that it borders on the ridiculous. Still, a surprising number of change efforts voluntarily forgo their participation advantage by adopting tactics that exclude wide swaths of potential supporters.

  Consider again the Occupy movement. Besides being unable to articulate a vision for the change it wanted to see, its very name implied that participation was limited to those who were willing to sleep in a park. If you weren’t willing to “Occupy,” then how could you really be a full-fledged member of the movement? It also somewhat limited its actions to a single tactic. You couldn’t very well start handing out leaflets in neighborhoods and expect to get support (especially from those with a park nearby). Nobody wants a bunch of activists occupying their neighborhood. To openly show support for Occupy might have seemed tantamount to an invitation!

  Further, as we saw in Chapter 3, when Congressman John Lewis asked to participate at an Occupy rally, he was refused. The reasons given were varied, from the fact that he was part of the “two-party system” to that he failed to follow the arcane rules of the movement’s events. Any way you slice it, the message was clear: only the anointed belong, all others are not welcome.

  It’s also not clear what the activists expected to achieve by their actions. Occupy’s choice of tactics represented a massive investment in time and effort—millions of man-hours if you count all 951 cities—but cost their opponent little. Why would a banker sitting in a comfortable, air-conditioned office care if a bunch of crazy people wanted to sleep on the street? Maybe some felt a bit uneasy as they passed by Zuccotti Park carrying their morning coffee from Starbucks, or perhaps when the car service happened to drive by on their way to an expensive lunch to entertain clients, but for the most part they went about their business unfettered. The protestors, on the other hand, were greatly restricted from taking part in everyday life because they had to occupy the park. Eventually, their numbers dwindled and the park was cleared. Not a single Wall Street executive got so much as a parking ticket in the process.

  Other recent movements, such as Black Lives Matter and the Bernie Sanders political campaign, fell into similar pitfalls. Instead of reaching out, they seemed to revel in sticking their fingers in the eyes of potential allies, because to them only the most pure of heart belonged. Any deviation from strict doctrine was apostasy. That may rile up the most faithful supporters, but it alienates the rest of the Spectrum of Allies, and by limiting participation, greatly reduces the likelihood of success.

  In order for a movement’s tactics to be effective, they must focus not merely on making a point, or “raising awareness” of an issue, but on actually making a difference. They must be part of a larger strategy to mobilize constituencies in the Spectrum of Allies to influence institutions in the Pillars of Support. Also, especially in the beginning, tactics must be designed to be cheap, low risk, low involvement, and easy to replicate to maximize potential for participation.20

  Consider once again Otpor’s “barrel prank” from the Introduction of this book. The activists took a rusty barrel and painted Milošević’s face on it along with the words “Bash his face for a Dinar!” It cost them next to nothing. It happened at a time and place of their choosing, so it was relatively low involvement. It was also low risk—the activists were nowhere near the barrel, but down the street sipping coffee at a café the whole time—and it was easy for passersby to participate. They just needed to put a dinar in the barrel (about two cents) and whack away. What’s more, it was fun—and funny! It didn’t make people feel angry, it made them feel empowered.

  The barrel prank was also designed to work as part of a larger strategy. The street they chose was full of fashionable shops and cafés, exactly the type of place where they would find people who either passively supported or were neutral to their movement and who would have been unreceptive to a rowdy band of young activists marching and shouting slogans and epithets, but were entertained by the clever bit of street theater that the barrel prank represented. By alerting key media outlets of their plans, which allowed them to capture the scene of out-of-shape cops struggling to wrestle the rusty barrel into their tiny squad car, they also pulled in a key Pillar of Support. Throughout the two-year campaign that led to the “Bulldozer Revolution” that ousted Milošević, journalists faithfully covered Otpor’s every move. One of the reasons was that they always made great copy.

  “You either disrupt, you mobilize, or you draw people from the middle of the spectrum. These are the three purposes of every tactic,” Srdja Popović of Otpor and CANVAS told me.21 The barrel prank achieved all three. Ordinary citizens bashing Milošević’s face on a barrel was certainly disruptive to the regime, which is why the police came and wrestled the barrel into a squad car. It mobilized the people who took a swing, and it amused those who watched but weren’t quite ready to participate. Surely some went home that night and regretted not joining in.

  Occupy’s takeover of Zuccotti Park, on the other hand, was certainly disruptive, but to ordinary citizens, not the bankers they sought to overthrow. It may have helped to mobilize supporters, but not for long. Nobody is content to sleep in a park forever. As for those in the middle, they were not won over in the slightest. Many, in fact, were turned off. Worst off all, it was incredibly resource intensive: those who occupied the park could not effectively hold down a job, care for a family, or maintain friendships outside the relatively small band of protestors. Once the occupation failed, so did the movement. Occupy was never really taken seriously again.

