This Is How Change Fails To Survive Victory (And What To Do About It)
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, corporate America began hiring an unprecedented number of DEI executives to ensure inclusive workplaces. Investors began pouring money into ESG funds and President Biden signed into law the biggest investment in clean energy ever. Mckinsey reported progress for the LGBTQIA community in the workplace.
We are clearly in a different era now. Legislators are targeting ESG funds for destruction. Major firms such as Walmart are rolling back diversity policies. Upon taking the presidency, Donald Trump began a full assault on DEI programs. Activists who just a few years ago thought victory was inevitable are now besieged on every front.
This cycle of progress and backlash is so consistent we have a name for it: The failure to survive victory. Every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution. That’s the physics of change. But like the physics of flight—where lift must counteract gravity— the key to overcoming it is to understand its principles and put them to work for your own purposes.
How Change Is Triggered
We tend to think about change in personal terms. We remember a time when something persuaded us to change our behavior, to exercise more or to eat well, to study more diligently or to shift our focus. So when we try to change the behavior of others, we think in terms of persuasion and influence.
Yet there is a fundamental flaw in that approach. Large scale change is not a personal behavior problem, but a collective behavior problem. The willingness of people to accept an idea or engage in a particular behavior is greatly influenced by how many people around them already accept that idea or engage in that behavior.
In a highly influential 1978 paper, sociologist Mark Granovetter showed how the adoption of ideas or behaviors often depends on the distribution of resistance thresholds. Clusters of individuals with low barriers to adoption can influence those with greater resistance. Building on this foundation, Duncan Watts later showed how even small differences in the structure of how people are connected within networks can significantly shape the spread of ideas.
In practice, the spread of an idea or behavior is often triggered by an external event that lowers resistance and increases the concentration of people open to adoption. This creates a window of opportunity for change agents, where what once seemed impossible suddenly becomes within reach.
That’s essentially what happened after the murder of George Floyd. The shocking images of a police officer calmly suffocating a man to death while others looked on profoundly lowered public resistance to change, making many more open to reforms in the criminal justice system. Activists, whose efforts had previously fallen on deaf ears, suddenly found themselves in a powerful positioned to shape the national conversation and influence the zeitgeist.
The Identity Trap: Group Polarization, Moral Outbidding And Purity Spirals
People who are passionate about an idea often internalize it as an integral part of their identity and tend to see others who hold the same idea as fellow travelers working to build a cohesive community. For example the Niagara Movement led to the founding of the NAACP. A single meeting of 17 developers in 2001 led to the Agile Development movement.
Yet as Will Storr explains in his bestselling book, this sense of shared identity often fuels a status game in which members vie to display their devotion and loyalty to the cause. Group polarization drives “moral outbidding,” leading to a purity spiral in which extreme views dominate—strengthening group identity but stifling and intimidating dissent.
The problem is that the more we dedicate ourselves to a particular status game, the more difficult we find it is to relate to those outside of it. That’s the identity trap. If we’re not careful, signaling our identity can become more important than the underlying idea itself. Top notch athletes, Special Forces operators, Wall Street traders and members of religious cults often find they have difficulty relating to others who play different status games than they do.
Business leaders are prone to many of these same pitfalls. Fads like six sigma, stack ranking and the war for talent emerge for a time and create a cascade in which adherents rush to not only adopt a practice, but signal their inclusion into the tribe. In a pattern known as reflexivity, the idea becomes self-referential and self-reinforcing.
This is the danger point. Extreme views become normalized, pushing moderates to the margins as their voices are silenced or dismissed. Discontent simmers beneath the surface, growing into a deep well of frustration. Warning signs, often subtle at first, are overlooked or dismissed.
The Inevitable Backlash
In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes the point that when we adopt opinions we are often signaling our inclusion in a particular team. It feels good to feel part of something bigger than ourselves. Yet s MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues have shown, this can often lead to echo chambers which take on their own sense of reality.
As the community grows, it begins to build influence. Yet by this point, something akin to what Wittgenstein called a private language begins to form. Those who proudly display tribal signals and speak the tribal language demonstrate that they are members in good standing, while those who don’t are viewed with suspicion.
Yet for those outside the community those signals, and the motives behind them, are inscrutable. Most have some stake in the status quo and a wide range of reasons to be skeptical about the idea for change, including lack of trust, change fatigue, competing incentives or commitments, switching costs or issues related to their own identity, dignity or sense of self.
To avoid backlash, changemakers must focus on identifying and communicating shared values to the wider community. That’s what happened to us in Ukraine following the Orange Revolution and it is what is happening now to movements like ESG and DEI now. I see the same pattern in our work helping organizations with change initiatives of all shapes and sizes.
The failure to survive victory is always a failure to leverage shared values in favor of differentiating values that allow stalwarts to signal identity and status.
Preparing For The Next Window Of Opportunity
The truth is that most change efforts fail and the ones that do succeed almost always have at least one heartbreaking setback along the way. Gandhi had his Himalayan miscalculation. Mandela had Sharpeville. The first march on Washington, in 1913, was a disaster. As Saul Alinsky put it, every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution. That is the physics of change.
Yet as Alinsky also wrote, “Once we accept and learn to anticipate the inevitable counterrevolution, we may then alter the historical pattern of revolution and counterrevolution from the traditional slow advance of two steps forward and one step backward to minimizing the latter.” Resistance is inevitable. Anticipating it is how you survive victory.
It’s also how you recover from a setback. When your opposition is triumphant, that’s when you should be preparing for your next window of opportunity. Ask yourself: What do I wish I had in place before I began this effort? What could I have built? What connections could I have made? What alliances could I have forged?”
The best time to do that is when nobody is watching, when it seems that all is lost and your cause has been all but forgotten. That’s when you have the space to really think things through, to build a strategy without the stress and strain of having to execute on a daily basis. The time to lay the groundwork for victory is before the battle begins.
If you want to be an effective changemaker, your first task is to anticipate resistance and build strategies to overcome it. To do that, you need to focus on shared values and always be preparing for your next window of opportunity. Lasting change is built on common ground.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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