Fridays for Future and its coalition of allies built the power to put the climate crisis on the public agenda. At the time of the protest, searches for “climate change” reached one of the highest levels recorded by Google.23 By calling out adults and leveraging the growing body of science that documented the harm global warming had already done, they legitimated their attacks, fostered moral outrage, and seized control of the public narrative. Their words and actions attracted the world’s attention and helped shift the frame used to discuss climate change. They also knew that changing behaviors and laws would require much more than protest, however. So they used organizing activities—such as building activist training camps like those Xiye ran and inviting others into the planning meetings for the march—that helped build participants’ commitment to one another and to the movement.
Organizing creates the glue that transforms a collection of individuals into a group with a common purpose. It makes people want to come back, contribute, and feel connected to something larger than themselves. Fostering connections that are strong enough to make people feel part of a community they deeply value helps ensure a movement’s survival and vibrancy over time.24 When organizing is interwoven with stories, like those told by Xiye and her peers, it creates a feeling of “oneness” that mobilizes people around a shared identity. This sense of common cause stems not only from the rationale of the story’s message, but also from its emotional appeal. As we will see next, the need for communicating and organizing activities never goes away, whatever role participants may be playing, because this is how movements gain supporters and access the valued resources they need to expand their power.
THINKING OUT OF THE BOX
Innovation is essential to offer a viable solution to a social problem or an alternative to the status quo. Without it, a movement has no specific requests, no yardstick of success. The solutions that innovators design may be altogether new and original, or they may use existing, well-tested ideas that they assemble in novel ways or apply to new contexts. Consider women’s rights: The concept gained little traction when French playwright and political activist Olympe de Gouges proposed it in 1791 in the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen. Mirroring the first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, her Declaration proclaimed: “Women are born free and remain equal to men in rights.” In 1793, de Gouges was sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal and executed, but her words did not die with her. They influenced and inspired women to fight for equal rights, in France and beyond. Her innovation contributed to the development of the counter-narrative that multiple waves of feminist movements refined and spread in the decades and centuries that followed.
Social innovations come in a variety of forms: They may be ideas, products, services, programs, processes, or laws and policies. But whatever the form, innovators must provide a viable pathway toward addressing the problem at hand and redefining the status quo. The innovator’s role is to identify the weaknesses of the current state of things; imagine a solution that is better than the current alternative and will not cause negative unintended consequences; and articulate and justify these solutions to the various groups who will need to adopt or will be affected by the proposed alternative.25 Their task is daunting: Not only must they envision a new reality, but they must also find ways to legitimize this new approach in the eyes of others. Doing so without having formal authority or access to resources, financial or otherwise, is challenging. This is why innovators tend be problem-solvers who think out of the box and persevere in the face of complexity and adversity.
This is precisely what Jean Rogers did. In 2008, as the financial crisis ripped through Wall Street and shattered the lives of many on Main Street, one foreclosure at a time, she started thinking about how she could help change the rules of the game in the financial markets. An environmental engineer by training, she had spent nearly two decades working as a sustainability consultant, helping companies adopt environmentally responsible practices. “It didn’t make sense to me that corporations were largely not accountable for their impact on local communities, the lives of their employees and customers, and the environment,” she told us. “Look where that had gotten us.”
Jean had watched her friend David Gottfried develop and scale LEED building certification, a rating system for green buildings. Then an idea started brewing: Investors make decisions based on data; but even if an investor wanted to consider a business’s social or environmental impact, such data were limited and often reported haphazardly. What if there were a way for companies to consistently and transparently report on more than just their financial performance? The task would be monumental, and she was bound to face resistance from the “business as usual” corporate sector. But with a two-year-old daughter, the need to change the status quo felt more personal and pressing than ever.
Jean began by doing what all innovators trying to solve a social problem must do: She worked hard to gain an in-depth understanding of the problem she was hoping to help solve.26 She researched the difficulty of tracking companies’ social and environmental performance alongside their financial performance. She learned about and became a supporter of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which had developed a standard set of metrics that companies could use, whatever their industry, to create sustainability reports. At the same time, she interviewed corporate executives and investors about their reporting techniques so that she better understood each actor’s constraints and challenges. In the process, she discovered why there was no one-size-fits-all answer: Food retailers and distributors have a greater need to report on the use of packaging, for instance, than banks or software companies, for which privacy may be more important. What emerged was the need for a set of rigorous and vetted standards that companies, investors, and public authorities would find reliable to measure and communicate social and environmental performance specifically for each industry.