  Today, of course, the Internet is a major asset for mobilization, especially social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Although often denigrated as “slacktivism” by critics, Internet campaigns meet all of the requirements of a successful platform for mobilization. Internet-based tactics tend to be low-risk, low involvement, cheap, and easy to replicate. They can also be enormously constructive.

  Zeynep Tufekci, a longtime activist and academic, describes several particularly successful initiatives in her book Twitter and Tear Gas. One, called 140journos, used citizen journalists to get around the Turkish government’s censorship and report on events around the country.22 Another effort, @TahrirSupplies, coordinated medical supplies for the protests in Cairo. Run by four Egyptians who had never met each other in person and only two of whom were in Cairo, it proved remarkably efficient in getting resources to where they were needed most. At one point, it raised over $40,000 for some much-needed surgical equipment in less than five hours.23

  Yet the mobilizing power of the Internet and social media is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it is an incredibly efficient way to get a message out. On the other, it is so successful at attracting admirers that it’s easy for nascent movements to forget that it is only the first part of the recruit-train-act triangle. If you only recruit people, but don’t get them to act, then there isn’t much use in recruiting them in the first place. If they do act, but haven’t been trained and indoctrinated into the genome of values, the results can be even worse, because they will be likely to act in ways that discredit the movement.

  Make no mistake. Movements, as the name implies, must be kinetic to be successful. They need to start in one place and end up somewhere else, evolving and changing along the way. Every tactic needs to be a platform for participation, mobilization, and connection. It also must target specific constituencies in
the Spectrum of Allies in order to influence institutions in the Pillars of Support.24 Perhaps even more important, a movement for change needs to realize that the battlefield is always shifting and that their own tactics will often alter it in ways that don’t necessarily favor them.

  ACTION AND REACTION

  * * *

  In President Bush’s 2004 State of the Union Address, he took a hard line on the issue of gay marriage, criticizing Massachusetts’s recent decision to allow same-sex unions. It seemed like a smart move. Protecting the idea that marriage was to be strictly defined as a sacrament between a man and a woman was popular at the time, and many people believed that activist judges were ignoring the popular will by ruling in favor of LGBT plaintiffs. Yet Bush’s remarks were to have unintended consequences that would set a series of events in motion that no one could have predicted.25

  Gavin Newsom, then the young and charismatic mayor of San Francisco, happened to be in attendance and was appalled that the president of the United States, in the middle of fighting two wars, was taking time to condemn gay citizens and deny their right to marry. Incensed, he resolved to do something about it. When he returned to San Francisco, he began performing same-sex weddings at City Hall. As soon as word got out, there were lines down the street of couples waiting to tie the knot.26

  For gay rights groups, it was seen to be an enormous victory. “The dams were bursting,” exclaimed Susan Sommer of Lambda Legal, a gay rights group.27 “The Newsom thing made everybody feel that the battle was on,” echoed Mary Bonauto, a prominent civil rights lawyer at the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders.28 Yet the triumph was to be short-lived. Within a month the California Supreme Court halted the San Francisco marriages, and in 2008 the state passed Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment specifically outlawing same-sex marriages by referendum. It seemed like Newsom’s actions had backfired. Instead of giving the idea of gay marriage a boost, he had inadvertently mobilized the forces against it.29

  Yet if the Newsom marriages led to a setback, Proposition 8, ironically, proved to be a boon to gay marriage advocates. It’s one thing to oppose altering the sacrament of marriage; it is quite another to deny couples who love each other the right to spend their lives together and to sanctify that union. That is, of course, a subtle distinction, and in fact, both amount to largely the same thing. Still, it proved to be decisive. One gay activist even went so far as to call Proposition 8 “the greatest thing that could have ever happened.”30

  As it turned out, the conservatives opposing same-sex marriage had misread the polls and overreached. Yes, most people, when asked, weren’t crazy about the idea. It seemed unnatural. Everybody who had grown up with the idea of marriage as a union between a man and a woman didn’t see any good reason for that to change. At the same time, however, most people didn’t have strong feelings about the issue either, and most of the opposition tended to lie closer to the center of the Spectrum of Allies than to the extreme.

  The combination of seeing perfectly respectable same-sex couples getting married in Massachusetts, San Francisco, and elsewhere, along with the harshness of Proposition 8, seemed not only unjust, but downright cruel, and shifted opinion in the opposite direction. The United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage in 2015.

  One of the lead attorneys arguing in favor of the LGBT activists was Ted Olson, a prominent conservative Republican attorney.31 In a Newsweek op-ed, he laid out his case. Olson wrote that legalizing same-sex marriage wasn’t strictly a gay issue, but would be “a recognition of basic American principles.” Allowing gays to marry, he argued, wouldn’t weaken the institution of marriage, but strengthen it by extending the right to make a covenant to more American citizens.32 The argument was eerily reminiscent of Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to make good on the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. In the final analysis, the assertion of commonality, not difference, made marriage equality a reality. Lasting change can only be made on the basis of shared values and shared consciousness.

