Cascades

by Greg Satell

  In other words, the Saddleback Church is a small world network, just as we saw in Chapter 2. Small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose. The weekly groups build strong personal bonds. They study the Bible together, but also support each other through problems at home and at work. They visit each other when they or a family member is sick. That’s what drives them to the weekend services, where they interact with other groups. And all of it is driven by the principles in Rick Warren’s sermons and in his books. Warren’s magnum opus, The Purpose Driven Life, published in 2002, has sold more than 30 million copies.

  The model that arose out of Warren’s collapse has also propelled his church from a local community to a global phenomenon. While the California congregation attracts upwards of 20,000 parishioners to weekend services at its 120-acre campus, his message is also being carried throughout the world. “Building the church was the first challenge,” says Warren, “and we did that with small groups. Saddleback wouldn’t work without our small groups—that’s where people get excited about God, where church becomes really relevant for them, that’s where people spring into action. But then we were given a new vision. We started to teach others how to plant churches and make them grow. Eventually our whole focus came to be summed up by this word ‘purpose’ and that has taken me through two books and a world-wide ministry network, training pastors and other church leaders, into a much more global orientation and a preoccupation with putting an end to poverty and AIDS in Africa and throughout the world.”7 Small groups, as it turns out, are almost infinitely scalable.

  AnnaLee Saxenian has noticed a similar trend in the technology industry. While her first book, Regional Advantage, chronicled how Silicon Valley’s network-driven economy propelled it past Boston’s more hierarchical structure in the 1980s, her follow-up, The New Argonauts, written almost 20 years later, explains how it became a global phenomenon. The Bay Area’s culture of openness and meritocracy made it an ideal place for immigrants to thrive. Many of them maintained deep ties to the region even when they returned to their home countries and started businesses there.

  These linkages proved incredibly valuable on both sides, leading to profitable licenses and partnerships for the entrepreneurs returning home and opening up new markets for the US-based technology companies. Over time, some of these countries, such as India, China, Taiwan, and Israel, became particularly adept in certain technical areas and began to specialize. The links back to Silicon Valley proved to be a crucial element of success, providing a ready market, a wealth of technical expertise, and, in some cases, finance. These nascent technology hubs benefited Silicon Valley as well, providing access to new sources of talent and ideas, while spreading much of the Valley’s unique cultural attributes and values. As Saxenian puts it, the “brain drain” has become a “brain circulation.”8

  Saxenian also pointed out to me that, after decades researching the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Silicon Valley and in other tech hubs across the world, she has never seen a new ecosystem form “de novo.” As she sees it, the Silicon Valley ecosystem arose out of a unique set of preconditions. Unlike Harvard and MIT in Boston, universities like Stanford and UC Berkeley, where she has been on the faculty since the eighties, didn’t have large established companies to collaborate with. So reaching out to nascent firms may have been more an act of necessity than design. Also, because the entire Bay Area was, in a sense, itself a start-up, there was a tendency to band together. “Everybody worked for the same company—Silicon Valley,” she told me. Since then, all of the tech hubs that have sprung up around the world, from Bangalore to Beijing and Taipei to Tel Aviv, have done so, to a greater or lesser extent, through connections to the Bay Area.9

  It’s an interesting observation that explains a lot. We often hear of various regions that bill themselves as “the next Silicon Valley.” They invest in technology campuses, offer generous incentives for companies to locate there, and support many initiatives designed to mimic Silicon Valley, like technology incubators, accelerators, and coworking centers. Still, they never seem to pan out, and Saxenian’s insight explains why. First, by trying to build a technology hub from scratch, they miss the most important asset—Silicon Valley. It is the informal ties among entrepreneurs that make new technology centers thrive. Second, the new ecosystems that link back to Silicon Valley tend to further reinforce the Bay Area’s network centrality—and primacy.

  This point also exposes a crucial flaw in recent social movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. In their quest to upend the establishment, they shunned any ties to existing institutions. Instead of pulling in Pillars of Support, they actively pushed them away. As Joe Nocera observed in his New York Times column before the 2012 election, “ultimately, Occupy Wall Street simply would not engage with the larger world. Believing that both politicians and corporations were corrupt, it declined to dirty its hands by talking to anyone in power. The takeover of the park—especially as the police threatened to force the protestors out—became an end in itself rather than the means to something larger. Occupy was an insular movement, whose members spoke mainly to each other.”

  In the same 2012 column Nocera explained that the Tea Party did just the opposite. “It, too, believed that politicians were venal,” he wrote, “but rather than turning away from politics, its adherents worked to elect politicians who believed in the same things they did. Yes, the Tea Party had wealthy benefactors, but their money would not have succeeded without enormous grass-roots support. Two years ago, 87 new Tea Party-elected candidates showed up in Washington. Much as you or I may not like it, they have largely succeeded throwing sand in the wheels of government. That was their goal.”10

  The Tea Party, incidentally, also shared some important attributes with the Saddleback Church. Like Saddleback, from the outside it looked monolithic, able to rally huge numbers of people to support or oppose a particular issue. There were large conferences and national spokespeople on cable TV. However, much like Saddleback’s weekend services, all that is somewhat of a mirage that distracts us from the real power of the Tea Party movement.

