Greg Satell was interviewed on the You Are Not So Smart podcast (excellent, highly recommended) about his book Cascades. Cascades explains Greg’s observations on what it takes for innovation of all kinds (political movements, cultural change, startups, re-orgs, etc.) to achieve lasting impact. Here are the key takeaways that I believe relate to startup / intrepreneurial innovators.

5 Reasons People Will Oppose You

We innovators already believe. So we often assume everyone else will see the power of our innovation once we explain it. When they don’t, we think simply repeating facts at them over and over again will work. It doesn’t. People tend to oppose innovation for five reasons. You need to deal with each:

1. Lack of trust: Unless the people who will adopt your innovation already know and love you, you need to earn their trust before they’ll be believe your arguments. So do the work to get to know them, personally and professionally. Learn their perspective, empathize with their pains, and take actions that show you are trustworthy.
2. Change fatigue: Most people don’t like change. So if they’ve gone through a bunch of it lately, especially if it was change that generated no real results, then they’ll be tired. You need to acknowledge that change is hard, that its frustrating how often our time is wasted, and show them that this time will be different.
3. Competing incentives: Asking someone to adopt an innovation that will make their life harder, or put their income at risk is not very likely to succeed! For instance, if your new product will cut the time to do a job in half that sounds awesome… unless you get paid by the hour. You’ll need to either change the incentives or make sure you offer other benefits that compensate for that loss.
4. Switching costs: Adopting an innovation is expensive. Not only do you need to directly pay for the innovation’s hard costs (like $1 million for a new machine or piece of software) but everyone adopting the innovation is a lot less productive during the transition. You need to fully appreciate the switching costs and be able to show a clear Return On Investment (ROI). This is why most venture capitalists say that in order for an innovation to replace an existing solution it needs to be ten times better. Anything less struggles to overcome switching costs.
5. Identity: All of the above items are rational in nature. This one is emotional. If the innovation asks someone to change their personal identity… they will fight it to the bitter end. Such as when US armed forces refused (and continue to refuse) to wear UN peacekeeper uniforms – because their identity is with the US. Or if an innovation asks a high-status person (like a Doctor) to do work previously associated with a low status person (say an admin), they may well recoil.

Action: Plan for how to deal with the five reasons people will oppose you.

Its the Network, Stupid

For me the author did a great job of expanding on an idea I first learned from Seth Godin’s book Idea Virus, more than 20 years ago: it is all about the network. Us humans are conditioned to be suspicious of change unless lots of our peers respect it. An innovator can either see that there are 1 million people they need to convince of a thing, meaning they’ll need to convince half a million early adopters to have any hope of getting the other half to convert OR… they can see that group of 1 million people is actually split into hundreds of sub-groups, many with linkages between them.

It is much easier to convince 5 of the ten people in the Project Wombat Wastewater Auditing team to adopt your new software than to convince the whole 10,000-person company. Once you get those 5 to be enthusiastic, the other five will likely “tip” and adopt. And all of those people have worked on other stormwater audit projects. They’ll help you get those other project teams excited. Now you’ve got 100 people enthusiastically using the product. They lead you to audit teams outside of Wastewater like Health & Safety, Sustainability, and Capital Projects. At each step you gain new insights on how to improve your product to meet the growing list of users, and every time you enter a new “market” you do so with champions and momentum.

Action: Create a “map” of the networks of people you’d like to impact, how they are related, and who you should work with first.

The Road Is Long

The biggest difference between movements that succeed and those who fail is that the successful teams plan for the counter reaction.

Greg Satell

You think the status quo was fighting you while you were getting your idea off the ground? Once you have some initial success, that is when the status quo will rally its significant resources to try and stop you.

• Did you get your candidate elected instead of the dictator? Be ready for when the dictator throws out the election.
• Launch your new product with pilot users inside the company and they love it? Be ready for the CFO to shut you down because you’re brand spanking new innovation lowered short term results.
• Win a high profile customer away from the fat-and-lazy dominant player in the market? Get ready for law suits and informal, behind-the-scenes deals to freeze you in place.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Winston Churchill

Action: Conduct a premortem to ID, and plan for, how the status quo will fight back.

It Ain’t Over Until Its Boring

Innovation is like love. It starts with excitement and constant discovery as you dive into unknown territory. That’s why romantic comedies focus at the start of relationships. The decades that come after are full of the mundane, compromise, hard conversations, and little signs of joy that are essential for lasting love… but don’t sell movie tickets.

Likewise great innovators plan to keep fighting until their job changes from exciting revolutionary to (by comparison) boring administrator. That’s how they know they have success.

Action: Frequently remind your team that this is a long journey. As you mature, glorify the mundane work that keeps progress rolling.

We Can’s Succeed Alone

Successful movements consist of coalitions of disparate groups that often disagree with each other vigorously. But they compromise on their disparate positions to meet their shared interests. This isn’t easy. In fact, it is really, really hard. Ideological purists simply don’t succeed. For us innovators, it means we need to appreciate that we have lots of stakeholders we need to keep happy, and they don’t all want the same things!

• You and your fellow founders probably want to make an impact and be your own bosses.
• Investors might want to see at least a 10x return on their investment, and until that happens they want to see exponential growth.
• Employees probably want a stable job that reliably pays their bills and gives them work-life balance.

You can’t achieve your vision of impacting the world without a team of employees excited to work. You can’t pay them in the early days unless you pitch, and deliver on, exponential growth for your investors.

Action: Document your core values, collaborate with stakeholders that share those values, and be ready to compromise on everything else.