  Unfortunately, the cycle of revolution and counterrevolution does not always end so happily. As we have already seen, the internal backlash against John Antioco’s bold strategic moves to invest heavily in a digital platform and to cut late fees created the tensions that ultimately led to his departure from the company. His successor, Jim Keyes, reversed the strategy, focused efforts on reviving the retail operation and lost further ground. The once dominant company never recovered.

  PLATFORMS FOR GOVERNANCE, COHESION, AND COORDINATION

  * * *

  Movements for change tend to be decentralized, with various factions and interests. To prevail against the British, Gandhi often needed to act as a broker between elite Hindus, peasants, outcaste “untouchables,” Muslims, and Sikhs. The coalition behind the civil rights movement was known as the “Big Six,”33 each of their leaders representing different constituencies and interests. In the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress led an alliance of seven distinct organizations,34 all of which signed the Freedom Charter. In each case, the various components within the coalition had their own factions, local chapters, and tensions.

  Obviously, the decentralized nature of movements raises serious issues of governance and coordination that can cause things to spin out of control. In some cases, a wise and charismatic leader like Gandhi or King can, largely through force of personality and charisma, help hold things together. However, all too often, things devolve, and that usually spells disaster for the movement.

  That was exactly the problem that General Stanley McChrystal faced in Iraq. As Commander of Special Forces, he had enormous authority over the units under his command, but little ability to compel action at partner agencies, such as the CIA, the State Department, law enforcement agencies, and others. To be successful, he realized that he needed to be able to establish some semblance of governance and coordination.

  He found one part of the solution in liaison officers. Usually, these roles were given to officers nearing retirement or simply substandard officers who weren’t fitting in. However, McChrystal realized that by upgrading liaison officer positions and awarding those roles only to his best people, he could build linkages and weave a network that could engender trust and help information cascade to where it needed to go.35

  Since leaving the military, his consulting firm, the McChrystal Group, has implemented similar practices at civilian organizations. Every executive today complains about “silos” in his or her enterprise that restrict the flow of information. Yet the real problem isn’t silos—which are somewhat inevitable—but how they are connected.

  One of McChrystal’s clients, Eastdil Secured, is an investment bank that puts together complex real estate transactions. To succeed in a high-value, ultra-competitive market, it must adapt quickly to constantly changing investment conditions and respond with clarity. By installing highly respected liaisons at each of its offices that are responsible for helping information to flow, the emergence of a new trend in one market can immediately be transmitted to other offices so that they can be on alert for signs of similar things happening with their clients.

  Another platform that McChrystal used to weave connections is the Operations and Intelligence (O&I) forum. These are meetings, usually held among a core set of people but open to anybody in the wider organization through videoconference. Meetings are held regularly, usually daily or weekly, and are made up of short briefings on anything important that is going on. The O&I forum is designed to ensure maximum communication across a diverse set of actors. It is not run by the highest-ranking officer, but by a meeting coordinator, and it is composed of five-minute updates.

  In the military version, thousands would tune into daily O&I meetings, including a wide array of partner agencies as well as military officers and frontline soldiers in the field. However, in One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams, Chris Fussell, McChrystal’s former aide-de-camp and currentl
y president of his consulting group, explains how the format has also been implemented at organizations as diverse as Under Armour, Intuit, a state agency in Oklahoma, and the Eastdil Secured real estate investment bank mentioned above. It works in the private sector for many of the same reasons it worked during the Iraq war: at the speed at which events move today, agility and interoperability often trump careful, deliberative planning, so we need to infuse traditional bureaucratic hierarchies with network mechanisms. Fussell calls this the “hybrid model.”

  Unlike a traditional meeting, the purpose of the O&I forums is not to make decisions, but to widen and deepen linkages and cascade information to where it needs to go in an operational cadence. So, for example, if some of those tuning in find one of the briefings relevant to a present issue they are facing, they can follow up offline, get more details, and act accordingly. “The [traditional] meeting structure is based on an outdated bureaucratic model,” Fussell told me. “We need to reimagine meetings around a network model, where the goal is not to necessarily make decisions, but to share information so that decisions can be made and executed at the tactical level.”36

  Otpor had its own version of the O&I forum that it called networking meetings. As the movement grew, branches of the activist group sprung up in cities across Serbia. At first, these were larger population centers with large universities, like Novi Sad and Kragujevac, but then they spread to smaller cities with strong opposition sentiment, like Čačak and Subotica and finally to even smaller towns in areas traditionally loyal to the regime. At its height, Otpor had as many as 70 chapters and needed a platform to provide some form of governance and cohesion, which is what the networking meetings were designed to do.37