by Greg Satell
It was President Kuchma’s corrupt regime that led to the Orange Revolution in 2004, which, along with the failures of the Yushchenko government, set the stage for Yanukovych’s startling comeback. That, in turn, led to the Euromaidan protests, which swept him from power and led to Ukraine’s break with Russia. In a similar vein, it was President Bush’s full-throated condemnation of same-sex marriage in his State of the Union Address that led then San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to perform weddings for gay and lesbian couples at City Hall. The ensuing backlash resulted in Proposition 8, which was considered so harsh that it gave new life to the same-sex marriage movement. John Antioco’s investments in a digital platform at Blockbuster Video led his successor to retrench the company in physical retail. The list goes on.
In my research of change movements throughout the world and throughout history this pattern is remarkably consistent, and the tennis match of ideologies can go on for years or even decades. What is also remarkably consistent is what it takes to end the cycle: the forging of a new agenda based on shared values.
What I hope you’ve learned in this book is that you don’t need any special abilities to create transformational change that endures. In his early years, Gandhi was so shy that he could hardly bring himself to speak in court. Martin Luther King Jr. was far from the obvious choice to lead the Montgomery bus strike. Nelson Mandela began as an angry nationalist. Lech Walesa was just a simple electrician. Srdja Popović thought he would spend his life playing bass guitar in a rock band. Mustafa Nayyem told me he didn’t have any special plans when he posted the message on Facebook that sparked the Euromaidan protests; he just did it out of anger and frustration.
Nevertheless all of the successful changemakers we have seen in this book learned along the way and were able to lead their movements to common ground that didn’t exist when they started out. Gandhi created his philosophy of Satyagraha and indoctrinated his Indian followers. Martin Luther King Jr. built his movement based on the founding documents of the American nation, the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Nelson Mandela’s anti-Apartheid movement created the Freedom Charter. Paul O’Neill made safety in the workplace the platform from which he would launch his campaign for operational excellence. General Stanley McChrystal led his forces from failure to success by forging a true “team of teams.”
What’s perhaps most striking is how dramatically things can shift when a movement for change turns its focus from highlighting differences to indoctrinating shared values. The Euromaidan protests achieved far more than the Orange Revolution ever did because they aimed to do more than just bring about a change in leadership, but to instill the norms of their European neighbors. The LGBT movement foundered for decades, but public opinion shifted sharply when it began to assert same-sex marriage as a “recognition of basic American principles.” Alcoa and IBM remain, even today, decades after their historic turnarounds, profitable companies.
Make no mistake, successful movements do not overpower, they attract. If you are simply out to prove yourself right and others wrong, you are destined to fail. It’s not enough to just want to make a point, you have to actually want to make a difference, and that means making change work for everybody.
There are many injustices in the world and many other things that can be improved. That’s why it’s so easy for a passion to improve the world to devolve into blind opposition to those who don’t see things the same way you do. All too often, that frustration leads us to self-righteous indignation and we end up preaching to the choir instead of venturing out of the church and mixing with the heathens. That’s how movements fail.
The salient point here is that movements that succeed do things differently than others. Cascades obey scientific principles that govern their behavior, and successful movements learn how to harness them. That’s why those that prevail end up looking so much alike. As we have seen throughout this book, starting out with very different challenges, philosophies, and personalities, those that rose to meet the challenges and overcome seemingly insurmountable odds all eventually arrived at surprisingly similar principles. That’s what enabled them to achieve the change they sought. They learned from early failures, made adjustments, and continued to work toward their vision of tomorrow. Those that fell short failed to learn those lessons, and lacked the discipline to harness cascades to build common ground with other key stakeholders. Inevitably, they blamed their lack of progress on those that opposed them, rather than on their own inability to win support.
I hope you have learned that change is truly possible and that you can help to make it happen. Whether you are a senior executive at a major corporation or at a nonprofit organization, a political leader, a community activist, or simply someone who seeks to make things better for your family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers, you can do more than just tilt at windmills or sink into angry despair. You too can embrace the principles of successful movements and go out and make your own brand of transformational change a reality. You can work to reshape your community, your organization, your industry, or even your entire society. The world we live in today was built on change and so will be the one we leave to our children and our grandchildren. However, those changes seldom come easy or happen by themselves.
So let’s return to the six principles for creating transformative change that I’ve outlined in this book and examine how each one represents a crossroads where you will be tempted to make a point, but if you want to really make change happen, you will have to refocus your efforts on making a difference through building common ground.
1. IDENTIFY A KEYSTONE CHANGE
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Everybody has things they don’t like about the status quo, but if all you can do is voice grievances, you won’t get very far. So, the first step toward creating change is to articulate what you want it to look like, or what Srdja Popović likes to call “defining a vision of tomorrow.” Unless you can clearly spell out what you’re advocating for, not just what you’re against, your movement will be unlikely to grow beyond the angry, the disaffected, and the indignant and will likely turn off everybody else.
