victory | Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Why Big Ideas Often Fail To Survive Victory

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

I still vividly remember a whiskey drinking session I had with a good friend in my flat in Kyiv in early 2005, shortly after the Orange Revolution had concluded. We were discussing what would come after and, knowing that I had lived in Poland during years of reform, he was interested in my opinion about the future. I told him NATO and EU ascension was the way to go.

My friend, a prominent journalist, disagreed. He thought that Ukraine should pursue a “Finnish model,” in which it would pursue good relations with both Russia and the west, favoring neither. As he saw it, the Ukrainian people, who had just been through months of political turmoil, should pursue a “third way” and leave the drama behind.

As it turned out, we were both wrong. The promise of change would soon turn to nightmare, ending with an evil, brutal regime and a second Ukrainian revolution a decade later. I would later find that this pattern is so common that there is even a name for it: the failure to survive victory. To break the cycle you first need to learn to anticipate it and then to prepare for it.

The Thrill Of A New Direction And An Initial Success

In the weeks after the Orange Revolution I happened to be in Warsaw and saw a huge banner celebrating democracy movements in Eastern Europe, with Poland’s Solidarity movement as the first and Ukraine’s Orange revolution as the last in the series. Everyone thought that Ukraine would follow its neighbor into peace and prosperity.

We were triumphant and it seemed like the forces of history were on our side. That’s one reason why we failed to see the forces that were gathering. Despite our enthusiasm, those who opposed our cause didn’t just melt away and go home. In fact they redoubled their efforts to undermine what we had achieved. We never really saw it coming.

I see the same thing in my work with organizational transformations. Once people get a taste of that initial success—they win executive sponsorship for their initiative, get a budget approved or even achieve some tangible progress on the ground—they think it will all get easier. It never does. In fact, it usually gets harder.

Make no mistake. Opposition doesn’t erupt in spite of an early success, but because of it. A change initiative only becomes a threat to the status quo when it begins to gain traction. That’s when the knives come out and, much like my friend and I after the Orange Revolution, most people working to bring about change are oblivious to it.

If you are working for a change that you believe in passionately, chances are you’re missing a brewing storm. Almost everyone does the first time around (and many never learn to recognize it).

Propagating Echo Chambers

One of the reasons we failed to see trouble brewing back then was that, as best we could tell, everyone around us saw things the same way we did. Whatever dissenting voices we did come across seemed like an aberration to us. Sure, some people were still stuck in the old ways, we thought, but with history on our side how could we fail?

Something similar happened in the wake of the George Floyd protests. The city council in Minneapolis, where the incident took place, voted to defund the police. Taking its cue, corporate America brought in armies of consultants to set out the new rules of the workplace. In one survey, 85% of CHRO’s said that they were expanding diversity and inclusion efforts. With such an outpouring of news coverage and emotion, who would dare to question them?

The truth is that majorities don’t just rule, they also influence in a number of ways. First, decades of studies show that we tend to conform to the views around us and that effect extends out to three degrees of relationships. Not only people we know, but the friends of their friends—most of whom we don’t even know—affect how we think.

It isn’t just what we hear but also what we say that matters. Research from MIT suggests that when we are around people we expect to agree with us, we’re less likely to check our facts and more likely to share information that isn’t true. That, in turn, impacts our informational environment, helping to create an echo chamber that reinforces our sense of certainty.

The Inevitable Backlash

Almost as soon as the new Ukrainian government took power in 2005, the opposition went on the offensive. While the new President, Viktor Yushchenko was seen positively, they attacked the people around him. His Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, was portrayed as a calculating and devious woman. When Yushchenko’s son got into trouble, questions were raised about corruption in his father’s administration.

A similar pattern took hold in the wake of the George Floyd protests. Calls for racial justice were portrayed as anti-police and law enforcement budgets across the country increased as “We Support Our Police” signs went up on suburban lawns. Critical Race Theory, an obscure legal concept rarely discussed outside of universities, became a political punching bag. Today, as layoffs increase, corporate diversity efforts are sure to take a hit.

