The 3 Elements of Massive Social Change (that actually work)

How new research is getting the art of changing the world down to a science.

So you want to do something meaningful in your life.

You’ve thought about all the different ways you could go about saving the world. Becoming a lawyer for the disenfranchised. Starting your own political party. Developing a technology that helps clean up the ocean.

But what if I told you that new research found out that all of those strategies don’t work? That, in fact, most of what we think we know about changing the world is wrong?

2 years ago, when I was 23, I started a social business together with a good friend. This social business has broken even after 15 months, employs 6 people by now, has saved tons of CO2, thousands of plastic bottles and will give thousands of people access to clean drinking water (having given it to a few hundred already).

So naturally, when I hear about new research regarding what works and what doesn’t in Social Change, I listen.

And a few years ago, I heard about the work of Scott Sherman.

Scott is an American researcher, who for his PhD looked at hundreds of social change initiatives, broke their actions and strategies down into hundreds of factors, put everything into a big formula and calculated which factors contributed to change, and which didn’t.

Surprisingly, he found that neither legal, political nor science-based strategies work. (You can read a great introductory piece here.)

Real effective social change, he says, needs only 3 elements.

If you’ve been reading my blog and wondering what all this relationship stuff has to do with real-world social change — this is the answer.

1) Exposing Injustice

To facilitate change, you first need people to realize that change is needed. People who aren’t that affected by a problem, or sit on the “winning” end of it, don’t see any reason to change. There are lots of strategies for making them — sometimes painfully — aware. Demonstrations, rallies, PR stunts. All the well-known weapons in the NGO-arsenal.

This is what social change movements are currently really good at.

The hard part is translating this awareness into real-world social change.

The problem is familiar: Protests fizzle out, because the people in power have the resources to wait them out — and the protesters don’t have the resources to keep them up long enough.

If you don’t integrate element 2 and 3 you’re essentially wasting your time.

2) Social Aikido

Aikido is the martial art where you don’t try to counter or “over-power” your opponent, but where you take their force and momentum and merely redirect it — trying to defeat your opponent while not harming her.

Social Aikido is where you stop seeing the “opposition” as enemies, but instead manage to unite against a common problem.

Why is this important?

Because no matter if it’s in a friendship, the relationship to your neighbor or the relationship between countries: If you only say “I hate this”, but don’t go on to say “How can we work together so that YOU get what you need in a way that WE get what we need as well?”, you won’t get much.

(And just to be clear: having respect for somebody else’s needs does not mean accepting their current strategies. Yes I get that you’re hurt and want to be heard and respected. But I will still forcefully keep you from hitting anyone, while we figure out how to get your need for being heard and respected met.)

How does this work in the real world?

Here’s a concrete example by one of the true masters of Social Aikido, Marshall Rosenberg.

He had started an alternative school in the US which was operating on the basis of Nonviolent Communication, the approach Marshall pioneered.

The school was very successful, both in terms of academic achievement and cooperative and heartwarming atmosphere — bullying was practically non-existent. But the school was about to be shut down by the authorities.

Here’s what he did next:

[There was] a social change project in Illinois. It involved a public school we had created, but we wanted to go from this school to the whole system […]. It was very hard to get this school going, but after much resistance, we finally did get federal funding that allowed us to start the school.

However, in the next school board election after the school was created, four members were elected to the board, having run their campaign on a platform of getting rid of the superintendent and the school. This happened even though the school had been successful. It won a a national award for educational excellence. Academic achievement had gone up, and vandalism had gone down. [All emphasis mine.]

We could see that for this school project to survive we needed to communicate with the people who were vehemently opposed to what we were doing. It wasn’t easy to get a three-hour meeting with this school board. It took us ten months to arrange the meeting. They wouldn’t answer my phone calls, and they wouldn’t answer my letters, so I went down to the office once, but they wouldn’t see me.

During the ten months we had to find somebody who had access to them, and train this person in our skills so she could try to get a meeting. She finally got them to have the board meet with the school superintendent and me, but they had conditions. They didn’t want the press to know about it because it would be embarrassing if they were seen talking with people they got elected to get rid of.

How did Nonviolent Communication help me in that setting? First, I knew I had to do some work on myself before we had that meeting because I had enemy images of this board. I had trouble imagining them as human beings. I had a lot of pain inside because of things they had said about me.

