How to Make Change
A working theory of how to understand and make change happen in the world.
The fundamental question about the future we all want to know is: will things change or stay the same? And if they change, how and why? Every question about the future essentially boils down to whether or not change will happen because change is the only unknown. If things stay the same, we already know what that's like.
The future is unpredictable, yet many of us work in professions that try to predict and prepare for it anyway. From investors to athletes to anyone who sells stuff, we spend a lot of time trying to prepare for, predict, and control the future. As the world around us changes, we spend even more time trying to manage and adapt to change. And if things aren't going our way, we're capable of going to great lengths to make change happen in our favor.
But how should we think about change? Does all change happen the same way? What are the ideal conditions for things to change? And when do we want change versus stability? I have a working theory that when change happens, there are four core change factors that drive it: Quality, Influence, Elimination, and Control.
For this essay, I'm specifically focusing on the kind of changes where a big part of the world operates significantly differently than it did before. Like Apple introducing the iPhone and radically changing the market for mobile computing. Or how Trump rose to infamy by riding a wave of populist sentiment in America. Big stuff that changes many people's lives. And while I think these change factors can explain how small changes happen too, like someone trying to eat healthier or exercise more, I'm more interested now in exploring the space where macro changes happen.
First, let's lay out what I mean by the four change factors, then we'll discuss how to interpret this framework and hopefully use it to create the change we want to see in the world.
Four Ways to Make Change Happen
Quality: Create or identify something that yields greater value than the current status quo. This is the most obvious factor, since we all intuitively gravitate toward things of high quality that can improve our lives. Organizations that focus on making change happen by offering more high-quality solutions tend to look inward as they refine their product or service so more people will like it. This is what Henry Ford did to make automobiles the new status quo for personal transportation instead of horses, and what Apple did to change the mobile phone market with the iPhone.
Influence: Those with influence can convince others that one vision of the future is favorable over another. And if enough people are attracted to that vision, they'll help make the influencer's vision of the future the new status quo. Of all the change factors, influence is the most subjective. Charisma and vibes play a big role in gaining influence over others, and influencers don't actually have to have the best solution; they simply need to connect with people and convince them that they do. Using influence to spark change is hyper-charged these days with digital media, and includes everything from Taylor Swift endorsing a presidential candidate to Joe Rogan promoting the carnivore diet.
Elimination: Something goes away and creates a void that can be filled with something new. This can happen peacefully, like graduating from high school and moving away to college, or violently, like the new world order that came after World War II. Typically, the way in which something is eliminated will influence the kind of thing that ends up filling the void left behind. 9/11 was such a dramatic and terrorizing incident that it led to decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan—wars that many argue were misguided overreactions. No matter how it happens, when something big comes to an end, it opens the opportunity for a new status quo to take effect.
Control: Some entity has gained control over a domain so it can simply create the change that it wants, with little to no resistance. This entity may have risen to power on account of quality, influence, or elimination, and it has monopoly-like control. Like how Ticketmaster controls most of the big entertainment venues and can charge pretty much what it wants to charge for tickets. The kind of change that arises from having control is highly dependent on the temperament of the people in control and the people being controlled. A government has monopoly power over its citizens and has equal opportunity to enhance or degrade the lives of its people. Frequently, an entity gains control by amassing influence or demonstrating it has superior qualities, so control becomes a reward of sorts for succeeding at the other change factors.
Why Things Change Or Stay The Same
Having this framework of change in mind obviously doesn't guarantee that one can simply make change happen. It can be wildly difficult to create a more quality solution or gain enough influence to truly shift how the world works. Which is why when an organization manages to successfully define the new status quo, they almost always transition from being an agent of change to a defender of the new status quo that they created.
In 2022, Google reportedly paid Apple $20 billion to ensure that Google was the default search engine in Apple's Safari web browser. Similar numbers were reported in previous years as well. Google, which was one of the most radical change agents on the Internet, is now spending an insane amount of money to make sure they are a part of the status quo in Apple's digital ecosystem. And Apple is able to command such a high price because they too rose to power and became the status quo for personal computing. When an organization succeeds at changing the world according to their vision, they naturally want to prolong that vision and keep things stable.
Being successful at change is a game of compounding benefit. Meaning, the more you change the world, the easier it becomes to change the world around you. Apple is in such a position of strength that it could demand $25 billion from Google, and they'd probably pay. Being able to create that magnitude of change doesn't happen when you're just starting out. But when you're that big, change usually only happens on your terms.
Organizations that define the status quo typically excel at all four change factors. But usually, it's wiser for an upstart to succeed at one of the change factors, then use resources from that success to invest in the others. Because Apple and Google built best-in-class quality products, they gained influence, control, and have the ability to eliminate—I mean, acquire—any companies that may threaten their survival.
This is why change is so hard to make at established companies with a track record of success. It's about maintaining the status quo, not trying to reinvent the wheel. Only when something drastic happens and a big part of their success is eliminated—like if a major customer leaves for a competitor, or a highly effective CEO retires—does a window of opportunity for change appear. People typically only want change when the status quo becomes uncomfortable for them.
Organizational Inertia
This resistance to change at established companies acts as a sort of organizational inertia. Or in layman's terms, it's when people start saying things like, "well that's just the way things have always been done." Change becomes a dirty word at companies like this, and most of their efforts are now spent maintaining the status quo.
