Why every movement begins with those willing to raise their hands.
A little more than two years ago, one of my closest friends died. He was two decades older than I was, already well into his seventies, yet there had been no obvious reason to expect his sudden departure. His death struck with the peculiar force reserved for those losses that arrive without warning. It left me grieving, certainly, but it also forced me to reconsider more than a few comfortable assumptions about my own life.
He was, in every meaningful sense, an idealist. He carried within him a vision of how the world ought to function, how institutions ought to behave, how people ought to treat one another. Reality, unfortunately, never showed much enthusiasm for cooperating with that vision. Like so many idealists before him, he spent much of his life tilting at windmills with the determination of a modern Don Quixote.
Yet for all the disappointments, he never surrendered his enthusiasm.
At one point he founded a new political party. It was intended as a breakaway movement from the Socialist Party with which he had previously been associated. Against every reasonable expectation, he managed to secure a council seat in one of Austria’s larger municipalities. Early success convinced him that greater victories lay just ahead. Believing momentum to be firmly on his side, he stepped aside in favour of the second candidate on the list and turned his ambitions towards Vienna itself.
It did not take long for Austria’s political machinery to reduce the party to splinters.
He possessed faith. He possessed enthusiasm. He possessed remarkable energy, a measure of electoral success, and enough charisma to attract followers willing to join his cause.
What he lacked was structure.
He lacked the ruthless discipline required of anyone attempting to build an enduring organization. He lacked the willingness to make difficult decisions when sentiment pleaded otherwise. He lacked the iron grip necessary to keep competing ambitions from tearing the movement apart. Before long, personal agendas overwhelmed the original purpose. The party slowly devoured itself from within. By the time I met him, the once-promising political movement had become little more than a corpse—an idea that had outlived the body meant to carry it.
Ideas Need Hands
There is a persistent tendency, particularly among educated people, to believe that ideas change the world.
History offers a rather less flattering conclusion.
Ideas rarely change anything on their own.
They require hands.
Feet.
Voices.
Bodies willing to stand in the rain, knock on doors, distribute pamphlets, argue with strangers, report neighbours, occupy committee seats, march through city streets, attend compulsory workshops, cheer dutifully at rallies, flood social media with approved slogans, defend policies they scarcely understand, and denounce people they have never met.
Every great movement begins not with genius, but with volunteers.
That is the first rung of the ladder.
Availability.
The competent person usually hesitates.
He asks inconvenient questions.
What exactly are we trying to achieve?
How is this supposed to work?
What are the unintended consequences?
What happens after we succeed?
These are deeply irritating questions.
They interrupt momentum.
Movements, corporations and bureaucracies alike have little affection for hesitation. They much prefer something simpler.
Enthusiasm.
The fool asks an altogether different question.
“Where do you need me?”
Not because he is malicious.
More often because he genuinely wishes to help.
That is precisely what makes him so valuable.
Power has always depended upon people who mistake commitment for understanding.
The Young Romans
In 1984, the Austrian singer Falco stood at the height of his creative ascent. His first solo album, Einzelhaft—Solitary Confinement—was released, and I was immediately captivated. One song in particular lodged itself in my mind like a siren’s call. Junge Römer—Young Romans—captured the intoxicating romance of youth breaking free from the suffocating conventions of its elders. Revolution has always been one of youth’s favourite aphrodisiacs.
Four years later, in 1988, I was drafted into compulsory military service.
For several weeks I served alongside a young man named Michael.
Michael had previously belonged to a loose gang of teenagers who spent their evenings congregating in public places, drinking loudly and generally making themselves a nuisance. They were hardly hardened criminals—mostly restless young men searching for identity with more energy than direction.
Inspired, perhaps, by Falco’s mythology, Michael announced that he intended to create a new gang.
He wanted to call them the Young Romans.
He invited me to join.
For a few days I lingered around the edges, quietly taking the measure of the enterprise, trying to decide whether there was anything beneath the theatricality. Eventually I declined.
The gang came into existence anyway.
Finding willing recruits proved remarkably easy.
There was no shortage of eager foot soldiers.
The movement’s stated purpose remained charmingly undefined. As far as I could determine, the principal objective was simply to appear impressive.
It was enough.
For a little while.
Then, almost as quickly as it had appeared, it dissolved.
The mythology lacked the strength required to survive contact with reality. It could attract followers for a season, but not commitment for a lifetime.
Still, for one brief heartbeat, it became something real.
The Need to Belong
One of the more uncomfortable truths about human beings is that belonging usually matters far more than being right.
We enjoy imagining ourselves as fiercely independent thinkers, carefully weighing evidence before arriving at carefully reasoned conclusions.