Jean’s research culminated in the publication of a white paper that laid out her innovative idea: a methodology that would lead to the development of appropriate sustainability standards for each industry.27 Her practice of leading with questions and seeking advice as a newcomer in the space paid off: The response to the paper was overwhelmingly positive, with investors and asset managers reaching out to ask her when the new metrics would be available.28
Thinking that once she had put the idea out, the right person would pick it up and run with it, Jean put the project on the back burner for a year. Then, as the Occupy movement gained momentum, she decided she was done waiting. If she wanted to see these sustainability standards developed, she would have to do it herself. With the support of her husband, she quit her job and gave herself a sixth-month deadline to launch the not-for-profit that would become SASB, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board.29
Beyond fundraising to finance the launching of SASB, Jean’s first task was to assemble a team of researchers and technical experts who would be working with her to develop the sustainability metrics for each industry. “I can’t tell you how many times I heard that I was crazy to think that we would be able to develop metrics for eighty industries in less than eighty years. We had to prove them wrong and show that it was doable. So, after we came up with a rigorous methodology, we developed a huge blueprint of the next eight years up on the wall to make sure that we would reach our goal in eight and not eighty years!”
Creating SASB, recruiting her team, and developing the methodology to create the standards were only the beginning of Jean’s journey as an innovator. She and her team now had to transform SASB into a legitimate standard-setting organization with the power to grow a collective movement behind it. She knew from experience that if she wanted SASB to be taken seriously and to attract supporters, she would first need to understand the existing power relationships among business leaders, investors, public agencies, and NGOs involved in corporate sustainability. In short, she needed a power map. She gathered all the information
she could, from the names of the top organizations to those with the biggest budgets; she noted the organizations with influential leaders, and those whose papers were cited in the field. She collected every data point she could to understand who was connected to whom and who seemed to rely on whom.
As an outsider in the world of finance, and a fledging organization opposing the status quo, the exercise made it clear: To build its power and transform SASB into a legitimate standard setter, she needed to identify and obtain access to the resources that these key stakeholders in sustainability valued. She started organizing to identify allies who shared her belief that investors needed new metrics with the goal of getting them invested in SASB as fellow innovators in the development process. “My very first Board had former officials of both the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) on it,” Jean told us, and that “created the legitimacy for others to participate.” She launched industry working groups, organized conferences in San Francisco and New York, and hosted regular online feedback sessions. Over time, she was able to build a community of supporters who felt committed to SASB, its vision, and its promise to change the face of capitalism.
Through a mentor, Jean built rapport and then began to meet regularly with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying group for businesses, and the SEC. Their involvement bolstered her credibility and that of SASB in the eyes of other key actors, who were now open to meeting with her. In all these conversations, “I always framed our value proposition in terms of things [I knew] they valued—even instigating and making them a bit ‘mad’ about the status quo… The fact that SASB promised to deliver material information for investors, productivity for corporations, and market efficiency for the SEC was the key to getting these disparate and very powerful groups behind us.” And as she “did the rounds,” as she called them, expanding her circle of collaborators through quarterly meetings with civil society organizations, corporations, and public authorities to provide updates, Jean became a broker on sustainability issues, the in-between, linking groups that were not connected. She now controlled access to a valued resource: information about key organizations and leaders in the field. Jean and the movement for SASB had started building power.
Soon, they leveraged SASB’s newly developed network of relationships to attract big-name investors and companies as advisors and Board members, including Michael Bloomberg, who became the chairman of SASB’s Board. His presence further bolstered SASB’s legitimacy in the eyes of the corporate world, while the organization continued to strengthen its relationships with NGOs and public authorities as well. By 2018, with the input of movement participants, SASB had developed sustainability standards for more than eighty industries and become the leading sustainability accounting standard in the United States—a feat many thought impossible when she first told them about her idea.
The movement Jean created to develop her innovation was part of a much larger movement that aimed to reinvent and change capitalism, a transformation that would require much more than SASB. But the standards were now developed and ready for use; and after years of relentless work, this was the time Jean chose to step down from her role as SASB’s CEO. “I have realized that it is the innovation that excites me. I am a person who loves learning, I’m naturally very curious and fascinated by hard problems to solve, things others say can’t be done,” Jean told us. What remained to be done was orchestrating the change to make SASB sustainability standards and reporting the new normal for corporations and investors. Orchestration does not happen overnight, as Jean and her successors at SASB know well, because what is ultimately at stake is changing not only the law, but also the culture, both of which are deeply entrenched in society. Nevertheless, such change is possible, as we will see.