These patterns are not exceptions. They are the rule. As Saul Alinsky pointed out, every revolution inspires a counter-revolution. That is the physics of change. Every reaction provokes a reaction. Every success impacts your environment and some of those changes will not be favorable to your cause. They will expose vulnerabilities that can be exploited by those who oppose your idea.

Yet Alinsky didn’t just identify the problem, he also pointed to a solution. “Once we accept and learn to anticipate the inevitable counter-revolution, we may then alter the historical pattern of revolution and counter-revolution from the traditional slow advance of two steps forward and one step backward to minimizing the latter,” he writes.

In other words, the key to surviving victory is to prepare for the backlash that is sure to come and build a strategy to overcome it.

Building A Shared Future Rooted In Shared Values

In the two decades I have been researching transformation and change, the failure to survive victory is probably the most consistent aspect of it. In fact, it is so common you can almost set your watch by it. Amazingly, no matter how many times change advocates experience it, they rarely see it coming. Many, in fact, seem to take pride in how many battles they have lost, seeing it as some kind of badge of honor.

The uncomfortable truth is that success doesn’t necessarily begat more success. Often it breeds failure. People mistake a moment for a movement and think that their time has finally come. Believing change to be inevitable, they get cocky and overconfident and miss the networks of unseen connections forming in opposition. They make sure to press a point, but fail to make a difference.

Lasting change always needs to be built on common ground. That’s what we failed to see all those years ago, when I began my journey. You can never base your revolution on any particular person, technology or policy. It needs to be rooted in shared values and if we truly care about change, we need to hold ourselves accountable to be effective messengers.

We can’t just preach to the choir. Sometimes we need to venture out of the church and mix with the heathens. We can be clear about where we stand and still listen to those who see things differently. That doesn’t mean we compromise. In fact, we should never compromise the values we believe in. What we can do, however, is identify common ground upon which to build a shared future.

These principles hold true whether the change you seek is in your organization, your industry, your community or throughout society as a whole. If you fail to learn and apply them, don’t be surprised when you fail to survive victory.

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

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You Also Have To Survive Victory

Driving Change is Not Enough

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In early 2004, Viacom announced it would spin off Blockbuster Video, leaving CEO John Antioco master of his own fate. He moved quickly to meet the threat posed by Netflix head on, launching Blockbuster Online in 2004 and, after successfully testing the concept in a few markets, ending late fees in early 2005.

Still, not satisfied with playing catch-up, Antioco searched for model that would return his company to dominance. He found it in 2006 with the Total Access program. Within a few weeks of announcing the promotion, Blockbuster was winning the majority of new subscribers, outstripping Netflix for the first time.

It was a textbook case of sound strategy and execution meeting a disruptive threat, but it would not end well. In 2010 Blockbuster would declare bankruptcy and become a cautionary tale. We tend to think that driving change is merely a matter of coming up with a clever plan and executing well. Yet that isn’t enough. You also need learn how to survive victory.

Defying Critics And Beating The Odds

John Antioco was the quintessential American success story. Starting from humble origins as a management trainee at 7-Eleven, he rose to become a senior vice president at the company. He then moved on to run the struggling Circle K convenience store chain, which he turned around in just three years before moving on to Taco Bell and working the same magic there.

So when he joined Blockbuster as CEO in 1997, he was ideally suited to the job. Early in his tenure, he came up with a program to share rental revenues with the movie studios rather than buying the videos directly.The strategy improved the firm’s cash position and its access of high demand movies, while also allowing it to increase its marketing budget. It was a stroke of genius.

“The experienced video executives were skeptical,” Antioco would later tell me. “In fact, they thought that the revenue-sharing agreement would kill the company. But throughout my career, I had learned that whenever you set out to do anything big, some people aren’t going to like it. I’d been successful by defying the status quo at important junctures and that’s what I thought had to be done in this case.”