Reality is considerably less flattering.
Most of us decide where we belong long before we decide what we believe.
Once identity enters the equation, evidence becomes astonishingly negotiable.
Watch supporters of almost any political party being presented with policies from the opposing side—provided they are first told those policies originated within their own movement.
Again and again, people enthusiastically embrace positions they would have condemned only moments earlier.
Nothing about the proposal has changed.
Only the colour of the jersey.
The human mind is remarkably efficient at defending whichever tribe it has already chosen.
The ladder exploits precisely this weakness.
Its first rung is not constructed from intelligence.
It is built from identity.
You can observe this mechanism almost anywhere.
Corporations unveil ambitious culture initiatives that employees dutifully champion despite privately ridiculing them over lunch.
Universities embrace fashionable intellectual doctrines with astonishing unanimity, only to abandon them quietly a decade later when academic fashion changes direction.
Political parties discover that their supporters can be persuaded to defend almost any contradiction, provided it arrives wrapped in the proper colours.
Religious movements, activist organizations, charities, professional associations—once a narrative fuses with identity, questioning it begins to feel uncomfortably like questioning oneself.
That is why certainty is so much more valuable than understanding.
Understanding produces nuance.
Nuance slows action.
Certainty mobilizes.
Revolutions and Their Volunteers
History offers no shortage of examples.
One of the clearest unfolded in Iran in 1979.
Popular memory compresses the Iranian Revolution into a story so tidy that it almost resembles a fairy tale. The Shah falls. Ayatollah Khomeini returns from exile. An Islamic Republic emerges, seemingly overnight, from the ashes of the old order.
Reality was considerably messier.
Revolutions always are.
The coalition that brought down the Shah was astonishingly diverse. Liberals, Marxists, Islamists, nationalists, students, intellectuals and ordinary citizens all marched beneath the same broad banner, each convinced that history was moving decisively in their direction.
For one brief moment, they were all correct.
Then they discovered that they had never been travelling towards the same destination.
Student organizations played an enormous role throughout the revolutionary period. Their activism supplied much of the movement’s energy. Universities became centres of organization, recruitment and ideological ferment. Young idealists sincerely believed they were helping to build a freer, fairer nation.
They marched.
Occupied buildings.
Distributed propaganda.
Confronted opponents.
Many genuinely believed they were witnessing—and helping to create—the birth of a better society.
Their enthusiasm was entirely real.
Their usefulness was immense.
That usefulness, however, came with an expiration date.
Once the revolution had succeeded, the new regime no longer required uncontrolled enthusiasm.
It required order.
Institutions.
Obedience.
The very qualities that had made radical student movements indispensable during the struggle suddenly rendered them inconvenient afterwards.
Beginning in 1980, during what became known as the Cultural Revolution, universities were closed for several years. Academic institutions were systematically purged. Thousands of students and professors considered politically unreliable were expelled, imprisoned or worse.
The revolutionary energy that had propelled the movement forward became something to suppress.
Yesterday’s vanguard became today’s instability.
History had not abruptly changed direction.
The ladder had merely advanced to another rung.
The Revolution Devours Its Own
The pattern is considerably older than modern Iran.
The French Revolution offers another variation on the same theme.
The Bastille fell in 1789 amid extraordinary optimism.
Liberty.
Equality.
Fraternity.
Even today those words echo through history with undeniable emotional force.
Yet revolutions possess an unfortunate habit.
They consume certainty far faster than they produce stability.
Each successive faction accused its predecessor of insufficient purity.
Moderates became traitors.
Revolutionaries became counter-revolutionaries.
Yesterday’s heroes became tomorrow’s suspects.
The Jacobins eventually unleashed the Reign of Terror.
Then the Terror itself became intolerable.
The Thermidorian Reaction followed, consuming many of the very men who had only recently wielded the guillotine with such unwavering moral certainty.
The names change.
The costumes change.
The mechanism scarcely changes at all.
Those who climb first are often the first to discover that ladders descend every bit as readily as they rise.
The Corporate Revolution
It is tempting to dismiss these examples as peculiarities of revolutionary politics.
That would certainly be comforting.
It would also be profoundly mistaken.
Spend enough years inside a sufficiently large corporation and you begin recognizing strikingly similar patterns hidden beneath infinitely better tailoring.
Every few years a new crusade arrives.
Digital transformation.
Agility.
Innovation.
Customer obsession.
Purpose.
Culture.
Inclusion.
Sustainability.
The vocabulary evolves.
The mechanism remains stubbornly unchanged.
Volunteers appear almost immediately.
