All right, so welcome back to The Overlap.
The history of governments and organizations is punctuated by moments of radical transformation,
whether it's propelled by reform-minded leaders, mass protests, or the influence of foreign powers.
These periods of upheaval really redefine institutions and societies.
The current question of these sorts of events is whether it's more effective to instigate change
from a position of authority and influence within the system from the inside,
or to pressure the system from a position of detachment and opposition from the outside.
Speaking of inside and outside, I am your co-host, Joshua.
And with us again after a short sabbatical is our co-host, Will.
Will, why don't you say hello?
Hello. It's good to be back, everyone.
And despite the forces of technology conspiring against us, I'm here.
We are absolutely here.
So these moments of glorious upheaval, these historical dumpster fires,
are what academics refer to as radical transformations.
Sometimes they're kicked off by a politician who suddenly grows a conscience, which we know is rare.
And other times it's because of some sort of critical mass or black swan event of people getting justifiably angry
and marching in the streets and occasionally cutting people's heads off.
And just because some foreign power decides to stir the pot for its own amusement, right?
The chaos inevitably sparks the ancient eternal debate that fuels a thousand angry social media threads.
What is the actually effective way to fix something that's fundamentally broken?
Do you play the long game, put on a comfortable suit, infiltrate the halls of power,
and try to dismantle the whole corrupt apparatus from your corner office?
Or is it the path of the sensible insider sort of chipping away at the foundation with memos and policy proposals?
Or do you stay on the outside, don a giant megaphone, and apply relentless disruptive pressure so often and so hard that the whole thing just kind of collapses in on itself?
So it's kind of the quintessential question of the revolutionary versus the reformer, the protester versus the politician.
So what we've done is we've done some research about different strategies, different techniques throughout history,
and done sort of a comparative analysis, and that's what we're going to talk with you about today.
Again, I know this is kind of dry, but one of the things that precipitated this was understanding whether or not it had something to do with the efficacy of the movements that we're seeing pop up,
like 5051, who is still doing a fantastic grassroots job, but seems to have sort of, from a national organization perspective, fallen off the map,
which is an outside organization versus an outside character, say like, you know, Donald J. Trump,
who presents himself as an outsider who has taken up office on the inside in order to change the corrupt system
from the outside in. And so that's what we're going to talk with you about today, as well as some historical examples of different methodologies.
And anything else, anything else that I left out or you might want to say before we get started here, Will?
Let's roll. Let's get to it. Awesome. Yes. So if we want to move past sort of the superficial understanding,
we need to get to some sort of framework that sort of expands on the dichotomy between top down versus bottom up, which,
look, we're going to use a lot of these different, these different terminologies, because that's how they're being presented in society, on social media, in media sources, is sometimes we hear,
oh, it's a top down, which really just means it's somebody working from the inside, as opposed to bottom up, which is somebody working from the outside, right?
So you might hear us interchange some of this terminology, but, you know, we're not perfect. And we also want to be as inclusive of the thoughts and ideas and words that are being used out there as possible.
Inside agent versus outside agent, right? The inside agent of change is kind of like a person or group already embedded in the system.
I think a reasonable comparison would likely be sort of the corporate Democrats. Would you, would you concur on that one, Will?
Yeah. So it's somebody who essentially says, look, yes, it's broken, but we can still help people.
We can still figure out a way through this broken system to affect change in a positive way that might not be as necessarily as fast as you want it to be,
but it will be, be breaking as few things as possible. But also that a trade-off of that is slow change, slow progress, if you will, versus an outsider, like say, I mean, Bernie Sanders, is Bernie Sanders really an example of an outsider?
I mean, he's been in Congress for a long time. He was a governor. I don't know. Maybe AOC getting elected as an, as a bartender in New York is a better example.
What would you, who would you give us as far at a national level of an outside agent?
I would say AOC is closer to an outsider. Although Bernie Sanders, his rhetoric, you know, which I think is, points out a lot of good things.
His rhetoric is more of an outsider's rhetoric, but his activities, his actual actions are voting on things and trying to rally other people in the Senate to join him in opposing whatever ideas he thinks are harmful.
Yeah.
So I think AOC is closer to an outsider, but I'm not sure that either one really qualifies. And that's part of the question, right?
I mean, how much, how much are you in the swamp if you're draining the swamp, you know, as a senator trying to drain the swamp?
Exactly. It's like, it's like trying to, trying to drain the swamp inside of a boat in the swamp, you know?
Exactly.
I think, I think more often times, some of these outside actors tend to be more like movements, right? Like grassroots movements where you can't really necessarily pinpoint a single driver, a single person that sort of leads the charge.
You know, like what's his name? The guy from Braveheart.
William Wallace.
William Wallace, right? Like there isn't like some, they'll take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom. You know, it's nothing, nothing like that. It's same, same energy for sure. But I think, uh, Robert the Bruce, uh, you know, back him up at some point, finally got Robert the Bruce on board.
Exactly. So I think what I'm trying to say is this can kind of be, it can be a social movement. It can be an opposition party. You know, like we saw the Tea Party in the thousands, that was sort of the opposition to the mainstream conservative viewpoints. It was a more far right. But even now, you know, we have parties like the, the new democratic socialist party, right?
So we're, we're, we're, those would be the, an example of an opposition party that seems to try to disrupt or have a desire to disrupt that dichotomy between Republicans and Democrats, even though within them, they've both been changing and have changed several times over the, over the years. So I guess what we're trying to do is kind of divide it into two ideas, an internal and an external.