So Antioco approached the Netflix problem in the same way. He assembled a team of talented executives, came up with a strategy and worked to execute it flawlessly. Yet although his efforts were initially successful, there was a flaw in his plan that he didn’t see at the time and it would lead to Blockbuster’s downfall.

Failing To Align Stakeholders

Not everybody was thrilled with the moves Antioco made. Franchisees, many of whom had their life savings invested in their business, were suspicious of Blockbuster Online. They only owned 20% of the stores, but could make their displeasure known. The moves were also expensive, costing roughly $400 million to implement, and investors balked.

So while Blockbuster was making progress against the Netflix threat, as earnings turned to losses, its stock took a beating. The low price attracted corporate raider Carl Icahn, whose heavy-handed style made managing the company difficult. Things came to a head in late 2006 when Icahn demanded that Antioco accept only half of the bonus he was owed.

“I was at a point, both personally and financially, that I had little desire to fight it out anymore,” Antioco told me. He negotiated his exit early the next year and left the company in July of 2007. His successor, Jim Keyes, was determined to reverse Antioco’s strategy, cut investment in the subscription model, reinstated late fees and shifted the focus back to the retail stores.

When Blockbuster declared bankruptcy in 2010, the event was portrayed as corporate America’s inability to navigate digital disruption. Yet, as we have seen, nothing could be further from the truth. The management team came up with a viable strategy, executed it well and proved they could compete, yet still were unable to survive that victory.

Building Shared Purpose And Shared Consciousness

When General Stanley McChrystal took over command of special forces in Iraq, the situation he encountered was surprisingly similar to that of Antioco and Blockbuster. A well-led, well-resourced and highly efficient organization was faced with a disruptive challenge by a smaller, less powerful, but incredibly disruptive adversary.

Yet while Antico saw the problem as one of strategy and tactics, McChrystal saw it as one of one of organizational coherence. So he embarked on a program to improve the links both within his command and also to outside stakeholders, such as partner agencies, law enforcement and embassy personnel, to build “shared purpose and shared consciousness.”

“We began to make progress when we started looking at these relationships as just that: relationships — parts of a network, not cogs in a machine or outputs and inputs,” McChrystal would later write in his book, Team of Teams. Within a few years, the terrorists were on the run.

The difference in outcomes is striking. Antioco, who had built his career on defying the critics, largely ignored their concerns and pressed on with his strategy. McChrystal, on the other hand, understood that if he couldn’t get key stakeholders on board, the strategy wouldn’t matter. He worked on building relationships not to overpower, but to attract others to his cause. There were still critics, but they were vastly outnumbered.

You Need A Plan To Survive Victory From The Start

In my book, Cascades, I cover a wide range of transformational efforts, from revolutionary political movements to corporate turnarounds. In every case, the movement for change inspired others to move against it. As Saul Alinsky pointed out decades ago, every revolution provokes a counterrevolution.

I saw this first hand in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, which I personally took part in. Five years after we protested in the bitter cold to overturn a falsified election, we saw the target of our ire, Viktor Yanukovych, win the presidency in an election that outside observers judged to be legitimate. Later, similar events played out in the aftermath of Egypt’s Arab Spring.

What makes the difference is not a particular strategy or persona, but whether an organization can align based on shared values and purpose. It wasn’t that Blockbuster franchisees were worried that Antioco’s plan wouldn’t succeed, they were terrified that it would and they would be left behind. Investors, for their part, were more focused on earnings than Antioco’s vision.

Yet shared values are what enables a transformation to succeed beyond a few initial victories. As Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a key player in IBM’s historic turnaround in the 90s told me, “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.”

And that’s what so often makes the difference between ultimate success and failure. Those that see driving change as merely a series of benchmarks often find their efforts thwarted. Those that build a plan to survive victory based on the forging of shared values, are much more likely to prevail. Transformation is always a journey, never a destination.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credit: Wikimedia Commons