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What is the key piece in the success of any movement?

by | Jun 20, 2020 | What is the key piece in the success of any movement?

“There’s a kind of Hunger Games occurring among organizations and brands to seize people’s attention and loyalty. Here’s what it takes to win power in today’s hyperconnected age, according to activists Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms. Today, we have the capacity to make movies, friends or money; to spread hope or spread our ideas; to build community or build up movements; and to spread misinformation or propagate violence on a vastly greater scale and with greater potential impact than we did even a few years ago. Yes, this is because technology has changed. But the deep truth is that our behaviors and expectations are changing too.”

Think of the hoodie-clad barons who sit atop online networks a billion users strong. The rank political outsiders who have raised passionate crowds and swept into office. The everyday people, businesses and organizations who are leaping ahead in a hyperconnected world — while others fall back.

A comparison between old power and new power. Courtesy of Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms.

Our world is defined by the battle and balancing of two big forces. We call them old power and new power. Old power works like a currency. It is held by a few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible and leader-driven. New power operates like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory and peer-driven. Like water or electricity, it’s more forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.

For any new power movement, identifying and cultivating the right connected connectors is often the difference between takeoff and fizzle.

Having a connected and passionate crowd on your side has become a crucial asset in gaining new power. Today, the tools and tactics available to movement builders have expanded hugely. At the same time, it has become harder to break through because everyone is trying to rally a crowd. Whether you’re working to get elected to your local school board, launch an online community, or trying to build buzz around your new business, these are the four key steps to starting and growing a flourishing movement today.

Step 1: Find your connected connectors.

For any new power movement, identifying and cultivating the right connected connectors is often the difference between takeoff and fizzle. Etsy, the online crafting marketplace, now has tens of millions of members and generates hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Yet it only got off the ground thanks to small groups of digitally savvy feminist crafters.

The building blocks of a new power brand are very different from those of a purely commercial or transactional brand, or a top-down organizational one.

The platform was founded in Brooklyn in 2005 by four men, including Rob Kalin, a maker who wanted a market to sell his crafty, wood-covered computers. He wasn’t alone. In the early 2000s, there was a resurgence of enthusiasm for DIY artisanship. The early Etsy team deliberately recruited the most influential crafters at flea markets and promised them a place to sell their wares online. Critically, it also provided moderated forums on its website that allowed these crafters — who already shared a worldview and had mutual offline connections — to find one another. This blog post from early 2008, cited in Morgan Brown’s account of Etsy’s rise, sums up the company’s efforts to appeal to its community:

Etsy’s core mission is to help artists and crafters make a living from what they make. This may seem like an innocuous enough statement, but truth be told, the socio-political-cultural-economic state in which we live makes this a rather bold rallying cry. We want to make history’s “way of doing things” undergo a change . . . Etsy is part of a larger movement, and we at Etsy want to learn more about the consciousness of feminist crafters in our midst.

Etsy had found its connected connectors, who fueled the company’s growth organically; new power was its sales and marketing engine.

Step 2: Build a new power brand.

Every company or institution must make key early decisions about how it will project outward into the world. It has to come up with a name and settle on a visual aesthetic; it needs to refine a voice for how it speaks to consumers or clients. These things define its brand. The building blocks of a new power brand are very different from those of a purely commercial or transactional brand, or a top-down organizational one.

When Airbnb emerged in 2008, founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk just wanted to find a way to pay the rent on their San Francisco apartment. But as the company grew, it did so less like a franchise, with every room looking the same, and more like a movement, with early users sharing a passion for a new kind of stay — one that provided instant community in a new place, a host to guide them in a new city.

By 2014, Airbnb had in many ways moved beyond its earlier, more intimate and homemade feel. But its founders needed to maintain that critical point of difference from checking in and out of a Best Western; losing the communal and community spirit of their early days was a real business threat. And there was another threat, too: the regulatory challenges to Airbnb that were popping up all over the world. It had begun to rally its hosts as a way of fighting back against city governments, which made users’ bond with the platform even more critical.

