Gradually, Then Suddenly: Why Change Seems To Happen So Slowly, And Then All At Once
There’s a famous passage in Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 novel, The Sun Also Rises, in which a character is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he answers. “Gradually, then suddenly.” The quote has since become emblematic of how a crisis takes shape. First with small signs you hardly notice and then with shocking impact.
This is related to what mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot called Noah effects and Joseph effects. Joseph effects, as in the biblical story, support long periods of continuity. Noah effects, on the other hand, are like a big storm creating a massive flood of discontinuity, plunging everything into chaos before a new order can emerge.
A simple truth is that change isn’t always possible. History tends to converge and cascade around certain points. However, a corollary to this truth is that as forces gather, they eventually create a window of opportunity. One key strategy to bring about transformational change is to prepare for that moment and be ready to seize the opportunity when it arises.
Why Your Secret Bottle Of Scotch Will Disappear Before You Know It
Imagine throwing a party for a hundred complete strangers, divided into small groups. There’s some mingling as well. Every five minutes, two people from different groups swap places. As the night wears on, you mention to a guest that you have a nice bottle of scotch in the kitchen cabinet and you’ll serve him a few fingers, as long as he tells no one else.
Network science tells us that your scotch will be gone in record time. Let’s look at some math: The Erdős-Rényi theorem holds that if there are 40 groups in the room, generating 780 potential links among them all, it only takes 72 links to guarantee a continuous chain. So, if every group in the room makes a connection to another group by exchanging a member every five minutes, then 60 links would have been created after 15 minutes.
Yet because the links between groups form randomly, those 60 links will be unevenly distributed, leaving some groups tightly clustered while others remain completely unconnected. In the next five-minute shift of mixing, however, the 72-link threshold will have been met and the entire party will have formed a continuous chain.
What’s important to understand about this scenario is that, until the last step, the room remained largely unconnected. Yes, connections were forming, but not in a consequential way. You just had some islands of connected people. Yet with only a few more links, a complete phase transition took place and, all of a sudden, a complete network formed.
As I explained in detail in my book, there is significant evidence that this is how real-world cascades take place. There’s some seemingly random activity that goes on for a while that doesn’t seem particularly meaningful to most people. But then a few more connections—often triggered by some exogenous event—and the world changes in a significant way.
The Initial Apostles
In 1765, Great Britain stood at the pinnacle of global power. Its burgeoning textile industry, fueled by the revolutionary steam engine, was driving economic growth. Fresh from a decisive victory over the French-led coalition in the Seven Years’ War, England had already begun its rise to become the most dominant force on the world stage.
Yet half a world away, trouble was brewing. Angered by a series of taxes levied by the British parliament, a small group of rabble-rousers calling themselves the Sons of Liberty, began forming in Boston. Samuel Adams, cousin of future president John Adams and a key figure, set up Committees of Correspondence to keep allies informed and to coordinate action.
More than 200 years later, a similar band of Serbian activists found themselves exasperated by their own country’s leader, Slobodan Milošević. In 1998, five of them met in a Belgrade cafe and resolved to do something about it. The next day, six of their friends joined them and, together, they became the eleven original founders of the fledgling resistance group Otpor.
Much like the Sons of Liberty, Otpor was easily ignored. They were nobody special. They didn’t have any resources to speak of, no influential contacts or access to weapons. They didn’t have specialized expertise or even a comprehensive plan for the country. They were just a group of kids in their twenties, with some talent for pranks and street theater.
And, like the Sons of Liberty, they were fed up.
Connecting Clusters And The Gathering Storm
As tensions between the colonies and England escalated, the committee of correspondence networks continued to grow, increasing the frequency and scope of their communications. By 1774—nine years after the first committee was established in Massachusetts—these networks had spread to 11 of the 13 colonies, involving over 7,000 people.
With Otpor, as one of the key figures, Srdja Popović, explained to me, the strategy was Recruit—Train—Act. First they would recruit activists through street pranks and other actions. Then they would train them and encourage them to act, even if the action was small, because it is through action that people begin to take ownership of a movement.
In both instances, the nascent movements were easy to overlook. In the 18th century, the slow pace of transatlantic communication meant that news from the colonies took months to reach England, diluting any immediate sense of urgency. In Serbia, most believed Milošević’s grip on power was firmly entrenched, and it seemed unlikely that a bunch of kids playing pranks would change that basic reality.
Yet like in the whiskey example, forces were brewing and a phase transition was imminent. In 1774, in response to the Intolerable Acts that followed the Boston Tea Party, the Committees of Correspondence nominated delegates to the First Continental Congress. Six months later, shots rang out in Lexington, starting the Revolutionary War. In Serbia, Milošević’s attempt to falsify an election triggered the Bulldozer revolution that led to his downfall.
In both cases, there had been forces gathering that weren’t at all obvious at the time. It was England’s triumph in the Seven Years War that embittered France and sowed the seeds for its support of the colonies. The debts incurred by the French created tensions that led to its own revolution, the rise of Napoleon and, eventually, a wave of European revolts in 1848.
Similarly, Serbia’s uprising sparked a wave of Color Revolutions across Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, which included Ukraine and the Georgian Republic, and that continues to shape the region even today.
Small Groups, Loosely Connected, But United By A Shared Purpose
Bent Flyvbjerg, author of How Big Things Get Done, frequently highlights the planning fallacy as a key reason why projects go awry. We tend to trust too much in our plans, often underestimating setbacks and complications. This issue becomes even more pronounced in change initiatives, where the change itself can provoke resistance, creating additional obstacles that slow progress.
The truth is that things that change the world always arrive out of context, for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. Samuel Adams starts a Committee of Correspondence in Boston. Five kids meet in a cafe in Belgrade. At first, few noticed. But connections were forged and networks began to expand.
What people do notice is when an event triggers a moment of opportunity. Shots are fired in Lexington, a tyrant attempts to steal an election, an innocent is killed or some other injustice is perpetrated. That’s when it shows whether you’ve put in the work when it really mattered, long before the issue was on most people’s radar, when the groundwork needs to be done.
When that moment happens, it’s already too late. We know from centuries of history as well as decades of research that change follows an s-curve. It starts out slowly and then, if the ground has been prepared, it can accelerate exponentially. But you need to start building networks long before, when nobody is watching and there is no credit to claim.
That’s what makes the difference between a movement that succeeds and those countless others that catch some limelight, make a little noise and then sputter out and fade away into obscurity. And when that happens, many will throw up their hands and complain that nothing ever changes
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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