And I guess the efficiency part would be the next, the next sort of definition to define. So from an internal perspective, I think that the efficacy comes around kind of the personal convictions that the actor has that sort of possesses the, the understanding and the, and the knowledge and the, and the skillset to participate in politics, right? Understanding how the bills work, understanding how, how sausage is made in that sort of thing.
and tries to change that by making small adjustments to those processes within the greater framework,
believing that ultimately the framework is valid.
It's just the parts and pieces that need to be better.
I think the big question that it comes down to is how broken is the system or how broken do you believe the system is?
Yeah, and I do think it has a lot to do with perception of the system.
A lot of times, sometimes more so than the actual ability of the system to function, right?
I think we saw that pretty heavily or we're seeing it now too,
but convinced more than half of the country that the government was actually operating really inefficiently
and that we had to gut entire portions of our government in order to make it more efficient in whatever one describes efficiency.
And it's hard to take sort of a neutral tone with any of these things because obviously I'm not on the side of what Donald Trump said,
and I don't believe it's true, but I'm trying to paint this as a general idea
because I do think that there is some on the right, some on the right, that see it as, you know, I don't like what he's doing.
I don't really like him, but I do believe that there is corruption and that the government needs to be more efficient at specific things.
And now it doesn't like what he's the way he's doing it, but agrees.
And I think we all can agree that to whatever degree we view the government, we think that it could be more efficient at various things throughout time.
I mean, whether that's, you know, actively working on like snap benefits, you know,
they're taking away soda and chips and candy and cookies in different states now from snap benefits because they argue that the N is for nutrition and those things are not nutritious.
And it's like, well, you know, I mean, they can be in certain scenarios more nutritious than the alternatives and typically allow dollar for calorie to go a lot further.
But whether or not that is efficient depends on the side of the aisle that you stand on or the side of your perspective.
Right.
I was going to say that I think that, you know, it comes back to the what we can accomplish today.
I think from our part here is not so much painting one side or the other or talking about the current debate as a specific example of this.
But just to point out that there are tradeoffs when you go with an outside approach versus an inside approach or vice versa.
You know, there's there's going to be things that happen that you want to be aware of.
What are the costs? Right.
If you break the entire system, like if you sort of you go with the whole like most radical approach of a constitutional convention or something like that,
there's a lot of things that are going to get broken along the way.
And we need to be aware of that if we're going to choose that method.
It may seem like the fastest path to what you want, but it may also be a costly path.
And you have to decide if you are willing to pay those costs.
Exactly.
Like saying, yes, we need to change the Constitution.
But in a constitutional convention, they might decide to remove the First Amendment.
You know, it's like it's like, wait a minute.
I don't want it.
I don't want it to go.
I want us to add things that supersede others, you know, amendments versus anyway.
So an internal agent for change, right, whether inside or outside, they have to kind of possess a high degree of internal efficiency,
whether that be within the grass movements that I was talking about, like 5051, which is doing protests around the country at all 50 states.
So their degree of internal efficacy to believe their actions can be meaningful is kind of what determines their efficacy on either side.
External efficacy, on the other hand, is kind of the belief that the government or the institution will actually respond to the demands of an external force.
Right. So a widespread sense of low external efficacy, the feeling that the system really isn't responding to what we want, is kind of a powerful catalyst for radical change.
Basically asking the government to change and then perceiving that it's not changing drives in and of itself additional external upheaval.
So that's kind of what we're trying to do is we're trying to make a distinction between the internal and external at a fundamental level is understanding the sort of the tension at the heart of the change.
So a leader who wants to reform the system from the outside or from the inside, rather, may be motivated by a desire to restore a sense of external efficacy, meaning to a frustrated people.
Like so top down changes, which is is what we're currently seeing that he's making changes in executive orders, sort of top down style that aim to show that the system as perceived from the outside can be responsive to the problem.
On the other hand, an outside movement often starts from a collective sense of low external efficacy.
So they see the system is either doing something actively that they don't agree with or not doing something that they do agree with.
So when those people feel like their demands are being ignored, it kind of leads to a desire for fundamental reform or in the French term, la revolution.
Right. So and the success of each of a movement kind of hinges on its members.
Developing a profound sense of internal efficacy, the belief that their protests and actions can actually make an seemingly immovable power, government or structure to change.
Now, I would be remiss if I didn't mention there is a layer of complexity, right, in each of these roles, because an individual's or group status as an insider or outsider is not necessarily static, right?
It's kind of situational. It's kind of dynamic.
So a leader working within an organization may need to kind of adopt a mindset and sort of a detachment of an outsider to challenge long entrenched norms.
And I think that kind of paints what we were talking about with Bernie Sanders will like he is technically an insider who has taken up the cause of external forces and taken on a role of an external force acting on an internal system.
Right. And trying to to effectuate change from within that system using.
Right. So that kind of requires them to distance themselves. Right.
From from from the institutional awareness as a whole and convince other people to adopt the same sort of practices, which is good.
It's it's sort of an external internal. It's an internal grassroots movement.
So also like a social movement that overthrows a regime like like Arab Spring. Right.
That we saw in the was it the 70s? Arab Spring was in the 70s.
Before I was born. Yeah.
As I was getting confused with the more recent there was a more recent.
I did too. Because there was a because they retook it.