MAKING CHANGE A REALITY
In 2000 and 2003, the Netherlands and Belgium became, respectively, the first two countries to legalize same-sex marriage. Inspired by these advances, a group of lesbian activists in Argentina started dreaming up their own campaign for marriage equality. They faced tremendous resistance from a mighty force with centuries of experience with power—the Catholic Church. To make matters worse, they confronted fierce opposition from gay activists within the Argentinian LGBTQ+ community who favored civil union legislation. And yet, in less than a decade, something happened that even this small group of visionary lesbian activists never thought would occur so fast.
They won.
In 2010, Argentina became the first country in Latin America and the tenth in the world—ahead of countries like France, Germany, and New Zealand—to legalize same-sex marriage. That’s not all. The campaign that succeeded at changing the country’s laws was launched and orchestrated by a group that initially had almost no resources. As María Rachid, the founder of a shelter for bisexual and lesbian women in Buenos Aires and one of the leaders of the marriage equality fight, recounted, “We were weak in many of the areas that traditional social movements leverage for power, meaning we couldn’t turn out masses of people in the streets nor invest money in ads or fancy communications campaigns since we were broke.”30 But the success of the movement is no story of miracles or good luck. It is a story of perseverance, strategy, and, of course, power.
Their first accomplishment was seeing and seizing an opportunity to act. In 2003, when Nestór Kirchner, a center-left politician, was elected president of Argentina, he and his government knew they had to be careful not to trigger popular ire. Between 1998 and 2002, Argentina had suffered its own Great Depression. When the government announced austerity measures in 2001, including a freeze on bank account withdrawals, panic and political chaos ensued.31 The economic crisis had given the country’s social movements the opportunity to mobilize Argentines to agitate, driving four consecutive presidents to leave office before Kirchner’s election. So, the new president reached out to the country’s social movements early on, claiming he wanted to take their demands into account and govern peacefully.
María recalled the government’s overture: “They said they were developing a plan to fight discrimination, and they wanted to include sexual diversity. They asked us to share a diagnosis of the problems our community endured and to recommend public policies that would help. We were skeptical. Never in Argentina’s history had any government collaborated with the LGBT+ community on anti-discrimination policies. The government, for us, had been persecutors, not advocates.”
In the meantime, however, Kirchner’s government started going after perpetrators of the brutal military dictatorship that had spread terror across the country between 1976 and 1983; so, María and her co-organizers decided it was worth a try. “We thought, it’s now or never. We have to go for equal marriage, and we’ve got to win this with Kirchner, before his government ends.” Their recognition of the political opportunity presented to them and their decision to seize the moment were pivotal for the movement.32 In their case, the innovation was clear: developing a bill on marriage equality that would legalize same-sex marriage. They had been in touch with the activists who had developed such a bill in Spain and succeeded in getting it signed into law, and they were hoping to do the same in Argentina.
But having a window of opportunity and the draft of an innovative policy were no guarantee it would get adopted. To make this change a reality, María and her peers not only had to agitate for change, but also orchestrate its adoption, which requires changing what people deem valuable, desirable, and often altogether legal. And for laws to change, policymakers and elected officials must support the changes. Influencing the behaviors and mental models of so many people—from the public to policymakers—necessitates coalition building at scale.
To begin with, María helped gather five organizations in the LGBT+ movement, and together they founded the Argentine LGBT Federation. Creating a shared identity, a sense of oneness, among the participants was critical.33 María and her co-organizers designed training workshops and assigned the participants tasks to perfo
rm in groups so that they would get to know one another and develop stronger connections. People were sent out in teams, for example, to get a petition in favor of marriage equality signed. These efforts paid off, “the participants developed a real sense of belonging and a strong commitment to our common cause.” But the Federation remained fairly small, and they still lacked access to resources they could leverage to expand their ranks. So they started with the same intangible resource the young climate activists deployed: They appealed to people’s conscience, in this case, by promoting their ideals of equality.
The framing strategy they chose—advancing their demands as a crusade for human rights (not civil rights, as LGBTQ+ campaigns in countries like the United States focused on)—had been used by previous generations of Argentine LGBTQ+ activists, starting in the 1980s, as the country was reeling from the wounds of its brutal dictatorship.34 Linking the fight for gay rights to the country’s growing human rights community, which emerged in the decades after the dictatorship as a strong political force, was a way to humanize the LGBTQ+ community and legitimize gay rights.35 By standing on the shoulders of their predecessors, and framing their campaign as a call for marriage equality, María and her peers were appealing to people’s need to feel ethical, hoping to attract everyone who cared about defending human rights: How could the gay community that was, like so many Argentines, persecuted during the dictatorship be deprived of a right that others had? This framing enabled María and her peers to agitate against the status quo, trigger outrage, and push people to join their movement, thereby growing their ranks and finding new allies.
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