How Movements Make Radical Change Real

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In this post, we’ll explore why seeing your startup as a movement is powerful. We will consider:

• The need to define a higher purpose.

• The importance of having a clear enemy.

• How to draw a stark contrast between the status quo and the enemy that personifies it, and the future you propose.

• How to find those who are ready to join you first as co-conspirators, and recognize those who are not.

• The value of co-creating the future with early co-conspirators and how to ask them to take specific actions and play specific roles.

What is a Movement?

Ideas make radical change possible. Movements make radical change happen. Product ideas that incorporate elements of inflection theory—inflections and insights—create potential for radical change. But to transform potential into reality, you must be more than just right about the future; you have to change how people behave. A movement is a mechanism for converting potential radical futures into actual ones.

Without a movement, you’re alone in the future with a radical idea that changes what's possible and offers new capabilities. But that’s not enough. You need to draw real people toward the future you're envisioning. 

It's not easy. The real world is filled with big incumbent companies and people with ingrained habits. Incumbents have a lot of things figured out and plenty of assets to maintain their dominance. They're embedded in an ecosystem with partners who have a vested interest in the status quo. Additionally, customer habits are hard to change.

In contrast, startups lack products, customers, or meaningful resources. This will remain the case unless they find a way to change how people think, feel, and act, turning them into early believers who embrace your insight.

Movements Escape the Comparison Trap…by forcing a Choice…

Movements, often more prominent in social or political contexts (e.g., civil rights movement), succeed by appealing to, animating, and activating beliefs while empowering the underdog against the entrenched status quo. They work outside the established system to create radical change. Incremental reforms come from within the system; radical changes come from revolutionaries outside it.

In business, most startups embrace the patterns of acting within the existing system. Breakthrough startups are like revolutionaries aiming to overthrow the status quo and create fundamentally new rules and patterns. They turn the strengths of the status quo into weaknesses, like judo masters using opponents’ size and strength against them.

Consider Airbnb. The status quo before Airbnb was hotels, which have a lot of things going for them. When you stay at one, you know what to expect. A stay at the Marriott in Austin will offer a similar level of service quality and overall atmosphere as a Marriott in San Francisco or even Paris. Marriott has spent decades perfecting its ability to provide this uniformity of service, and they do it well. 

What is the weakness in this strength? 

It’s precisely that the hotel experience in all three cities is similar. Airbnb’s founders reframed the choices about lodging in a way that makes this seem like a limitation rather than a benefit. What if you become convinced that your experience in Paris shouldn’t be more or less the same as your experience in Austin? Why not live like a Parisian while in Paris and a Texan while in Austin? Won’t your travel experience be more authentic if you “live locally” in every city you visit and get to experience the best of what each has to offer? Framing the choice about lodging this way turns the very things that hotels are good at—standardizing experience, providing a central location for tourists, and so on—into their greatest weaknesses.

You’ll notice that Airbnb didn’t compete with hotels by saying they were “bad” at lodging or that Airbnb was “better” than hotels. Instead, they escaped the comparison trap entirely by forcing a choice and not a comparison. Stay in a standard hotel the way you would stay in one in any city or live like a local. Pick one way or the other.

How to Start a Movement

Appeal to a Higher Purpose

Just as a breakthrough idea starts with an inflection and insight, a movement starts with a provocative higher purpose. This higher purpose energizes specific people with specific calls to action. For instance, Tesla's mission is to "accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” Notice that the statement doesn’t even refer to the product Tesla sells. It instead defines a goal that transcends mundane concerns for products and sales and features and benefits. It gets people to focus on a higher purpose – the well-being of the environment and humanity at large.

President Kennedy gave a speech declaring that by the end of the decade, the United States should land a man on the moon and bring him home safely. He wanted every American to feel a higher sense of purpose about supporting his vision. Later, when JFK was touring NASA headquarters and stopped to talk to a man with a mop, he asked him “What do you do?” The janitor replied, “I’m putting the first man on the moon, sir.” The janitor could have said, “I clean floors and empty trash.” Instead, he saw his role as part of the higher purpose which was to fulfill the vision outlined by the President. As far as he was concerned, he was making history.

