These 3 key elements are what every change strategy needs

Experts have a lot of ideas about persuasion. Some suggest leveraging social proof to show that people have adopted the idea and had a positive experience. Others emphasize the importance of building trust and appealing to emotional, rather than analytical arguments. Still others insist on creating a unified value proposition.

The problem is that change is not about persuasion. The best indicator of what we think and do is what the people around us think and do, and that effect extends out to three degrees of separation. It is not only those we trust, but even the friends of our friends’ friends—people we don’t even know—that affect our opinions and actions.

So even if we are successful in convincing someone to adopt our way of thinking, chances are that once they re-embed in their usual social networks, they’ll be pulled right back. That’s why genuine transformation is never about crafting slogans or even training new skills. You need a strategy designed to shift the network itself and overcome resistance at its source.

1. Define the grievance and vision

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.

When we work with organizations in our ChangeOS workshops, we always start by getting the team focused on the initial grievance—or the problem to be solved. Often, we find that the team has a fully fleshed out solution, but never really defined the problem and that makes it difficult to scale. Nobody wants to invest in a solution without understanding why the problem is important. 

From there, we move on to the vision. 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 civil rights 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 you, it will undoubtedly be something different. The salient point is that every successful transformation I have come across started out with a Keystone Change. That’s where you should start as well.

2. A resistance inventory

In Rules for Radicals, the legendary activist Saul Alinsky observed that every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution. That is the physics of change. Every action provokes a reaction because, if an idea is important, it threatens the status quo, which never yields its power gracefully. Clearly, if you intend to influence an entire organization, you have to assume the deck is stacked against you and anticipate resistance.

A simple truth is that humans form attachments to people, ideas and other things and, when those attachments are threatened we tend to lash out in ways that don’t reflect our best selves. As much as we may hate to admit it, we all do it from time to time. Anyone who has ever been married or part of a family knows that.

That’s why anytime you ask people to change what they think or what they do, there will always be those who will work to undermine what you are trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Once you are able to internalize that, you can begin to move forward.

The key thing about overcoming resistance is to anticipate it, which is why one of the first things that we do when we start working with an organization is to do a resistance inventory, laying out the categories of resistance and discussing how they can be expected to show up, and what strategies can mitigate them.

3. Targets for action

Organizational change consultants often recommend that changemakers prepare a stakeholder map. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but it is inadequate because it fails to distinguish between different kinds of stakeholders. Some stakeholders are targets for mobilization and others are targets for influence.

For example, both parents and school boards are important stakeholders in education, but for very different reasons. School boards wield institutional power that can affect change, parents do not. So we mobilize parents to influence school boards, not the other way around. We need to approach constituencies and institutions in very different ways.

One of the things we’ve consistently found in our work helping organizations to drive transformational change is that leaders construe stakeholders far too narrowly. Fortunately, decades of non-violent activism have given us powerful tools for both: the Spectrum of Allies for constituencies and the Pillars of Support for institutions. In both cases the same basic principle is at work: You start by identifying targets and adopting tactics to them. 

That’s easier said than done, because tactics can seem more concrete. We’ve seen successful actions, like hackathons and social media campaigns, so we want to jump right in. But the truth is that until you are able to identify, analyze and understand exactly what your actions are targeted at, you’re just wasting your time. 

We need to redefine the terms of our struggle in ways that bring relative strength to bear against relative weakness and tilt the playing field to our advantage.

Applying strength to weakness

In the final analysis, most would-be changemakers fail because they assume the righteousness of their cause will save them. It will not. Injustice, inequity and ineffectiveness can thrive for decades and even centuries, far surpassing a human lifespan. If you think that your idea will prevail simply because you believe in it, you will be sorely disappointed.

Tough, important battles are won with good strategy and tactics, which is why successful change agents learn to adopt the principle of Schwerpunkt. The idea is that instead of trying to defeat your opponent everywhere, you want to deliver overwhelming force and win a decisive victory at a particular point of attack.

Yet Schwerpunkt is a dynamic, not a static concept. You have to constantly innovate your approach as your opposition adapts to whatever success you achieve. For example, the civil rights movement had its first successes with boycotts, but moved on to sit-ins, “Freedom Rides,” community actions and eventually, mass marches.

Defining the grievance and the vision, creating a resistance inventory and identifying viable institutional targets will help you apply strength to weakness. The key to success isn’t any particular tactic, leader or slogan, but strategic flexibility. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what most change efforts lack. All too often they get caught up in a strategy and double down, because it feels good to believe in something, even if it’s failing.

Change, like many things, largely boils down to strategy and execution. It’s not a simple matter of belief or passion. You need to learn how to operate effectively, by studying those who succeeded and those who failed, building on your successes, dusting yourself off after the inevitable setbacks, correcting mistakes and returning to fight with renewed vigor.

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