This phenomenon of big companies wanting to resist change is linked to our most basic, hard-coded human instincts. Companies are made up of humans, so why would the reasons for why a company acts a certain way be that different from how individuals act? Let's say you've worked hard in school and in your career and you're a multi-millionaire. You live a comfortable life and your family is well taken care of. You are almost certainly never going to take a bet that may either make you twice as rich or bankrupt. You're now playing defense, not offense.
And sometimes, this completely natural instinct to defend your kingdom turns malignant and other people get hurt. Take Purdue Pharma, the company that played a leading role in starting the opioid epidemic with its blockbuster drug, OxyContin. Once Oxy caught on like wildfire and millions became addicted to it, the last thing that anyone at Purdue wanted to hear was that their cash cow was killing people.
It's human nature to seek comfort and stability, but sometimes that instinct can turn evil when people start putting their need for stability over ethics or public health. And in large companies where leadership can be well insulated from on-the-ground realities, it's easy to delude yourself as a leader that everything is fine. This is the point when organizational inertia grows into a black hole, forcing everything around it to go along with the status quo it created. When you've changed the world according to your vision and the new status quo is making your executives incredibly wealthy, sometimes not even death will convince a company to change its ways without a fight.
It takes an incredible amount of effort to change the status quo when powerful people are profiting from that status quo. Upstarts need to be ridiculously superior or influential to break through the defenses of an entrenched incumbent, who can successfully block any challengers to their success. This is why government steps in to prevent companies from attaining true monopoly power, or to prosecute companies that make change happen through illegal means.
Purdue is a grim example of how dangerous it can be to maintain an unhealthy status quo. But there are examples along the entire spectrum of intensity where people actively make sure systems don't change. Companies like Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have a very vested interest in only having change happen on their terms. So does most of the industrial agriculture and Big Food industry.
I talk a lot about biodiversity, sustainability, and regenerative agriculture on this Substack. And I know there's a lot of verbal support for those ideas in the food industry, Big Food and Ag included. But the elephant that's frequently in the room when talking to big companies about making positive change in agriculture or public health is that some meaningful part of their business might still be thriving from a pre-existing, unhealthy status quo.
Because of this, there's a special kind of cognitive dissonance required to work at a company that's trying to introduce healthier products while the wildly popular junk food is still paying everyone's salaries and keeping the lights on.
And that's not necessarily the fault of the people working at that company today. That company's legacy business model that may profit from extractive agriculture or selling junk food was established decades before they worked there. There are plenty of great, optimistic people who work at those companies and want to drive change. But depending on the company, those people might be handcuffed by the status quo that the founders of the company established 25, 50, or over 100 years ago.
To completely upend a business model that's worked for a long time, those people have to come up with something so much better and profitable to even get leadership to consider a slight departure from the status quo. Or, something dramatic has to happen to the business—like a huge lawsuit or a prolonged recession—that makes the old business model untenable. Change agents in established companies have to work doubly hard to not only create something worth changing into but to communicate the vision of what that change looks like before it's actually happened.
For a rocket ship trying to go into space, a profound amount of energy needs to be spent simply trying to break out of Earth's gravitational pull. To break free from the gravity of the status quo, change agents need to be outstanding at communicating a better vision of the future. If properly designed, those visions can act like rocket fuel. And unless those agents have the ability to eliminate or control the status quo, they need to create future visions that gain influence and demonstrate their ideas for tomorrow are better than today's.
What To Do With This Information
None of these change factors should feel foreign or esoteric. They should be intuitive to the average person because we are trained our whole lives to interpret changes in our environment. Even if someone doesn't describe the changes in their life as a function of Quality, Influence, Elimination, or Control, we are naturally attuned to feel when things are changing for the better or worse in our lives. And you can probably attribute any change in your life to one or more of those four change factors.
But having a simple framework of change like this can help organize our thoughts and tactics as we plan for the future. It can help us more thoroughly analyze a situation. It can help us design better pitches and arguments in favor of certain changes.
One helpful exercise for change agents would be to state a goal and then take inventory of the assets and capabilities one has in each of the change factor categories. And whatever category the individual or group feels they are most competent in will usually indicate the best starting point to getting their idea off the ground. The rest of the areas should be on the development roadmap, and resources derived from being strong in one of the categories should be reinvested in bolstering capabilities in weaker areas.
Conversely, if some outside force is trying to change your world in an unfavorable way, the framework can be a simple mental model to help identify why you're being disrupted and how to try and stop it. Ironically, I think this change framework can also be used to preserve the status quo and prevent change. Once again, the tool takes on the intent of the user.
Change is one of the few things that we can all feel on a personal level as individuals, but also on a macro level in the companies, organizations, and governments we belong to. This theory is a work in progress, and I would love to hear your feedback on what works or doesn't work for you about it. But as a person who's both experienced a lot of change and fights to make change happen in the food industry, the dynamics of change are too important a topic to not pay more attention to and try to understand.
Because one of the things I’m certain will never change, is the fact that change is inevitable, but we can shape it.
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Mike Lee is the author of Mise: On the Future of Food, and principal futurist of The Future Market.