The Arab Spring was kind of upset at the Islamic State and they they overtook the Islamic State.
But then the Islamic State has now come back. So it's it's sort of a yo-yo.
But that's an example of how they now have to navigate that transition from being an external force that has disrupted the existing system and now has to be a new stable internal power structure.
And and this continuous transformation and redefinition of those roles is kind of a crucial aspect of that radical change.
So I say that not to confuse you, even though I know it is confusing, but but rather to highlight that this is not black and white.
Right. Like these are very, very gray areas that can happen and need to in order to transition in sort of a transitional architecture between rapid external change to new internal regime.
And how to how to how to navigate those sources. Right. And I think we're seeing sort of that that concept from the perspective of creating the United States from what was what was England really new England as well.
They were a radical expeditionary force that sought revolution to overcome England and did.
And then they had to turn themselves into a government. And it's and I think that that it was probably a pretty radical time then as well.
So we'll include a photo on our blue sky. Make sure you're following us on blue sky and Macedon.
But we'll include a photo of kind of a graph, a chart we made for explaining the different types of of radical change from top down all the way down to negotiated transition.
But I think we're going to talk about some sort of case studies within that transition.
Well, did you have any other thoughts before we sort of dive into specific use cases and specific types of changes?
I think I would just have to say, if you're confused at this point, just to kind of sum up what we're talking about here is that you have the paradigmatic examples of the outside revolutionary leader who comes in and demolishes the existing system versus the insider who reforms.
But in reality, there's also a sort of counterpoint to each of those.
That's the insider who tears down the entire system by sort of inviting outsiders into the conversation without actually destroying it.
Remodels, so to speak, the inside of the system versus the outsider who may transition over to being an inside leader.
Right. Hopefully they're pretty rare. But the revolutionaries who make also good reformers are good leaders after the fact.
There have been some throughout history. I think we'll talk about a couple of examples like that as well.
Let's say let's say that make efficient leaders because a lot of these people were really good at mastering this very thing and were terrible leaders.
So I will say if you're hoping that that somehow we're going to get to the overthrow of the Weimar Republic with Hitler, we're not.
I purposefully left that out because of the trope about liberals always making everyone that it doesn't believe what they believe Hitler.
So I'm like, you know what? I'm leaving Hitler alone.
I've got some other more modern, more recent examples for these things.
So let's get started on one of them.
Mikhail Gorbachev.
I barely I barely I barely remember him.
I remember they used to make fun of him by putting a world map on his forehead on Saturday Night Live.
Do you do you have any any really remembrance of Mikhail Gorbachev at all?
I just remember the classic line.
You know, Mr. Gorbachev tear down that wall.
Right.
Exactly.
President Reagan.
And I mean, it's likely generational.
Right.
But but ultimately, Mikhail Gorbachev was the was the prime of of Russia.
And he whipped the help of Bush, the original H.W.
Right.
Am I am I?
I'm getting my history right.
It was Bush.
No, it was Reagan.
Reagan was the one who initiated the conversation and sort of had.
That's right.
The moment.
So this was the the sort of the end of the of the Cold War.
But essentially, we're going to we're going to actually kind of talk about his position with the Soviet Union.
It's it's still so weird to even say that out loud.
Like the so we're talking about the Soviet Union.
Sorry.
Mikhail Gorbachev was the prime of the Soviet Union.
And he's kind of a prototypical example of a well-intentioned inside initiated reform.
that spiraled into an unintended revolution.
He assumed power in 1985.
I was literally one when he assumed power.
That's why I have very little memories of this.
But I do remember of him and seeing him and hearing him talk and things.
But the Soviet Union was was suffering from a really terrible economic stagnation,
mainly because their position was to be this sort of in the Iron Curtain.
Right.
I mean, when you think of the Iron Curtain, what do you think of inflexible?
But it was a centralized command economy, very top down, that were operating on the legacy of Stalin's policies.
And they really were not able to compete in a in a globalized world.
The system that maintained power, not through really their responsiveness to their people in sort of a democratic sense, but through a really, really harsh security posture, including widespread censorship and a culture of secrecy.
sound familiar.
Given the conversation this week.
Yeah, exactly.
Gorbachev, who was a dedicated communist, had experienced the famines and the purges of the Soviet era and the transition to that area and sort of recognized that a significant change was necessary for the state's survival.
So the position that he took as a high ranking insider kind of gave him the authority to challenge this status quo.
So Gorbachev's approach was kind of centered on two key policies.
One was glasnost and the other was perestroika.
So perestroika, which in Russian means restructure, it was an attempt to sort of decentralize the Soviet economy, making the government relax a little of the control over individual businesses, small businesses, and introduced as well, semi-private business ventures.
Obviously, as a communist, the government owns all means of production.
They own all businesses.
So what he suggested was sort of breaking it down, allowing for semi-private businesses and individual enterprises to be more prominent within the Soviet Union.
So the goal was kind of to inject efficiency and innovation into this rigid system to hopefully improve the lives of the workers, which if you're familiar with the communist manifesto, that's kind of the whole point.
And so this was, I mean, obviously a very dramatic shift, but the glasnost, you can probably tell from the glass part, is openness and transparency is kind of what it stood for, right?
So it proved to be the more, I guess, destructive force in his plan.
But Gorbachev's policy of openness allowed for freedom of speech.
It allowed citizens to sort of express their viewpoints and reexamine their history and whether or not they wanted to carry that forward without fear of the gulag, like dying because of what you have to say.