In a world awash with competing opportunities, achieving frictionlessness has become necessary for anyone trying to build a crowd.

So Airbnb relaunched its brand, with a brand story made for the age of new power. Its new logo was not designed to be admired but to be remixed and adapted by different affinity groups within the Airbnb community. Airbnb even introduced a tool, called Create, to make it easier to remix the logo. “Most brands would send you a cease-and-desist letter if you tried to re-create their brand,” said Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky at the time. “We wanted to do the opposite.” The Create tool signaled the way Airbnb saw its community — as a place where you could both belong and be yourself.

Airbnb also retooled its corporate language with a manifesto more like that of an alternative-living community than a Silicon Valley money machine:

We used to take belonging for granted. Cities used to be villages. Everyone knew each other, and everyone knew they had a place to call home. But after the mechanization and Industrial Revolution of the last century, those feelings of trust and belonging were displaced by mass-produced and impersonal travel experiences. We also stopped trusting each other . . . That’s why Airbnb is returning us to a place where everyone can feel they belong.

Airbnb’s brand voice is built to cultivate a sense of community and participation, and executives are betting that this will be a key source of competitive advantage. It spends millions holding an annual gathering of thousands of its most active hosts, building solidarity and esprit de corps. Going further, it has invested in supporting local groups of hosts as part of a decentralized home-sharing club, supported by Airbnb but led by its most involved members.

Step 3: Lower the barrier, flatten the path.

A macro theme of our age is that participating in almost anything has become easier, whether we are protesting, taking vacations or managing our dating lives. In a world awash with competing opportunities, achieving frictionlessness has become necessary for anyone trying to build a crowd.

An unlikely digital wunderkind has used the same logic to produce an enormous surge of new power. Indian anti-corruption activist Kisan “Anna” Baburao Hazare is eighty. For decades he has campaigned for social justice in the Gandhian tradition — nonviolent protest driven by acts of personal sacrifice, such as “fasts unto death” to protest corrupt officials and unjust laws.

In 2011, Hazare was staging his biggest campaign yet: in support of what became known as the Jan Lokpal legislation, a national bill that would strengthen the power of ombudsmen to hold public officials accountable at all levels. In early April of that year, after the prime minister rejected his demands, Hazare announced he was beginning a fast until the bill was passed. Hunger strikes are a very powerful tactic, especially given their legacy in India. But there’s a weakness: they don’t give other people anything to do except express support (at least not unless you’re willing to do the same).

Hazare began to experiment with new tactics. He asked Indians to send him an SMS if they supported his campaign. Among the emerging middle class who formed the backbone of his supporter base, mobile penetration was near universal. So he got himself a shortcode and generated about 80,000 texts from ordinary Indians, a respectable effort.

The most effective crowdbuilders will be those able to move people up the participation scale and sustain and nourish a community over the longer term.

Then Hazare subtly changed his tactics. All over India and in many other parts of the developing world, people use missed calls to communicate — you dial and quickly hang up, so your number pops up on their phone. If you’re running late for a coffee with a friend, you leave them a missed call. If you’re dating someone and just want to let them know you’re thinking about them, you leave a missed call. Unlike phoning or texting someone, leaving a missed call is free. It’s also effortless.

This small change made a spectacular difference. When Hazare provided a local number to call and asked Indians to show their support for his campaign, his numbers went from 80,000 to 35 million. Thirty-five million missed calls. That’s one of the largest single coordinated acts of protest in human history. It’s a great example of how to build a crowd in a new power way, and central to it was using an existing behavior (the missed call) that made the barrier to participation low. Taking part was truly frictionless.

Step 4: Move people up the participation scale.

You might ask, so what? What do 35 million calls really add up to? Isn’t this just clicktivism? Hazare turned those phone numbers into real, on-the-ground power. Two weeks after this call to action, his campaign had the world’s largest spreadsheet of phone numbers of supporters. People on the list were contacted to help turn out hundreds of thousands of participants to real-world protests in Delhi and other cities. And while Hazare’s bill didn’t pass as is, the government accepted some demands, and his campaign helped push through sweeping changes to laws against corruption.

