social movements | Human-Centered Change and Innovation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

On September 17th, 2011, protesters began to flood into Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. Declaring “We are the 99%” they planned to #Occupy Wall Street for as long as it took to make their voice heard. Similar protests soon spread like wildfire across 951 cities in 82 countries. It seemed to be a massive global movement of historic proportions.

But it wasn’t a movement. It was merely a moment. Within a few months, the streets and parks were cleared. The protesters went home and nothing much changed. #Occupy was, to paraphrase Shakespeare, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Certainly, no tangible aim was accomplished.

Failure has costs. Thousands of people for hours a day across several months adds up to billions of dollars worth of man-hours that could have been put to some useful purpose. Make no mistake. Creating positive change in the world takes far more than mobilization. You need a vision and a strategy, guided by values, designed to accomplish clear objectives.

Getting Beyond Grievance

Every change effort starts with a grievance. There’s something that people don’t like and they want it to be different. In a social or political movement that may be a corrupt leader or a glaring injustice. In an organizational context, the problem is usually something like falling sales, unhappy customers, low employee morale or technological disruption.

Whatever the case may be, the first step toward bringing change about is to understand that getting mired in grievance won’t get you anywhere. You can’t just complain about things you don’t like. You need to come up with an affirmative vision for how you would want things to be different and better.

The best place to start is by asking yourself, “if I had the power to change anything, what would it look like?” Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for the civil rights movement was for a Beloved Community. Bill Gates’s vision for Microsoft was for a “computer on every desk and in every home.” A good vision should be aspirational. It should inspire.

One of the things I found in my research is that successful change leaders don’t try to move from grievance to vision in one step, but rather identify a Keystone Change, which focuses on a clear and tangible goal, includes multiple stakeholders and paves the way for future change, to bridge the gap.

For King, the Keystone Change was voting rights. For Gates it was an easy-to-use operating system. For your vision, it will undoubtedly be something different. The salient point here is that every successful transformation I have come across started out with a Keystone Change, so that’s where you will want to start as well.

Building In Constraints Through A Genome Of Values

Creating a clear vision for change is absolutely essential, but it’s only a first step. You also need to be clear and explicit about your values. While a vision for the future represents possibility, values represent constraints. Values make clear that we not only want things, but we’re also willing to incur certain costs to attain them.

For example, throughout his life, Nelson Mandela was accused of being a Communist, an anarchist, an extremist and worse. Yet when confronted with these accusations, he would always say that no one had to guess what he believed or what he was fighting for, because it was all written down in 1955 in a document called the Freedom Charter.

Importantly, the Freedom Charter imposed constraints on Mandela and his movement. When he rose to power, he couldn’t oppress white Afrikaners, because that would betray all that he’d been fighting for. That gave the movement credibility and power. Occupy, of course, was never clear or explicit about its values and never sought to constrain itself in any way. It’s activists were often seen as undisciplined and vulgar

In a similar vein, when Lou Gerstner set out to transform IBM in the 90s, he vowed that he would shift the company’s values from the “stack of its own proprietary technologies” to its “customers’ stack of business processes.” Yet it was his willingness to forego revenue on every sale to make good on this value is what made people believe in it. If not for that, it’s doubtful IBM would still be in business today.

Make no mistake. Values always cost something. If you are unwilling to bear costs and constraints, it isn’t a value. It’s a platitude. Change is always built on a foundation of shared values and common purpose. If you aren’t able to communicate clearly about what you believe and what you value, you can’t expect others to join you.

Mobilizing People To Influence Institutions

In October 2011, at the height of the #Occupy protests, the civil rights legend and Congressman John Lewis showed up at an #Occupy rally in Atlanta and asked to speak. He was refused. Some attributed the snub to racism among the privileged white protestors. Others faulted Lewis himself, who didn’t understand the complex rules of the rally.

The protester who led the charge to block Lewis, however, described a different motivation. For him, Lewis’s great crime was that he was part of the “two-party system” and therefore unworthy of trust. “Any organization that upholds the legitimacy of the two-party system simply buttresses interests opposed to those of everyday people,” the man said.

This is, of course, total nonsense. Every regime or status quo depends on institutions to support them. That’s why a key part of any transformation strategy is to mobilize people to influence the institutions that can bring change about. One major reason that #Occupy failed was that it mobilized people to do no more than sleep in parks and snarl out epithets.

Now consider Martin Luther King Jr., who was able to bring considerable influence to bear on the US political system, just as Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston did with the US legal system and Nelson Mandela did with international institutions. These men had at least as much reason to be skeptical as any #Occupy protester, but understood that it is institutions that have the power to make change real.

In our corporate work, we find the same principle applies. Would-be changemakers tend to construe institutions too narrowly. If it is an internal initiative, they overlook customers, industry associations, community leaders and other external stakeholders. If it is an externally facing initiative, they often overlook important internal stakeholders that can help.

Preparing For Your Moment

It’s easy to confuse a moment with a movement. A movement involves linking together small, but often disparate groups in the context of shared purpose and shared values. A moment occurs when an event triggers a temporary decrease in resistance to an action or idea that opens up a window of opportunity. Movements require preparation. Moments require little more than luck.

That’s why we see protesters suddenly fill the streets and then, almost as suddenly, dissipate with little or no impact. It’s why some startups catch investors’ imagination and race to billion-dollar unicorn status, only to crash and burn just as fast. Politicians’ fortunes rise and fall, social media stars have their moment in the sun before disappearing into obscurity.

Building a movement requires work. You need to get beyond mere grievances and articulate an affirmative vision. You need to identify and speak to shared values and build on common ground. You need to invite people to join your cause for their own reasons, which may be different from your own. And then you need to focus your efforts on influencing the institutions that can actually make a difference.

