This one key insight will change how you think about change

It’s become almost a cliché to talk about how consistently organizational change fails. Study after study finds that roughly three-quarters of change efforts don’t achieve their objectives. There are underlying forces that work against us adapting to change—including synaptic, network and cost effects—that lead to resistance. 

Another problem lies in how we study change itself. Typically, researchers at an academic institution or a consulting firm interview executives that were involved in successful efforts and try to glean insights to write case studies. These are famously flawed, lacking controls, and often relying on self-serving accounts. 

One unlikely place to look for insight is a little-known academic named Gene Sharp, who wasn’t interested in business at all, but political revolutions. What he found was that there are sources of power that support the status quo and these have an institutional basis. As long as they remain in place, nothing will ever change. But if you can shift them, anything becomes possible.  

A Revolutionary Shift 

Before 1789, the world was ruled by monarchies rooted in the divine right of kings and the feudal system. Yet that year would prove to be an inflection point. The American Constitution and the French Revolution began a fundamental realignment of power that culminated in the revolutions of 1848, a widespread uprising against monarchies that spread across Europe.

But in the late 19th century something new emerged: nonviolent movements. Rising out of the abolitionist efforts in the US, which then morphed into the struggle for women’s suffrage, new techniques of fighting for change emerged. Among those watching closely was a young law student, Mohandas Gandhi. He would later perfect their techniques in South Africa and India. 

It was Gandhi’s work that Gene Sharp first began to study and led him to an epiphany: violent revolts would always be at a disadvantage because the regime controls the means of violence, such as the military, police and other security agencies. It also has the power to create and enforce laws.

Nonviolent movements, on the other hand, could fight with very different weapons, those of psychology, sociology, and economics, where the regime can be put at a disadvantage. That’s how Gandhi was able to win against seemingly impossible odds. What Sharp wanted to do was create a systematic strategic framework so that anyone could achieve what Gandhi did. 

That’s what led to his key insight: power is rooted in institutions, and only by shifting them can true transformation occur.

Understanding Sources Of Power

Think about an all-powerful dictator somewhere, like Vladimir Putin in Russia or Xi Jinping in China. Then, imagine that all of the janitors decide not to come in to work. That all-powerful dictator is now powerless to get the trash picked up. He can arrest the janitors—or even have them killed—but picking up all the trash in the country is not something he can do himself.

The point is that a leader’s power extends only as far as their ability to control or influence institutions. They can only make laws to the extent that they control the legislative system and can only enforce those laws if they control or influence the legal system and the police. The same goes for commercial institutions, educational institutions, the media and so on. 

That, in a nutshell, is Sharp’s key insight: power is never monolithic but distributed across many institutions, all of which have vulnerabilities. It can be attacked wherever you find a weakness. If you can influence the institutions that the regime depends on to maintain and enforce its power, you can create genuine transformation. 

This is not just a theory. It has been proven to work in practice. The color revolutions were rooted in Sharp’s ideas as was the Arab Spring in Egypt. The Center for Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS) has put them to work in over 50 countries and even offers a comprehensive curriculum to help others bring about the change they want to see. 

Yet Sharp’s ideas don’t apply only to political movements. As I showed in Cascades, they can be just as effective in driving organizational change.

Mapping Power In Your Organizational Ecosystem 

One thing every leader quickly learns is how little real power they really have. Formal authority only goes so far. Much like Gene Sharp observed about regimes, the status quo has sources of power keeping it in place. Often these have had years—even decades—to entrench themselves. They will work against any significant change effort.

Consider the dilemma of the PC manufacturers in the 1980s. It was clear that Dell’s direct sales model was vastly superior to selling through distributors and market leaders like Compaq and HP made a number of efforts to adopt it. Yet so many stakeholders, including powerful executives within the company and external partners, had a stake in the existing model. So nothing ever changed.

Think about that for a minute. Pundits like to portray firms that get disrupted as simply not paying attention. But that’s often not true. In this case, the leaders of these PC firms accurately diagnosed the problem and created strategies, such as modified compensation schemes, to address it, but still failed to overcome the forces keeping the status quo in place. 

That’s why in our transformational change workshops, one of the first steps is mapping the sources of power we’ll need to influence to make change happen. Much like Sharp revealed about political revolutions, once you’ve identified institutional targets, you can start designing tactics to address them. 

Change Isn’t About Persuasion, It’s About Power

All too often, we think about change in terms of persuasion. We think if we can just come up with the right message, broadcast it widely and get it to the right people, that change will happen. But decades of evidence shows that’s not true. Even if we are able to inform people and change their attitudes, they are unlikely to change their behavior. 

What Gene Sharp showed us is that change isn’t about persuasion, it’s about power. To bring about transformation, we need to undermine the sources of power that underlie the present state while strengthening the forces that favor a different future. If you can influence the institutional stakeholders keeping the status quo in place, change can happen. If you can’t, it is unlikely things will ever change. 

That also helps explain why so many change efforts fail. They start with tactics designed to create a specific effect, such as “build awareness” or “create a sense of urgency.” Leaders roll out communication campaigns, design training programs, or host events like hackathons. Then they congratulate themselves when the action achieves the intended effect and wonder why genuine change never happened. 

Until you identify, analyze, and understand exactly what your actions need to be targeted at, you’re just wasting your time. Every enterprise, whether it’s an organization or an entire society, is governed by institutions that maintain the status quo. Once you are able to internalize that simple truth, you are ready to lead change effectively. 

Change isn’t about snappy slogans or clever campaigns. It’s what happens when you build the capacity to influence institutions.

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