Not necessarily because they possess deep conviction in the initiative itself, but because they instinctively recognize something even more attractive.
Visibility.
There is always another committee looking for members.
Another steering group.
Another ambassador programme.
Another task force.
Another culture network.
Another internal conference searching for passionate speakers.
Someone must become the public face of the initiative.
Applications are warmly encouraged.
The first people to raise their hands are rarely those carrying the heaviest workloads.
Nor are they necessarily the most capable.
They are simply the most available.
The Evangelists
This should not be mistaken for cynicism.
Many of these people are entirely sincere.
Indeed, sincerity is often their greatest strength.
An organization attempting to persuade thousands of employees that meaningful change is underway desperately needs true believers.
Senior executives cannot personally evangelize every office, every department and every meeting room.
They require intermediaries.
They require people willing to spread the message with genuine enthusiasm.
The more convinced these volunteers become, the more convincing they appear to everyone else.
And because they are everywhere, constantly visible, others gradually begin confusing visibility with influence.
The climb has begun.
The volunteer imagines he has finally entered the room where decisions are made.
In reality, he has merely entered the room where decisions are explained.
The distinction is enormous.
Most never notice it.
Why the Competent Rarely Volunteer
I have often wondered why genuinely competent people are so frequently absent during the early stages of these movements.
The answer, I suspect, is almost embarrassingly simple.
Competent people are usually busy.
They are repairing machinery.
Meeting customers.
Writing software.
Designing products.
Negotiating contracts.
Teaching students.
Running laboratories.
Building companies.
Operating hospitals.
Solving real problems.
The organization already consumes the overwhelming majority of their time and energy. By the end of the day, there is precious little left for symbolic labour.
The fool, meanwhile, discovers that symbolic labour can become a career in its own right.
He learns the language.
He attends the workshops.
He masters the slogans.
He volunteers again.
And again.
And again.
Eventually people stop remembering what, if anything, he actually produces.
They simply remember seeing him everywhere.
Visibility begins its quiet replacement of contribution.
No conspiracy is required.
No sinister cabal sits in a smoke-filled room plotting this outcome.
It emerges naturally.
Every large organization develops a parallel economy in which appearances slowly begin competing with achievement. Once enough people start rewarding visibility, visibility acquires a value of its own. Those who are seen often begin to matter more than those who quietly keep the machinery running.
The ladder does not discriminate.
It merely rewards whatever helps the system reproduce itself.
Believers and Opportunists
Every hierarchy contains opportunists.
History has always known them.
Tacitus knew them.
Machiavelli certainly knew them.
Every office worker who has survived more than a few years inside a large bureaucracy knows them as well.
These people are not fools.
Nor are they idealists.
They understand perfectly well what they are doing.
They attach themselves to whichever narrative appears most likely to prevail, changing colours with an agility that would make a chameleon appear stubborn.
The economist Carlo Cipolla, whose delightful essay The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity quietly lurks behind much of this discussion, would probably recognise them as something rather closer to his category of the bandit: individuals who seek advantage for themselves without necessarily wishing to destroy the system that feeds them.
They climb differently.
Quietly.
Deliberately.
Patiently.
They do not mistake the banner for the destination.
They simply know which banner is currently worth standing beneath.
The fool is something altogether different.
The fool believes.
And that belief makes him infinitely more valuable than the opportunist during the formative stages of any movement.
The opportunist calculates.
The believer inspires.
One persuades through conviction.
The other survives through calculation.
Power requires both.
But it recruits them for very different purposes.
The opportunist is useful once the machinery already exists.
The believer is indispensable while it is still being built.
Movements need missionaries before they need administrators.
The ladder understands that instinctively.
The Second Rung Begins
If the first rung of the ladder is availability, the second is visibility.
And visibility is intoxicating.
It begins so innocently that almost nobody notices the transformation taking place.
A photograph in the company newsletter.
An invitation to speak.
A mention from senior leadership.
A seat on an advisory council.
A profile on the intranet.
A steadily growing audience online.
Each individual moment appears almost laughably insignificant.
Taken together, however, they produce something remarkably dangerous.
Recognition.
Human beings have evolved to crave recognition almost as deeply as they crave food, security or belonging.
We enjoy being noticed.
We enjoy believing that we matter.
Power understands this instinct far better than most of us understand it ourselves.
For thousands of years it has rewarded symbolic recognition with extraordinary sophistication.
Not because recognition is expensive.
Quite the opposite.
Recognition is astonishingly cheap.
The volunteer imagines he is climbing steadily towards influence.
The organization has merely discovered that applause costs considerably less than authority.
The fool never notices the difference.
By then, his eyes are already fixed on the next rung above him.