So we should never mistake a moment for a movement. However, we can build a movement in anticipation for a moment that we expect will come. Gandhi trained his disciples for ten years before the opportunity for the Salt March came along. King’s efforts failed in Albany, but triumphed in Birmingham under better circumstances. Polish protesters were ill-prepared in 1970, but learned from the mistakes and later brought down an empire.

The crucial point to remember is that moments of opportunity are rare. We need to prepare for them. So that when they happen and fortune smiles on us we are ready. We have everything in place. That’s how radical, transformational change comes about.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pexels

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GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 2004, I was managing a major news organization during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. One of the things I noticed was that thousands of people, who would normally be doing thousands of different things, would stop what they were doing and start doing the same things all at once, in nearly complete unison, with no clear authority guiding them.

What struck me was how difficult it was for me to coordinate action among the people in my company. I thought if I could harness the forces I saw at work in the Orange Revolution, it could be a powerful model for business transformation. That’s what started me out on the 15-year journey that led to my book, Cascades.

What I found was that many of the principles of successful movements can be applied to business transformation. Also, because social and political movements so well documented—there are often thousands of contemporary accounts from every conceivable perspective—we can gain insights that a traditional case studies miss. Here are four principles you can apply.

1. Failure Doesn’t Have To Be Fatal

One of the things that amazed me while researching revolutionary movements was how consistently failure played a part in their journey. Mahatma Gandhi’s early efforts to bring independence to India led to the massacre at Amritsar in 1919. Our own efforts in Ukraine in 2004 ultimately led to Viktor Yanukovych’s rise to power in 2010.

In the corporate context, it is often a crisis that leads to transformational change. In the early 90s, IBM was nearly bankrupt and many thought the company should be broken up. That’s what led to the Gerstner revolution that put the company back on track and a similar crisis at Alcoa presaged record profits under Paul O’Neil.

In fact, Lou Gertner would later say that failure and transformation are inextricably linked. “Transformation of an enterprise begins with a sense of crisis or urgency,” he told a groups of Harvard Business School students. “No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.”

What’s important about early failures is what you learn from them. In every successful transformation I researched, what turned the tide was when the insights gained from early failures were applied to create a keystone change that set out a clear and concrete initiative, involved multiple stakeholders and paved the way for a greater transformation down the road.

2. Don’t Bet Your Transformation On Persuasion

Any truly transformational change is going to encounter significant resistance. Those who fear change and support the status quo can be expected to work to undermine your efforts. That’s fairly obvious in social and political movements like the civil rights movements or the struggle against Apartheid, but often gets overlooked in the corporate context.

All too often change management efforts seek to convince opponents through persuasion. That’s unlikely to succeed. Betting your transformation on the idea that, given the right set of arguments or snappy slogans, those who oppose the change that you seek will immediately see the light is unrealistic. What you can do, however, is set out to influence stakeholders who can wield influence.

For example, in the 1980s, anti-Aparthied activists activists led a campaign against Barclays Bank in British university towns. That probably did little to persuade white nationalists in South Africa, but it severely affected Barclays’ business, which pulled its investments from South Africa. That and similar efforts made Apartheid economically untenable and helped lead to its downfall.

In a corporate transformation, there are many institutions, such as business units, customer groups, industry associations, and others that can wield significant influence. By looking at stakeholder groups more broadly, you can win important allies that can help you drive transformation forward.

3. Be Explicit About Your Values

Today, we regard Nelson Mandela as an almost saintly figure, but it wasn’t always that way. Throughout his career as an activist, he was accused of being a communist, an anarchist and worse. When confronted with these accusations, however, he always pointed out that no one had to guess what he believed in, because it was written down in the Freedom Charter in 1955.

Being explicit about values helped to signal to external stakeholders, such as international institutions, that the anti-Aparthied activists shared common values. In fact, although the Freedom Charter was a truly revolutionary document, its call for things like equal rights and equal protection would be considered utterly unremarkable in most countries.

After Apartheid fell and Mandela rose to power, the values spelled out in the Freedom Charter became important constraints. If, for example, a core value is that all national groups should be treated equal, then Mandela’s government clearly couldn’t oppress whites. His reconciliation efforts are a big part of the reason he is so revered today.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of Gerster’s key lieutenants, told me how values played a similar role during IBM’s turnaround years. “The Gerstner revolution wasn’t about technology or strategy, it was about transforming our values and our culture to be in greater harmony with the market… Because the transformation was about values first and technology second, we were able to continue to embrace those values as the technology and marketplace continued to evolve.”

4. Every Revolution Inspires A Counter-Revolution

After the Orange Revolution ended in 2005, we felt triumphant. We overcame enormous odds and had won. Little did we know that there would be much darker days ahead. In 2010, Viktor Yanukovych, the man we took to the streets to keep out of power, was elected president in an election that international observers judged to be free and fair.

While surprising, this is hardly uncommon. Similar events took place during the Arab Spring. The government of Hosni Mubarrak was overthrown only to be replaced by that of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who is possibly even more oppressive. Harvard professor Rita Gunther McGrath points out that in today’s business environment, competitive advantage tends to be transient.

The truth is that every revolution inspires a counter-revolution. That’s why the early days of victory are often the most fragile. That’s when you tend to take your foot off the gas and relax, while at the same time those who oppose the change you worked to build are just beginning to plan to redouble their efforts.

That’s why you need a plan to survive victory from the start rooted in shared values. In the final analysis, driving change is less about a series of objectives than it is about forming a common cause. That’s just as true in a corporate transformation as it is in a social or political revolution.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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