“Driving change is always about attracting, never overpowering.”

Great exploration of the critical role of networks in driving social change.

Author Greg Satell was inspired by his first-hand experience living through Ukraine’s Orange Revolution to explore how such movements develop critical mass and effect lasting change. The result is “Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change.”

I’ll write more on this once finished reading, but one of Satell’s key tenets is that sustainable change is not effected by passionate partisans forcing their will upon skeptical opponents, but instead by influencing those others to the cause. Satell espouses a well-developed networks-based theory of how that occurs.

“That’s what really makes change happen. Not a strident call to the faithful, but the forging of common cause among diverse constituencies…. Linkages need to be built to higher threshold groups , and that can only be done by reaching out and learning bout the needs, desires and fears of others [the “Threshold Model” is explained in the book].”

“Cascades,” p. 121