His initial assumption was that this would, like, bolster the restructuring efforts by exposing corruption and incompetence.
Now, to be fair, the results were pretty catastrophic for the Soviet state.
Instead of invigorating the system, that newfound sense of openness kind of unleashed an avalanche of reporting on criminality as well as state crimes of the past and basically, unfortunately, kind of confirmed the public's deep-held belief that there was a lot of low external efficacy, right?
So there was a really structured inability to make change or to see change come from their government and progress to be made by their government.
It also exposed the fact that the government had been lying to them for decades.
Unfortunately, going immediately open in that situation led to a lot of discontent.
Gorbachev kind of intended to sort of control release the pressure that Russia and the Soviet Union found itself under, but it became sort of unmanageable.
It became a really crappy cesspool of filth.
And to quote our dear leader, it became a swamp.
And unfortunately, it was a swamp before, but then everyone knew it was a swamp, knew it for what it was, and wanted radical change.
So it was enough to drive radical desire to change.
And it empowered the nationalist movements and the separatist sentiments with the various of the Soviet republics, which grew into really dominant political forces, right?
That all wanted one thing.
Independence from the Soviet Union.
In a lot of ways, they were like individual states.
And I mean, in some cases, they were called states, like the Baltic states and the Slavs, and there are different groups in there.
But they were all wanting independence.
So the failure was not because of a bottom-up revolution, but the internal mechanisms that the reforms exposed within the oligarchy.
Right?
So as Gorbachev started losing power, he started seeing conflicting pressure from hardline communists who just kind of want to say, hey, look, you can't do this.
Everything's going to fall.
Or I don't want to say democratic, but a pluralist movement led by Boris Yeltsin, who wanted a more radical reform.
He wanted to destroy the whole thing.
He wanted to destroy the whole thing and start it from scratch.
So that was – there was an unsuccessful coup in 1991, August of 1991, initiated by the hardline communists.
It kind of exposed the fragility of the regime overall and demonstrated a lack of cohesion among the oligarchs, which at the time was kind of the sole pillar of their authoritarian stability.
Is there – they were a unified force that really couldn't be shaken, which depending on how you look at it made the people of the Soviet Union feel at least like they knew where it was going.
They didn't necessarily agree with it, but it was predictable, right?
And so the second that they saw any chinks in the armor, any crumbling of that pillar, that cohesiveness, the whole thing kind of fell apart rather quickly because everybody wanted something very different.
And they all started pulling in different directions and even tried taking over the country.
And it ultimately failed in August.
So the outcome of that was not a renegotiation of the Soviet Union and a much stronger Soviet Union as a whole, but actually the dissolving of the Soviet Union into various Baltic states like we were talking about earlier in Russia and as well as their small areas that used to be part of the Soviet Union like Ukraine and those other places.
What are your thoughts on this one, Will?
Of being an internal versus external or –
I mean, it shows the potential downsides of moving too quickly, right?
I mean, essentially what Gorbachev did was turn an impregnable fortress of secrecy and intrigue into a glass house and gave everybody rocks.
And they decided to launch them en masse and it didn't last long.
That's one might imagine.
Exactly.
So this is an example of what started out as a top-down situation that ended up in an attempt at a bottom-up uprising and ultimately led to the dissolution of the organization as a whole, as a union as a whole.
So it would be the equivalent of us breaking each individual state into its own country at this point within our United States.
All right.
So our next example is going to be sort of a cultural transformation, if you will.
And if you want to grab the chart on our social media post about this, the cultural transformation is kind of led by embedded leaders and management from the inside, right?
So they have the key drivers of this are going to be internal inefficiency, but competitive pressure from the outside.
And our case study is going to be actually Microsoft.
So Microsoft underwent a giant cultural transformation.
Unlike the Gorbachev example, Satya Nadella was the CEO of Microsoft during this time, kind of led a cultural change in Microsoft that shows the potential of strategic and successful inside-only initiated change.
So before Nadella became Microsoft CEO, Microsoft, as we all know, was an institutional giant, right?
That was really hurting from a sort of know-it-all culture.
So every team was working in internal silos.
They weren't collaborating with one another.
It was sort of a throw-it-over-the-wall kind of thing, as long as you checked your checkboxes.
It's very similar to how people portray the government working internally.
Collaboration was minimal.
There was this sort of individualistic, risk-averse mindset that kind of stifled them making any changes to their software because they controlled it.
I mean, they controlled basically the computer world for a very long time by taking what were business machines and putting them into people's homes so that they could use them in both.
So as a long-tenured insider, Nadella was kind of in a position to understand the roots of these problems and create sort of a radical change in the company's culture as a whole by rapidly transforming the ethos and then underpinning that with cultural policy that supported that ethos change.
And so the strategy that Nadella used was basically applying change management principles, something that the software and technology world uses very, very heavily even still today.
His first step was to create a vision of a learn-it-all company, right?
Which changes from a know-it-all to a learn-it-all company, meaning we'll work with anything.
We'll work with everything.
We'll learn all technologies and be masters of all domains.
And it was more than a slogan, right?
It was kind of a metaphor designed to create this sense of urgent change and urgent transformation to replace this old, rigid, siloed identity of Microsoft as a company.
And it was a call to action, really, for every single individual employee to embrace a growth mindset, not a gross mindset.
Basically, hey, look, learn from your mistakes.