To build a lasting movement, followers need to be moved up the participation scale. Courtesy of Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms.

When you’re trying to build a movement or grow a crowd, you get people in the door via simple, low-barrier asks. Once you have recruited these new participants, the job is to keep them engaged and to move them up the scale, toward higher-barrier behaviors like adapting or remixing the content of others, crowdfunding a project, creating and uploading their own unique content or assets, or, at the top of the scale, by helping to shape the community as a whole. Think here of the Airbnb super-hosts who set norms for others on the platform, the significant but informal role played by the Black Lives Matter founders, or the most influential volunteer moderators on Reddit.

The public realm is becoming a kind of Hunger Games for organizations and brands. The most effective crowdbuilders will be those who are able to move people up the participation scale and sustain and nourish a community over the longer term, dealing with the many challenges, compromises and balancing acts that requires.”

What is the key piece in the success of any movement?

by | Jun 20, 2020 | What is the key piece in the success of any movement?

“In my opinion, historically the key to successful political movements has been either good timing or charismatic leadership. However, (while good timing and charisma are still potent) I believe that in the last couple of generations media control has emerged as the most significant key to success. And, looking to the future, it’s not hard to imagine that new forms of media and public communication technologies (Facebook, Twitter, cyberbots, etc.) will be invaluable manipulative tools for political success.”

What is the key piece in the success of any movement?

by | Jun 20, 2020 | What is the key piece in the success of any movement?

“The declaration of surrender was touted as a triumph: “Microsoft Loves Linux,” the headline read, but just a decade earlier, the firm’s then CEO, Steve Ballmer, had called Linux a cancer. The all-powerful tech giant had lost and lost badly — to a ragtag band of revolutionaries, no less — but still seemed strangely upbeat.

Overthrows like these are becoming increasingly common and not just in business. As Moisés Naím observed in his book, The End of Power, institutions of all types, from corporations and governments to traditional churches, charities, and militaries, are being disrupted. “Power has become easier to get, but harder to use or keep,” he writes.

The truth is that it’s no longer enough to capture the trappings of power, because movements made up of small groups are able to synchronize their actions through networks. So if you want to effect lasting change today, it’s no longer enough to merely command resources, you have to inspire opponents to join your cause. History shows these movements follow a clear pattern.

Make Your Purpose Clear

In a previous article about why some movements succeed and others fail, I compared the Occupy and Otpor movements. Occupy, as most people are aware, was a band of young activists who took over Zuccotti Park in Manhattan to protest against social and economic inequality. Otpor was a similar group in Serbia that sought to overthrow the Milošević regime.

Despite their similarities, the results they achieved couldn’t have been more different. In the case of Occupy, the protesters were back home in a few short months, achieving little. Otpor, on the other hand, not only toppled Milošević, it went on to train activists in the Georgian Rose Revolution, the Ukrainian Orange Revolution and the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, just to name a few.

One reason for the disparity is that while Otpor had one clear goal, to overthrow Milošević, it was hard to tell what Occupy wanted to be done. As Joe Nocera noted in a New York Times column, the group “had plenty of grievances, aimed mainly at the “oppressive” power of corporations,” but “never got beyond their own slogans.”

Clarity of purpose is a common theme in successful movements. For example, Gandhi’s allies questioned his idea to make the salt tax a primary focus, because they favored a plan for more comprehensive change, but he saw that a single issue, even a small one, could unify the nation and break British Raj’s monopoly on power.

Values Are More Important Than Slogans

In Team of Teams, General Stanley McChrystal argued that building a shared purpose is essential to distributed action. “An organization should empower its people, but only after it has done the heavy lifting of creating shared consciousness,” he observed.

Here again, we see a stark contrast between Occupy and Otpor. While both took a non-hierarchical approach, distributing power broadly, Otpor was far more organized and disciplined, creating a training curriculum and holding bootcamps to indoctrinate new members in the principles of nonviolent struggle.

