When You Fail To Forge Shared Values, Your Vision Will Fail Too

In 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States, Teresa Shook, an Indiana lawyer who had retired to Hawaii, posted a simple message on Facebook: “We have to march.” Within hours, her post went viral and what began as a single voice quickly snowballed into a nationwide call to action.

An experienced activist, Vanessa Wruble, began organizing a formal effort that included fashion designer Bob Bland and recruited three prominent activists of color, Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour, and Tamika Mallory, to serve as co-chairs. They wanted to address the “whiteness problem” and build a more diverse, representative coalition.

Tensions soon flared. The women of color were wary of being tokenized, while some of the white organizers didn’t appreciate being lectured about their “blind spots.”  For a time, they managed to paper over these divisions, but it was only a matter of time before the movement unraveled and, despite a well attended march, the women failed to further their cause.

The Congress Of The People And The Freedom Charter

Much like many of the women’s activists, Nelson Mandela started out focusing on difference. “I was angry at the white man, not at racism,” he would later write. “While I was not prepared to hurl the white man into the sea, I would have been perfectly happy if he climbed aboard his steamships and left the continent of his own volition.”

Yet over time, Mandela came to understand that achieving freedom for his people required embracing the hopes and dreams of others as well. In 1955, he helped organize the Congress of the People, a gathering that included Black, mixed-race, Indian, and liberal white South Africans to craft a common and inclusive vision for the country’s future.

The result was the Freedom Charter, a revolutionary call for a radical reorganization of the economic and political structure of South Africa. Yet despite its bold aims, the Freedom Charter was grounded in shared values, such as equal rights, equal protection under the law, and dignity—not just for the signatories, but for every South African.

It didn’t seem so at the time—and the struggle would go on for decades—but the Freedom Charter became the first major blow to apartheid. In later years, when Mandela was accused of being a communist, an anarchist, and worse, he would point out that nobody had to guess what he believed, because it had been written down in the Freedom Charter back in 1955.

Mandela would later say it would have been very different if his organization, the ANC, had written it on their own, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful. Without it, he would have likely never have been released from prison, and South Africa’s story would have taken another course entirely.

The Identity Trap

We all have a sense of our own identity. Some of it is rooted in immutable traits we’re born with, such as gender and racial attributes, but much of it we acquire along the way. We pursue training in a particular field, take a job with an organization, choose to live in one place or another, and come to care about certain causes.

It’s important for us to signal our identity, which we do constantly in both conscious and unconscious ways. We often preface statements with identifiers to convey status and signal the role we expect to play (“As a so-and-so, I think this or that”). We also take note of how others signal identity to us and respond accordingly.

A large body of research suggests that signifying our inclusion in particular tribes we also communicate what groups we do not want to join and what our identities can and cannot tolerate. Just as we are wired, through kin selection and other processes, to show loyalty to the values and beliefs of our own tribe, we also have an innate urge to be hostile to the values and beliefs of those we see as different.

For the activists of color who were recruited to the Women’s March, it was important to express their differentiated identity. They made sure to correct the white women when they felt they had transgressed in some way. Over time these tensions festered into what Anand Giridharadas, in his book The Persuaders, called “the coalition’s awkward juggle of accommodation and truth telling and challenging and teaching.”

That’s the identity trap. If we’re not careful, signaling our identity can become more important than the purpose which we claim to be working towards.

The Tension Between Status And Shared Identity

In The Status Game, author Will Storr explains how we vie for recognition in three distinct ways. The first is prestige, which compels us to demonstrate competence or success. The second is dominance, which drives us to assert control over others. The third is virtue, in which we signal moral superiority. Clearly, all three were in play at both the Congress of the People and in the preparations for the Women’s March.

Yet while Mandela and his colleagues were, despite their diverse backgrounds and ideological differences, able to forge a common purpose, the Women’s March activists never did. The white women wanted to signal their virtue by being “inclusive.” The women of color feared being dominated, so sought to assert dominance themselves. Everyone wanted to be respected for their personal experiences and accomplishments.

As Linda Sarsour would later put it, “I didn’t think that I was made to go in there and just organize with these women who, like the Black women were telling us, all of a sudden are mad about things we’ve been mad about for a long time.” Yet it was clear that the march had energy behind it and they feared being left out. So they joined and took leadership roles despite their misgivings.

That’s the difference between a movement and a moment. A movement is built over months or years, by linking together small groups in the context of a shared purpose. These groups are mutually empowered through collaborating in a common project with a unified vision, guided by shared values to achieve a common goal.

A moment is a reaction to an event, or series of events, that lowers thresholds of resistance and can sometimes lead to a cascade. People demand change en masse, but unfortunately, rarely get it. That’s what happened with the Women’s March. The activists felt the moment and didn’t want to miss it, so they never bothered to build a movement.

They would come to regret it.

Failing To Survive Victory

The Women’s March of 2017 was never built on solid ground. Tensions between the white activists who wanted to emphasize issues like reproductive rights and the activists of color who prioritized things such as criminal justice, corporate power, and wealth inequality were barely concealed under the parade of hopeful slogans and pussy hats.

Things came to a head in February 2018, when Tamika Mallory, one of the co-chairs, was reported to have attended an event featuring Louis Farrakhan where he let loose with a torrent of anti-Semitic slurs. Further recriminations followed after Mallory refused to condemn Farrakhan during an appearance on The View. In the aftermath, three founding board members announced they were transitioning to other projects.

Every change effort faces similar challenges. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. The opposition, for its part, must weave together a coalition of fractious interests and competing priorities. This often devolves into infighting, recrimination, and, inevitably, collapse. The failure to survive victory is always a failure to leverage shared values, usually in favor of differentiating values that allow people to assert their status and identity.

Transformational change is always made up of small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose. The job of change leaders is to help those groups connect through shared values that can form the basis of shared identity and shared purpose. To do that, you need to be explicit and up-front. Papering over differences will only give them space to fester and, eventually, they will erupt.

Like so many that came before, the Women’s March failed to meet that challenge, as do so others that are failing even now. The path to success is a narrow corridor and must be tread with courage and discipline. Much like Tolstoy said about families, successful movements always end up looking alike; unsuccessful ones fail in their own way.

Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, a lecturer at Wharton, 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, watch his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.

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