Look at your challenges as opportunities to make a positive change, right?
Like, I mean, that's it.
And to operationalize all of it, Nadella created a series of practical people-centered changes that aligned with models like ADCAR.
And that model is basically a five-step program.
You can look it up online.
But if you do just a quick Google search, you can see that A stands for awareness.
D is for desire.
K is for knowledge.
A is for ability.
And R is for reinforcement.
He basically said, we'll announce the changes to the employees well ahead of time, explain the reasoning behind the change, include a plan, plan points and potential returns on investment, and then give the opportunity for employees to actually ask questions and also make suggestions on how to implement it.
The D was for desire to gauge employees' reactions to see how they were going to react to it, identify people who really wanted to sort of take a leadership role within that change.
And if employees were either resistant or indifferent, address their concerns and show their concerns how the change can actually benefit them as an individual.
The knowledge part was just to provide training and coaching to make sure that they had the ability to do the change.
And then A for ability is to schedule practice runs before the change is fully implemented.
So that way they can monitor performance.
They can follow the change, provide constructive feedback, and either show that it's working or not working.
And then reinforcement to monitor the change over time to make sure that it sort of fulfills the desired outcome.
And then use the positive feedback with a reward situation to recognize and encourage those people to keep following the new process.
That's called ACTAR.
It's used very heavily throughout businesses to make a large cultural change.
But no one did it as well as Nadella.
So he replaced the ranking system with a dynamic system that actually assessed the employees based upon what they contributed to the whole rather than to their individual teams.
So it created this shift from individual performance to team collaboration and to promote a greater sense of belonging to a whole rather than I work on my tickets and that's what I work on.
And when I'm done, I check off the box and I hand it to the next person because that's not in my job description kind of a thing.
He also pretty heavily invested in his employees' professional development.
All kinds of workshops, millions in training saying that, hey, look, the company values growth.
They were changing the employee culture and were looking for those champions, right, to adopt that mindset.
And Nadella also led by an example, demonstrating empathy, humility, fostered that environment of trust and inclusivity.
The outcomes of this transformation were pretty positive.
I mean, Microsoft's cultural shift is not only accepted, right, but it was fully integrated in the day-to-day work of their actual employees.
I, being a Linux nerd, right, like loving the Linux world, they went from this, you know, boo, boo, Linux, no, just use Microsoft and we'll create a Microsoft version of everything that Linux can do.
They went to this I love Linux thing, right?
And it was an attempt to say, hey, look, whatever you want to work with, you can do it with Microsoft's products.
They really did see a pretty giant transformation as a whole company.
They embraced agility using the agile principles and the innovation.
And basically, Microsoft has kept its reputation as one of the most valuable companies in the world because of Nadella's movements to change how Microsoft saw the world, right?
And I think the key distinction between Mikhail Gorbachev and Nadella were not in their inside initiated approach, but rather the nature of the sort of institutions they were leading, right?
So a corporation can kind of recenter its identity around a new political, sort of apolitical purpose and realign its internal structure to support the vision for what they want their company to be.
However, in an authoritarian state, it's monolithic, right?
There's a monolithic structure from within.
Changing that identity, right, sort of just makes it risk total collapse every time you make a change.
Because authoritarianism requires rigid stability and sort of might equals right is the ethos.
Therefore, the efficacy of an inside initiated change is pretty contingent upon the institutional context.
So that's sort of why I bring up the difference between Gorbachev and on Microsoft.
I think there are a lot of distinctions that are important here at different levels.
One of the challenges that you really can't, I mean, you just have to deal with the hand you're dealt in a sense, is that, like you said, Gorbachev is coming from this monolithic, you know, concentrated power, system of power, where, you know, the party had all the power.
And people were suspicious of each other and they were encouraged to be suspicious of each other and to report crimes and things like that.
Like they created a culture of suspicion and distrust and then tried to engender immediate trust by just opening up all the books on everything.
And when all that did was basically validate everybody's worst fears.
Whereas Microsoft had, you know, the advantage of being, you know, a corporation and a democratic society and they had some things that were tailwinds for them instead of headwinds.
But also you had management, you know, willing to follow through and to commit to making the changes.
And I think management could lead by example without sort of blowing up the whole system to prove that they meant what they said.
So I think there are some challenges there that were inherent, but it's important to notice some of the hallmarks of successful versus unsuccessful internal change.
Exactly.
So the next sort of use case or example case is the Arab Spring that we talked about a little bit earlier.
Now, this originated from a mass movement.
Now, this was in 2010 to 2012.
I don't know why I was thinking it was in the 70s.
I think there was some sort of, I think that was the Shah of Iran.
But anyway, he was actually, this is what they were fighting was what happened in the 70s.
But the Arab Spring was from 2010 to 2012.
And that is a perfect example of sort of this bottom up outside initiated change.
And it's a, it goes to show really how it's potential for massive change and the challenges that can arise from external influence.
So the revolutionary wave began with the self-immolation of a street vendor in Tunisia.
I think this was the setting himself on fire, if I'm not mistaken, in Tunisia.
And it was a protest, right?
Like it was an act of protest against public discontent with authoritarian regimes, with the economic hardship and the lack of political freedom that they experienced there.
And it's a classic example of how low external efficacy, how we perceive the ability for an institution or government to make change among the populace, where a single act of defiance, this person, sparked a widespread sense of shared grievance.
And the belief that collective action could actually force the government to change.