Like clarity of purpose, an emphasis on training is a common attribute of successful movements. In John Lewis’s memoir of his role in the civil rights movement, Walking With the Wind, he continually underlines the importance of training activists. Protests are incredibly stressful and often meet with fierce opposition. Training helps activists maintain discipline.

If you look at pictures or film of the sit-ins and marches of the 1960’s, you’ll see nicely dressed young men and women keeping their composure in the face of snarling dogs and police batons. That was a tactic civil rights protesters intentionally adopted, and it worked. Now compare that to the unkempt protesters at Occupy events. That’s the difference that creating and instilling values makes.

The Strength Of A Movement Is Not Large Crowds, But Small Groups

In the 1950’s, the prominent psychologist Solomon Asch undertook a pathbreaking series of conformity studies. What he found was that in small groups, people will conform to a majority opinion. More recent research suggests that the effect applies not only to people we know well, but that we are also influenced even by second and third degree relationships.

So while we usually notice successful movements after they have begun to attract large crowds and hold massive demonstrations, those are effects, not causes, of successful mobilization. It is when small groups connect — which has become exponentially easier in the digital age — that they gain their power.

In The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson observed that the movement was largely based in a wide-ranging assortment of groups that met in local cafes and coffee shops. “There is not, therefore, a single Tea Party organization or even a well coordinated network,” they wrote.

That’s why founders of Otpor warn in their training manuals about the dangers of holding large demonstrations too early. Rather, they suggest that protesters focus on building capacity and strategically sequencing their actions to gain support. If you can do that successfully, eventually the large crowds will take care of themselves.

Overcome Increasing Thresholds Of Resistance

While focusing on building a shared purpose among a network of small groups is an effective way to build ideological continuity, it also presents a danger. Tight-knit groups of likeminded people often forget that many others do not hold the same views. Often, as in the case of the Bernie Bro phenomenon last summer, they come to regard dissent as illegitimate.

That’s a real problem, because for any movement to spread and effect change, it needs to overcome steadily increasing thresholds of resistance. If only the views held inside the movement are seen as legitimate, then outsiders come to be seen as targets for attack. That’s why so many movements never create change that lasts, they create enemies that undermine their cause.

Consider, on the other hand, Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. It spoke not just to the problems of African Americans, but to the founding principles of the nation. It was that approach that grew the movement beyond its core constituency of southern blacks and made inroads to the larger public.

The truth is that movements rarely, if ever create change themselves. Rather, they inspire change through influencing outsiders. Consider that in the end that it was President Lyndon Johnson, a southern white man from Texas, who signed the Civil Rights Act that Martin Luther King, Jr. had championed. 

Rely on Engagement, Not on Rhetoric

Eight years ago, Barack Obama created a powerful movement that swept him to a stunning electoral victory, but inspired such fierce resistance that he had trouble enacting his agenda.  Donald Trump now aims to lead a nation that seems, if possible, even more divided. We seem doomed to stay stuck in a cycle of recrimination.

While it is easy to place the blame for this polarization on the politicians themselves, we must also realize that they reflect the movements that brought them to power. All too often, we are content to live in different worlds and shout at our screens. And as long as some feel victimized and others feel demonized, we will remain a country divided.

You can write all the scathing tweets and heartfelt Facebook posts you want, but the truth is that rhetoric rarely persuades. The way to change minds is through face-to-face engagement. This is what President Obama was talking about when he said he won Iowa in 2008 because he “spent 87 days going to every small town, fair, fish fry, and VFW hall.” Similarly, progress on LGBT rights in America has not been made just because of eloquent arguments, but because of all the many personal interactions between straight Americans and their gay friends, neighbors, and colleagues.

We can only truly form a national consensus by internalizing the concerns of our fellow citizens and forming a common cause. If we can learn anything from successful movements throughout history, it’s this: lasting change does not come when one side delivers a knockout blow to the other, but when both sides are able to claim the victory as their own.”