Identify Your Enemy

Your story must also have an enemy. That enemy doesn’t have to be a specific product or company; it’s the status quo. Apple’s “1984” commercial positioned IBM’s dominance of the computing industry and its corporate-centricity rather than its focus on individuals as the enemy. Salesforce’s “no software” campaign targeted traditional enterprise software, which was complex, brittle, and hard and expensive to maintain, operate, and upgrade. Slack positioned work email as the enemy. Your story must villainize the status quo by describing its problems, create a sense of grievance about those problems, and sharply contrast between the world governed by the status quo and a world freed from its dominance. When the right early believers see the contrast, they need to feel an intense desire to never again accept the world as it currently is.

Focus on Early Believers

You can't create a movement alone. Your job is to be the catalyst of a movement that is embraced by a minority at first and by the mainstream over time.

Once you have a provocative higher purpose, you need to build an early coalition of the people I refer to as co-conspirators. Building your early coalition starts with asking a simple question: 

Who is ready to move first?

Co-conspirators are not normal people. They’re zealots who steal the whiteboard pen out of your hand when you deliver a presentation to them. They’re animated by belief more than utility. Start-up employees are different from normal big-company employees. Start-up customers have different motivations and risk profiles than normal customers and start-up investors look for different factors than traditional investors. When chosen wisely, all these individuals act as co-conspirators, joining you in a shared secret, an “us versus them” battle, uniting a passionate minority against the prevailing norms of the majority.

You’ll encounter lots of people on your start-up journey: friends, family, potential employees, customers, partners, and investors. Here’s the thing: most are normal people, which means they expect things to stay the way they are. As a result, they’ll often be unable to grasp the insight behind your new idea, even if they are rooting for your success. For the founder, the temptation is to appeal to normal people because there are so many more of them. But that leads you to an incremental approach as you compromise to win them over.

Instead, it’s important to recognize that there is a tiny subset of people who are prepared to move into the future with you. They are your co-conspirators because they believe in your insight before others do. These are the people to focus on.

The canny start-up founder motivates co-conspirators by leaning into the unconventional beliefs they share—in particular, beliefs about the possibility of a different and better future. To move them forward, you need to show them that your shared beliefs about that future don’t represent some abstract possibility. You need to show them that realizing that future is feasible and desirable, and you need to offer specific calls to action. The calls to action can be framed, as most great stories are, in the form of a hero’s journey. It’s a classic form of storytelling. (We will talk about storytelling in a coming post.)

Passing the Tipping Point

A movement starts with the defiance of a few. Early success provokes the establishment to fight back. Eventually, it reaches a tipping point where normal people accept your ideas as the new normal. As a start-up investor, witnessing a company gain mainstream recognition is rewarding. It signifies that the movement has succeeded in establishing a new status quo. For instance, the moment I realized ridesharing was transcending into the "new normal" was when I began spotting Uber and Lyft signs in airports, a clear indicator of mainstream acceptance. Similarly, Twitter's tipping point was evident when it made an appearance on Oprah and when Twitter handles and hashtags started becoming ubiquitous in TV ads.

Pattern-breaking ideas usually start as heresy before they eventually become conventional wisdom. As a result, the story we tell in hindsight rarely captures the whole truth. Some successful startups, once considered radical, become integral to daily life. It becomes difficult to recall a time when their ideas were deemed crazy. Eventually, these companies shift from being rebels to defenders of their established rules. They may present a polished version of their origin story, making it hard to know the unconventional behaviors of their early days. They may diminish the role of some of their earlier radical actions to avoid being off-putting to a more mainstream and conventional audience.

What does this mean for you?

It’s powerful to think of your startup as a movement. In applying these concepts to your own startup, consider asking:

What is your startup’s higher purpose?

Who is your enemy? What is the contrast between the status-quo they represent and the future you propose?

Who is ready to move with you first and be your early co-conspirators? Who is likely not ready? Why are some more likely to embrace your different future than others?

What different future are you trying to co-create with your co-conspirators? What role are you asking them to play and why should they want to?