Two readers have contacted me recently asking for input and ideas related to creating a bigger initiative with their good ideas; one is Christian discipleship, the other more business-development.
This is the general problem of creating/fostering a movement, or a formal institution – a human entity which is bigger than you, and/or outlasts you.
Movements have their time. Even the best movements will not last — see Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. Movements usually grow quickly and die faster.
No one person designs or controls a movement, though a single personal event can spark them. Movement leaders occasionally make claims about ‘designing’ or ‘directing’ them, but I don’t see that in historical examples. Movements sometimes destroy the initial leaders, too (i.e., the origin of the French Revolution). Movements are vulnerable to being exploited by people who don’t care about the movement but are happy to take advantage of them (i.e., The Tea Party and BLM in recent memory in the US).
There is a correlation between movements and tribes. Tribes pre-exist movements, and the people who participate in movements often come from sympatico tribes. You can’t engineer a tribe but you can find them and get in front of them. You can’t will a tribe or a movement into being. (See Seth Godin’s excellent book “Tribes” for the best information on this.)
It’s important to distinguish movements and mobs. Both can be sparked. Neither requires a leadership design pattern. Anger and fear can be present in both. Mobs are more mindless and bring forth awful behaviors that individuals would unlikely exhibit.
Institutions are quite different than movements. There are some examples of movements being converted to an institution but they’re so different that it’s a rare event. Institutions are structural groups with specific mission, principles, and management practices. They’re consciously designed to work without the originators. Examples of institutions are schools, denominations, paramilitary groups, social clubs (e.g., Rotary), and service communities (e.g., YMCA, pet shelters).
Institutions require endowment funding and cash flow. They need to clarify and celebrate their purpose as people get introduced, participate more and more – with recognizable milestones and ‘graduations’ – and often training and practice at whatever the institution is focused upon.
Institutions work on the longer game, whereas movements are about this week or next. Institutions can’t wing it or fluidly change direction easily. The best institutions create roots and legacy. Institutions shape people and events in ways that will be felt for generations. This power of institutions is at the heart of civilization. We care deeply when institutions are corrupted or flail.
I don’t know how to teach someone to consciously plan and begin a movement. I’m not sure it’s possible. I can think of several examples where people were terribly harmed because they wanted to ‘force’ a movement to begin.
Starting an institution has been done successfully many times. My observation: Top-down programs with broad scope rarely succeed and are always inefficient. They tend toward self-protecting bureaucracies that extract more and more of what’s put in, with less and less delivered.
I believe you’ll have more success creating institutions by working patiently within our sphere of influence and trusting God to manage the scope and scale. First rule of beginning an institution: It’s not about you. Be firm on principles and flexible on tactics. Get something working at a small scale before you try to expand rapidly. Demonstrate your program approach helps 1, 10, and 30 people. This helps you define who the institution is for, and especially who it’s not for. Don’t make your institution utterly dependent on a specific technology which could disappear or drastically change in the future. You might be an important leader to launch an institution; Getting the right 2nd, 3rd, and 10th people on board is crucial. Seek complementary strengths and people willing to challenge assumptions. Design and implement practices as soon as possible so that it no longer depends on you.
Persistence matters. Building anything worthwhile takes time. There are many 10 and 20 year “overnight successes.” There will always be a significant gap between cause and effect, investment and payoff. One of the basic laws of human systems is that the more you push on a system the harder it will push back. Change happens more frequently through flanking maneuvers and “blue ocean” strategies than direct assaults.
Repairing or reforming institutions is more challenging than building them. The past and present create momentum which is difficult to overcome. Almost always new leadership is required. A significant number of people need to behave differently – and most people will strongly resist “being changed.” There are plenty of people who will give you advice about “change management.” The truth is that you can’t manage change. You can give people new information, create new incentives, and encourage them to make changes.
Businesses are more successful at reformation than others usually because of massive economic incentives to pivot to new models and markets. Even then many fail. Most non-profit reformations require key people from an institution to start another one with similar purpose or aims, in part because the status quo usually isn’t threatening enough to get a critical mass of leaders to behave differently.
Let me illustrate this last part – the difficulty of changing an institution which is still partially effective – by discussing the diseases which plague our primary grain crops and cause billions of dollars of losses annually. Diseases can greatly reduce harvestable yields, but the plants are still successful in producing some seeds. The plants aren’t doing as well they would without the disease, but the fact that they still produce seeds reduces the evolutionary adaptation pressure. These key crops are relatively slow to evolve disease defenses because the threat is short of existential extinction. The disease has no “incentive” to evolve to lethal efficiency and kill all their host plants.
In the same way, institutions which are partially effective – even far less than their critics expect them to be – get something done. It’s truly difficult and lengthy work to repair or reform an institution from within, so usually only incremental improvements will be justified.
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If you desire to criticize an institution by creating something better, I suggest you ask and answer these questions:
- What sacred cows will I slay?
- What dominant institution do I aim to displace?
- What groups am I disrupting?
- Which people will be furious with me?
- What price am I willing to pay?
- What grievous errors and sins must I avoid to see this through?
For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? (Luke 14:48)
Next, who are the gatekeepers? Who and what are they protecting? What do they optimize for? Can you work with them, or (more likely) will you need to work around them? Every institution has an existing set of incentive structures.
Do not undergo institution building lightly.