For example, one of the board members owned the local newspaper. I had read an article he wrote about me in which he said, “Are you aware that our ‘beloved’ superintendent” (he put beloved in quotes because everybody knew he hated the superintendent) “has brought in his Jew again to brainwash our teachers so that they can brainwash our students?” […]

[So] I got together with my colleagues on this project the night before our meeting and said to them, “It’s going to be hard for me to see this man (the newspaper owner) as a human being tomorrow when we go in there. I’ve got so much rage inside that I need to do some work on myself.”

My team listened empathically to what was going on in me. I had this wonderful opportunity to express my pain and be understood.They could hear the rage I felt — and then, behind the rage, my fear about my hopelessness that we could ever get such people to connect with us in a way that would be good for everyone.

It took three hours the night before the meeting to do all this work, because I had deep pain and a lot of despair. For part of that time I said, “Those of you who have seen him communicate, could we do a little role-playing? I want to try to see his humanness through the way he usually speaks.”

I had never seen the man, but they had, and they showed me how he communicated. I worked hard the night before to see his humanness so I wouldn’t see him as an enemy. I was glad we did that the night before, because the very next day as we were going into the meeting, he and I happened to be walking through the door at the same time. The first thing he said to me was, “This is a waste of time. If you and the school superintendent want to help this community, you’ll leave.”

My first reaction was wanting to grab him and say, Look, you said we were going to have a meeting and … I took a deep breath. Thank goodness for the despair work the night before. I could get better control over my feelings and try to connect with his humanness. I said, “It sounds like you’re feeling kind of hopeless about anything good coming out of this meeting.”

He seemed a little surprised that I would try to hear his feelings. He said, “That’s right. The project you and the superintendent are doing is destructive to this community. This permissive philosophy of just allowing children to do whatever they want is ridiculous.”

Again, I had to take a deep breath, because I was frustrated that he would see it as permissiveness. It showed me that we hadn’t made clear what our project was. If he had seen it, he would know we had rules, we had regulations. They weren’t set up on the basis of punishment or administered by authorities; they were worked out jointly in the community among the teachers and the students.

I wanted to jump in and get defensive, but I took another deep breath, and (thanks to the work of the night before) I could see his humanness. So I said to him, “So, it seems you would like some recognition for how important it is to have order in the schools.”

He looked at me strangely again, then said, “That’s right. You people are menaces. We had great schools in this community before you and the superintendent came.”

Again my first reaction was to remind him about all the violence that had been going on in the schools and how the academic achievement had been very low. But I took yet another deep breath and said, “So, it sounds as if there are many things about the schools that you want to support and protect.”

The meeting went pretty well. He was speaking in ways that would have been very easy for me to reflect as an enemy image, but after continuing to hear what was alive in him and respectfully trying to connect with his needs, I could see he was better able to open up and understand what we were talking about. I left that meeting feeling quite encouraged.

I went back to my hotel room and felt really good. The phone rang. It was this man, and he said, “You know, I’m sorry I said some things about you in the past. I guess I didn’t understand your program. I want to hear more about how you put this together and where you got the ideas.” And so forth.

So we talked like brothers for forty minutes on the phone. I poured out to him answers to his questions and my excitement about the school. […]

In the next board meeting he voted in favor of our program, even though he had been elected to get rid of it.”

Excerpt from the book “Speak peace in a world of conflict”.

This communication superpower is what so many social change initiatives lack — their “blind spot”. They waste their time upholding enemy images and quarreling, when they could be going in and transforming people’s attitudes and lives.

Social Aikido isn’t easy. It took Marshall f***ing Rosenberg, the guy who in a mere hour solved the conflict of two warring tribes in Nigeria, ten months just to get this meeting. But it’s possible, and once you’re in and you have the empathy and conflict resolution skills necessary, magic happens.

3) Building alternatives

The third element is the logical conclusion of exposing injustice and practicing social aikido: You work together to build a new solution that makes the existing solutions look pale in comparison.

As Buckminster Fuller said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

This works really well when you have created connection in your social aikido — it becomes a lot more arduous if you haven’t.

Also, if you’re creating an alternative system — like an ecovillage — those conflict resolution skills come in very handy. Otherwise you’re unknowingly re-building all the domination systems you wanted to escape in the first place, as seen in many of the communes in the 60s & 70s. This is why many ecovillages I know of especially focus on those relationship skills.

You can do all those elements individually.

You can just “raise awareness”.

You can hold “round-tables” that lead to nothing, because you don’t have the skills to deeply connect to human beings that don’t communicate the way you do.

Or you can withdraw from society and build your own little paradise.

But you can also learn the skills necessary to do Social Aikido, put all three elements in the pot, stir, and see amazing change happen in front of your eyes.

So, what are you waiting for? ☺