Next, you need to identify a keystone change that can help bring that desired future state about. There are three criteria you want to look at:
1. A keystone change needs to be a concrete and tangible goal.
2. A keystone change unites diverse stakeholders in the Spectrum of Allies and the Pillars of Support.
3. A keystone change paves the way for future change.
It’s important to note that to say a keystone change is concrete and tangible doesn’t mean that it is easy. It took decades for the women’s suffrage and LGBT movements to identify their keystone changes of voting and marriage rights, and years more to make them a reality. Other keystone changes we have seen in this book, such as making Alcoa a safer company, transforming factory changeovers at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, moving Experian’s massive digital infrastructure to the cloud, or the Institute for Healthcare Improvement driving the implementation of six life-saving procedures at thousands of hospitals across America, were no mean feats. Still, they were specific, tangible, and led to much greater impacts later on.
I have no doubt that you see things in your world that you would like to change—an injustice in your community, a missed opportunity in your organization, an inefficiency in your industry, or maybe something else. But what is the change you would actually like to see? What does your vision of a better tomorrow actually look like? Once you can articulate that and identify a keystone change as a concrete and tangible goal, you are well on your way to creating a true transformation.
2. MAKE A PLAN
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Having an idea for change is only the start. You also need to identify, specifically, who you need to win over to bring change about. Power will not fall simply because you oppose it, but it will crumble if you bring those who support it over to your side. So, once you have defined your vision of tomorrow and a keystone change that will
help bring it about, you need to devise a plan to get there using the two tools described in Chapter 5: The Spectrum of Allies and the Pillars of Support.
The Spectrum of Allies maps out the terrain on which the battle will be fought by identifying which constituencies you can expect to be active and passive supporters of your vision of tomorrow, who is likely to be neutral, and who will passively and actively oppose your movement. The Pillars of Support identify which institutions you need to pull in to change the status quo. As Clayborne Carson put it, “A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.”
For any tactic to be effective, it needs to mobilize specific constituencies in the Spectrum of Allies to influence institutions in the Pillars of Support. So it is absolutely essential that you define these things first or you will end up just making noise instead of actually making a difference. In some cases, you can even set your cause back.
3. BUILD A NETWORK OF SMALL GROUPS
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Successful movements are rooted in network cascades, and cascades are built upon small world networks. The functional units of these networks are the small groups that link to other small groups. Individually, these clusters mean little, but when they become connected to others and are triggered by an event, they can become immensely powerful.
All too often, we tend to look back at great historical movements through the lens of Gladwell’s Law of the Few. So, when we think about Indian independence, we see Gandhi; the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr.; the anti-Apartheid movement, Nelson Mandela, and so on. Yet each were actually just one part of a deep network of groups whose links built up over time. Nobody creates transformational change alone.
The truth is that you can’t really create a cascade; you must prepare for it by continuously connecting to others outside your initial base of support. You use the Recruit-Train-Act triangle to build your movement, so that when a trigger opens up a window of opportunity, you are ready to capitalize on it.
4. INDOCTRINATE GENOMES OF VALUES
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There are many worthy objectives that you can strive for—narrowing the gap between rich and poor, ending discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation, creating a technology to better the lives of your fellow citizens, or even just striving to serve your customers and other stakeholders more effectively.
Yet shared purpose will soon disintegrate in the face of adversity if there are not shared values. (And remember, values cost something. If not, they are merely platitudes.) Successful movements for change invest tremendous resources in codifying, training for, and enforcing those values. That is often what separates victory and defeat.
Values can be indoctrinated in a variety of ways. Social movements like John Lewis’s SNCC and Otpor conducted intensive training for activists and, in a similar way, Facebook created a Bootcamp for its incoming engineers. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement developed “change kits” to help hospitals internalize the values of its movement. Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church writes books and distributes sermons. Lou Gerstner sent companywide e-mails. Yet it doesn’t really matter how the values are communicated, but that they are continually reinforced by the behavior and actions of leaders. Values are not optional. They are not “nice to have” or adhered to at some times and not others. They are absolutely critical to making lasting change a reality.
5. CREATE PLATFORMS FOR PARTICIPATION, MOBILIZATION, AND CONNECTION
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The reason that nonviolent uprisings deliver better results than violent ones is that they invite far more participation. The goal of a movement is to mobilize, not to administer purity tests. Otpor recognized that it is much more effective to whack a barrel with a bat than it is to sleep in a park night after night. The activists didn’t accost passersby or chastise anyone for their lack of commitment. They simply invited people to join in something that was fun, easy, and helped to carry their message.
