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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.