So there were additional subsequent uprisings in countries like Egypt, Libya, and then Tunisia were kind of driven by the domestic social movements that use the collective identity and social networks, which at this time is starting to become pretty heavily used across the world, to mobilize people in vast numbers, right?
So this aligned with resource mobilization theory, which kind of says that movements succeed by gathering and deploying both material resources like funding and actual people power with non-material resources like legitimacy and social networks to achieve their goals.
One of the goals here on the overlap has always been to align with resource mobilization, right?
To gather people to create change and to create a movement that has the ability to create change from the bottom up rather than from the top down.
But the outcomes of these movements varies widely.
And really it sort of depends on to what degree external intervention is influencing those movements.
So the research actually shows a strong correlation between external influence and the failure to achieve a stable democratic outcome.
For example, in Tunisia, where that actually began, they had a successful transition to a free and democratic state.
Now, this was partly because it received very little foreign aid.
The Tunisian opposition was compelled to organize and create stable institutions on its own, which allowed for a strong foundation to achieve a post-revolution state.
What Will was talking about earlier with that transforming from a transitory movement into a stable governing body, they were able to do that very quickly because there was not a whole lot of outside forces, right?
In contrast, however, Egypt and Libya received significant amounts of financial, diplomatic, and even military and warfare support from the U.S., the EU, the Gulf states.
They experienced much less stable outcomes.
In Egypt, intervention actually contributed to the failure of the revolution.
It led to an autocratic regime.
You remember what autocracy is?
Why don't you tell them, Will?
Well, it's like a self-rule is kind of the idea there, but it's a rule by one individual, right?
Like it takes over.
Yes.
Sort of, that's a better way to describe it, but it's sort of the way I look at it.
I mean, it's despotism, right?
Controlled by a strong leader who rules unilaterally.
Exactly.
Basically, they have unlimited power.
Some despot has unlimited power and governs the whole country.
Sorry, it sounds so real.
So, essentially, Egypt actually returned to an autocratic regime, and we know who that was.
In Libya, they actually had foreign intervention, which, I mean, it had to happen because essentially it was failing as a whole, and it was a humanitarian crisis.
But there were multiple warring factions that were trying to take control of the government in the vacuum that came from the Arab Spring movement, which just led to innocent people's eyes.
Yeah, I think what this highlights is the problem is that, I mean, you can see there's a tipping point here, right?
There's an obvious, it says something about the situation when someone is willing to or chooses to light themselves on fire, literally, rather than continue living under the government that they're under.
And that's the only way they can both communicate their frustrations and also address them is to literally light himself on fire.
But the challenge is that you have to have something, you have to have a picture of what a good government would look like or what things look like after you've replaced this horrific, you know, terrorizing government.
What happens next?
And I don't think there was a sense of what was going to happen next, a clear sense of that in the Arab Spring.
And a lot of people, I think, believe that led to the failure of the project.
Although it certainly achieved revolutionary change, it didn't create a sustainable path forward for those governments.
Well, for sure.
I also think that when you're dealing with help, right, from external forces, you're also subject to the desires and whims of the external forces.
And in some cases, they might be to just destabilize you so that they can take advantage of you in some way, right?
I mean, foreign intervention can actually make the conflicts longer and disrupt the internal process of building consensus within those institutions.
I mean, I can I can name like, I don't know, 90 countries.
The United States has done it over over something as simple as oil.
Yeah. So that's that's I mean, that's another example.
That's an example of a bottom up.
Again, if you're following along with that little graph we're posting on a blue sky, you can see that that is sort of a mass populist movement.
Right. Comes directly from the outside.
It really sort of is driven by public discontent, low efficacy as an institution as a whole.
So let's take a look.
Now we're going to take a look at a sort of forced adaptation.
External stakeholders basically from the outside using market forces and reputational damage to enact change within an organization.
The example for this is actually going to be Papa John's.
Papa John's pizza, you guys all remember, kind of embroiled in turmoil because apparently Papa John was kind of an asshole.
But but out so outside change really isn't isn't our outside initiated change really isn't limited to political revolutions.
It's kind of a growing and powerful force in the corporate world as well.
And we're seeing it with things like, you know, the whole GME to the moon thing with the stock market, you know, that was driven largely by a an amassed group of people.
Shareholder activism and consumer boycotts kind of represent a shift in power dynamics.
We just saw it recently with Target kind of forcing institutions to change their policies, to change their viewpoints, to change the way that they're acting out in the world to adapt to pressures from their internal hierarchies.
And the company's like Papa John's pizza is a good example of this.
The company crisis was triggered by John, who was literally the face of the brand.
He was in every commercial.
He was the brand.
He was Papa John.
Right.
He made controversial public statements.
Right.
And and subsequent internal misconduct allegations led to a really large loss of public trust.
And ultimately, the stock tanked.
I mean, the company was facing a threat from both its founder internally, as well as a threat from its stakeholders.
So the board originally sort of responded to the threat was kind of and they were kind of defensive.
Right.
They the internal threat was sort of a defensive move, a poison pill, a pill, they called it.
Stockholder rights plan designed to prevent John, the founder, from actually regaining control of the company.
A poison pill is a defensive tactic.
It's basically used to dilute the stake of a hostile acquirer by and by the board time to make a decision in the company's long term interests.
Do you know a whole lot about like poison pills in this scenarios?
I wouldn't say I'm an expert on it.
I mean, stretch.