In much the same way, General Stanley McChrystal transformed the O&I brief from a mere informational exercise into a platform for widening and deepening connections. 100Kin10 organizes conferences so that its members can connect, create common projects, and share best practices. The National Health Service in England designs campaigns to be as easy to adopt as possible. There are nearly limitless possibilities, and every movement for change needs to choose which platforms serve it best, but one commonality is that they must always face outward and pull people in rather than push, shame, or try to coerce them.
Successful movements understand this and are grateful for any help they can get. Unsuccessful movements rally the faithful and demonize those who don’t share their ideas or their commitment. They make their point but fail to make a difference.
6. SURVIVE VICTORY
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Every movement has an immediate goal, whether it is to promote fundamental rights, to drive implementation of new ideas, methods, and procedures, or simply to return to profitability. That’s what drives action. Once those immediate goals are achieved, however, change movements often fall apart. That’s what I experienced in Ukraine, and it is incredibly common. The same thing happened in Egypt and many other places. This doesn’t just hold true for political movements either. For every CEO like Lou Gerstner or Paul O’Neill who creates lasting, transformative change, there are hundreds that achieved early success and then faltered.
That’s why the victory phase of any change movement is always the most dangerous, because the peril lies within. It wasn’t Yanukovych who failed the Orange Revolution, it was Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, who quickly fell into infighting and failed to forge a common purpose. It wasn’t just the rise of Silicon Valley that led to the demise of the Boston tech firms, but their own rigid way of thinking. Netflix didn’t kill Blockbuster, Antioco’s successor, Jim Keyes, did.
Successful movements survive victory by staying true to their values even after the initial triumph. Euromaidan succeeded where the Orange Revolution failed because it continued to promote its values after Yanukovych had been removed from office. It wasn’t based on any one politician or persona. The turnaround at IBM endured long after Lou Gerstner was gone because it wasn’t centered on any particular strategy or technology, but continued to promote the values that made IBM a great company. If Nelson Mandela had looked to take revenge for his many years of suffering after he took power, instead of bringing white Afrikaners into the society he sought to create, he would never have become the revered figure he is today. Values prevail because they are not situational or of the moment, but lasting principles for adaptation.
Most of all, successful movements are able to leave the battle behind, to become, as Srdja Popović put it to me, “mundane and ordinary” and make peace with the fact that victory inevitably leads to the tedious boredom of governance. They do not see that as the price of progress, but its reward.
That’s how you win.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Andy Kroll, “How Occupy Wall Street Really Got Started,” Mother Jones, October 17, 2011, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-international-origins.
2. Mark Engler and Paul Engler, This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century (Nation Books, 2016).
3. Andrew Fleming, “Adbusters Sparks Wall Street Protest,” Vancouver Courier, September 27, 2011, http://www.vancourier.com/news/adbusters-sparks-wall-street-protest-1.374299.
4. Matt Sledge, “Reawakening the Radical Imagination: The Origins of Occupy Wall Street,” The Huffington Post, November 10, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/10/occupy-wall-street-origins_n_1083977.html.
5. https://web.archive.org/web/20111205005640/ http://www.france24.com/en/20111015-indignant-protests-go-global-saturday.
6. Micah White, “Occupy and Black Lives Matter Failed. We Can Either Win Wars or Win Elections,” The Guardian, August 28, 2
017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/29/why-are-our-protests-failing-and-how-can-we-achieve-social-change-today.
7. Tina Rosenberg, “Revolution U: What Egypt Learned from the Students Who Overthrew Milosevic,” Foreign Policy, February 17, 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/02/17/revolution-u-2/.
8. Srđa Popović, Blueprint for Revolution (Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 11.
9. Ibid., 100–104.
10. Ibid., 12.
11. Tina Rosenberg, Join the Club (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 226.
12. Gina Keating, Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs (Portfolio Penguin, 2012), 71–74, 110–11. A summary of Antioco’s career can also be found at https://www.twst.com/bio/JOHN%20F.%20ANTIOCO.
13. Interview with author.
14. John Antioco described the strategy in an article in the April 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review, “How I Did It: Blockbuster’s Former CEO on Sparring with an Activist Shareholder,” http://hbr.org/2011/04/how-i-did-it-blockbusters-former-ceo-on-sparring-with-an-activist-shareholder/ar/1. It was also described in a BusinessWeek article about Blockbuster’s initial public offering, “Why It’s Not A Blockbuster IPO,” BusinessWeek, August 1, 1999, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1999-08-01/why-its-not-a-blockbuster-ipo.
15. Interview with author.
16. There have been a number of accounts of this meeting and a lot of suggestions about a buyout offer. I haven’t been able to substantiate any of them. For his part, Antioco denies that there was any serious discussion at that time.