But it's basically just the idea that you take something that could be deadly to you because, you know, be deadly to the acquirer.
Right. So it's like it's taking your own value so that you're diminishing the ability of anybody else to come in and do it themselves or take control.
So it's.
Yeah.
And so they released all the information, essentially, like they released the internal stuff.
They basically were like they pulled a Gorbachev.
Right.
They just they they went all full glass nost and said said, look, here here's what it is.
And it sucks.
And so while the board was actually fighting that internal battle and responding to the external pressure,
that reputational damage actually led to massive financial losses.
Right.
And really a negative impact on public opinion.
At that time, Papa John's like my wife and I still don't don't order pizza from Papa John's.
We try to stick to local if we can every now and then I am guilty of eating Domino's over Pizza Hut.
It's just my personal preference.
Don't come at me.
Don't at me in the comments.
But otherwise, I prefer I prefer local brands or local chains to those.
It's because of part of this thing before before this.
I didn't really think about it.
It was pizza, right?
Like it was either good pizza or it was bad pizza or it was delivered pizza,
which was neither good nor bad.
It was both filling and soggy for some reason.
But the point I'm making there is people were actively boycotting Papa John's and that forced the board to make a decision.
The ultimate resolution wasn't just like a change within the board that were they were like, let's just drop this or let's just do this and we can fix it.
It was actually a hybrid solution driven by external pressures.
So the company's board under that pressure appointed Jeff Smith.
The CEO of the firm called Starboard Value as its new chairman, which effectively brought in an outside force to the inside of the company to actually turn it around.
Now, this case of Papa John's actually demonstrates that the court of public opinion and the power of the shareholder collectives can actually be a mobilized external force enough to compel that institution to make radical changes that its internal leadership might be unwilling or unable to make by themselves or unilaterally.
Agreed.
I mean, that's if you wait until change is forced upon you, it's usually going to be something very painful.
That's one thing we can learn from a lot of these examples is if the leadership doesn't take initiative and doesn't have a plan for a path forward, it's probably going to be devastating.
Exactly.
These radical transformations.
Exactly.
That is the outcome of that one as far as I'm concerned.
At the same time, I do think that because of this, it's also led to situations that are forced into this situation or at least forced to look like this sort of thing happened so that they can make rapid change.
In the case of sort of a hostile takeover from the board perspective is that they can either leak something about one of the owners or one of the board members in order to cause this upward motion from the bottom to change the top.
It's now become a playbook for corporate change.
Exactly.
So that leads to our last one, our last example here.
And this is sort of a negotiated transition with both the elites and the opposition and taking a sort of a hybrid approach of inside and outside, leveraging both, and then driven by internal and external pressures.
And that is the end of apartheid in South Africa.
What do you remember from the apartheid situation in South Africa from your kid brain perspective?
Because we were rather young when this came down too.
Yeah, I mean, I remember Mandela, right?
I remember the sort of protest from his imprisonment, his sort of nonviolent protest.
And I remember Bishop Desmond Tutu, I think, was the one who came in and helped negotiate the path forward for a group, you know, for two groups who couldn't be more diametrically opposed.
I mean, the elites, whites, who basically just robbed South Africa for generations versus, you know, the indigenous people or the people who the country ostensibly belonged to, you know, who had been oppressed for all that period of time.
And the fact that they were able to find a way forward is amazing to me.
I mean, nobody's necessarily happy.
Nobody feels like the justice was fully served.
But it's a lot better on South Africa than it could have been had that been the case.
I think that's what a lot of people saw.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
So let's kind of get into the breakdown.
Let's talk about this.
So if you're not familiar or you're only vaguely familiar, I won't I won't do a deep dive on this one.
But this is a reasonably fresh sort of event from the perspective of the world.
So the end of apartheid in South Africa is kind of an example of how a pure inside and a pure outside approach to change sometimes doesn't fit the bill.
Right.
It was it was a negotiated transition, as Will said, that kind of defied that binary choice that showed that the power of a hybrid model where converging internal and external forces create sort of an enabling environment for radical change.
The the apartheid system dying was kind of the result of a confluence of pressures for decades.
Outside forces, namely, literally everybody else that wasn't in South Africa, applied a lot of pressure on the South African government, both from the U.N., from the U.S., the EU.
Humane or human rights associations and human rights organizations throughout the world, NGOs, applied pressure on the South African government.
The U.N. kind of led the call for the economic and cultural sanctions to be placed on South Africa, which placed a significant burden and a really big challenge to the South African economy.
Then the at the end of the Cold War in the late 80s played a big role by kind of removing the apartheid regime's justification as a bulwark against communism, eroding its support from powerful nations like the United States.
At the same time, decades of constant, often incredibly violent protests from black South Africans led by the African National Congress created an unsustainable and ultimately an unstable internal environment.
Now, the African National Congress was actually outlawed and its leaders were subsequently imprisoned. Its persistent resistance and its increasing instability of the country weakened the white government's commitment to maintaining its repressive system.
The key to radical change was not the victory of one side over the other in this case, but really the recognition by both sides that the keeping things as they are, the status quo could really not be maintained.
And I'm going to quote here, could neither be maintained by force forever, nor overthrown by the opposition without considerable suffering, end quote.
So it created kind of a window of opportunity for a settlement that could actually be negotiated.
The change was kind of done through a series of bilateral and multi-party negotiations.
So between the ruling National Party and the African National Congress, it was kind of an elite-driven process.
So the elite process was the mechanism of change, but it was successful because of the prior decades of both external and internal pressure that made the status quo really untenable.
The South African case kind of demonstrates that the efficiency and efficacy of an inside-initiated change is not a standalone phenomenon, right?
It's kind of dependent on a broader context of external forces.
The end of apartheid was really messy. It was very contentious. It was a protracted process.
Political violence was almost continuous throughout even the negotiations in how to put an end to apartheid reasonably.
Now, obviously, these things are not really still resolved.
They're resolved at a legal level. They have not yet been resolved at a cultural level.
We're still seeing massive amounts of income inequality and unjust actions coming from predominantly the white crowd in South Africa.
But this end of apartheid did actually create a new democratic constitution, right?
And they had their first non-racial elections in the history of the country.
So this model of change kind of highlights the need for a dynamically hybrid approach.
Outside pressure creates the conditions for negotiation, while inside leaders willing to make concessions and embrace that new future or that vision can actually carry it out.
Boringly, I created a comparative matrix of case studies and their outcomes.
So I will also post that on the socials for you guys to check out just to see how nerdy I actually am.
But I wanted to sort of ask Will what your viewpoints are.
What's your takeaway from kind of seeing each of these positions and how they turned out?
Now, obviously, you know, I mean, they're all use cases with specific scenarios and drivers and histories and stuff like that.
But is there anything that sort of threads through all of these things for you that goes, you know what?
I think that ellipses.
I think that if there's a through point here in this or an idea that runs through all this for me, it's just that at some point you have to have the buy-in of someone who has power in the existing system or has the capacity to effectuate a sustainable system after the revolutionary point, after the radical transformation, in order to have a successful transformation.
So if you're going to have any kind of sustainable life after a revolution, so to speak, you either need the buy-in of the people in power who can make the changes necessary to bring that about.
Or you have to have some sort of, at the very least, you have to have some sort of plan for what happens after the revolution.
Or somebody does.
Somebody does, yeah.
If you don't have a plan, somebody's got a plan for what happens in your country after you're done.
Right.
I think for me, what I saw was that the more complicated the problem or problems, the more nuanced, the grayer the solution became.
And sometimes, I mean, sometimes they achieved it, sometimes they didn't, right?
Ultimately, the more complex the problem, the more complex was the solution.
I think it's really easy to hear someone speaking from a populist perspective saying, the answer is simple.
All we have to do is, and then here's a list, a top-down ordered list of everything that we need to do to make radical change in our country.
Far more simple than you ever realized.
For me, it's that it's far more complex than any one person can have a simple answer for.
Agreed.
Yeah.
So that is basically it for this podcast.
It wasn't necessarily to come out of here going, you know what?
You know what works?
A top-down approach always works.
Or, hey, a bottom-up approach is the only path.
Or even, hey, why can't we all just find the magical middle and come to some conclusion?
I think it's highlighting that we need to break apart specific areas of identified areas of change and tackle it from multiple approaches based upon what our skill sets are to resolve the problem that we have.
And look, I think it's fair to say, like, we all have a problem right now.
The problem is the government is not working for us.
And I think that's universal to the American experience right now.
None of us currently feel like the government is doing what it can to benefit us.
And I'm not trying to whitewash and sort of gloss over the terrible atrocities that the current administration is doing.
But the people who elected him ultimately just wanted to see the government change.
They wanted to see the government be more efficient or, in some cases, cease to exist.
But ultimately, we can all agree that the government isn't working for us.
And I think we're coming quickly to a place where there's not a table big enough for all of us to sit at and figure it all out.
I think, especially with the erosion of trust, the erosion of science and sort of the adoption of this unitary command theory and unifying power into ultimately an autocracy is not the answer.
And I think more and more people, hopefully more and more people, but seemingly more and more people are starting to wake up to that fact and go, I didn't vote for this.
And there's a whole lot of our listeners who we know already you didn't vote for this, but the way to affect change is not necessarily to tell the person who's fighting on the inside that they're dumb or fighting on the inside or the person who's fighting externally by showing up to protest that they're dumb because that's never going to change anything.
The truth is it'll all change something.
All of it together is the only way to change for the better permanently.
Does that make sense to you, Will?
Yeah, it does.
I mean, it's all part of the equation.
And I think the problem is we're reaching a point where people are kind of exhausted and suspicious of each other and all the things we talked about and all the problems that we see in other situations like this.
And yet this is the time where we need clear systems thinking to kind of step in and say, what does this look like?
What does the path forward look like?
And we're running out of people with the wherewithal and desire and energy and ability to do that.
So, you know, we're running out of time to make a change that doesn't cost us, you know, what we have, what we've built over the past 200 plus years.
Yeah.
I think the ultimate goal is to do it with the least loss of life as possible at this point.
Like, it just seems like we're heading down a path where no matter which way we go will lead to the loss of lives.
And we're running out of the runway to have a no lives lost solution.
And also not doing anything is also leading to the loss of life already and loss of homes and loss of well-beings and efforts and everything.
Well, on that cheery note, we're so happy you tuned in with us today here at the Overlap.
I am super happy to have Will back.
I hope you are too.
And I'm sure he's happy to be back.
Are you happy to be back, Will?
Very much so.
Excellent.
My alternative was not a plan of my own making or a desire of mine.
Absolutely.
I'm glad to be back.
I hear you there.
Thanks again, guys.
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