  In a study of the Tea Party in America, researchers Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson found that what most motivated activists were issues in their own communities, and they banded together with other local groups who felt the same way. Their leaders were largely people of comfortable means, many of whom owned their own businesses. Often they were retired, semiretired, or homemakers. Many had previous experience in organizing community events. Inspired by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli’s now famous on-air rant, these people set up groups in local cafés, community centers, libraries, and places of worship. Meetings, which often involved a speaker on a particular issue, a group discussion, or, in some cases, a movie night, were promoted with e-mails, flyers, and Meetup sites. They were largely financed by bake sales, collection plates, and other small-scale activities, As one Tea Party leader put it, “It’s like being a Girl Scout mom.”11

  Once again, we see the same pattern: small groups, loosely connected, but united by a common purpose leading to real change.

  WHAT MAKES A NETWORK EFFECTIVE?

  * * *

  A Broadway musical, like a movement, needs to attract people to it. To do so, the producers must find the right mix of tune, message, artistic expression, and commercial appeal to both engage audiences in the theater and impress critics enough to get good reviews. Millions of dollars depend on keeping people in the seats. So, if you were going to invest in a musical, what would you look for?

  You might say, go with a proven team like Rodgers and Hammerstein, who produced such hits as Oklahoma! (1943), South Pacific (1949), and The Sound of Music (1959), all of which were Broadway legends that ran for years. Yet their 1955 production of Pipe Dream, performed in the heart of their creative prime, flopped. Or you might say that you need a great story, but bestselling novels like Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Carrie, both of which became blockbuster movies, failed to attrac
t audiences on stage.12 Or maybe it’s the acting, but bankable stars like Al Pacino and Bruce Willis have had horrendous failures on stage.13 So what determines whether a Broadway musical becomes a hit or goes down in flames has long been something of a mystery.

  Two researchers, Brian Uzzi and Janet Spiro, decided to unravel the puzzle. They analyzed 474 musicals that were performed between 1945 and 1989. What they found was startling. Even when controlling for factors such as competition, marketing budget, production budget, economic conditions, and the track record of the cast and crew that worked on the play, what best determined the success of any particular Broadway musical was the structure of the networks of the cast and crew.14

  Using a metric called “Q,” which measures the “small worldliness” of a particular network, they found that if very few people among the cast and crew had previously worked together, the play performed poorly in terms of both critical recognition and financial results. However, if too many people had worked together and the connections were too dense, results were similarly bad. Top performers had combinations of both, people who knew each other well and new blood that could take the team in new directions. In other words, small groups, loosely connected, but united by a common purpose are key to success on Broadway as well, and this can be represented by a measurable quantity. Similar results were found in a wide array of studies, including ones that focused on engineers at Bell Labs,15 currency traders,16 and the German automotive industry.17

  This is an enormously helpful insight if we want to create a movement for change. Clearly, if connections are too loose, it will be hard for people to coordinate action. For a long time, the LGBT movement suffered from this problem. Lesbian and gay groups were diverse in geography, makeup, and their aspirations, which made it hard for them to coordinate actions. On the other hand, groups like Occupy Wall Street and the Indian National Congress were both highly dense networks, and they failed to connect with the larger populace. In the latter case, Gandhi was able to provide a bridge between the elites and everyday Indians, but Occupy seemed to revel in their disconnection, and that made it hard for them to recruit a Spectrum of Allies. For any movement to succeed, you need to have deep, personal ties among activists, but also make sure that you keep nodes open for others to connect to. That’s how a movement grows and stays relevant.

  Since Watts, Strogatz, and Barabási did their seminal work in the late nineties, researchers have also found that mapping networks can reveal power relationships. As Anne-Marie Slaughter, who served as the director of policy planning in the US State Department under Hillary Clinton, has noted, “Power in networks flows from connectedness: the number, type, and location of connections a node has. . . . The most central nodes have the most connections and the highest likelihood of gaining more.”18

  In fact, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, a network scientist named Valdis Krebs was able, using publicly available data culled from newspaper reports, to determine the leadership structure of the hijackers, by determining which of the terrorists had the highest “network centrality” scores.19 Like the “Q” metric, these are measurable quantities that we can determine by assessing how many connections a particular node has, to which other nodes it is connected, and where it is positioned in the network.20

  For example, a high-powered CEO might sit at the top of a hierarchy but be relatively unconnected to important parts of the network (like franchisees in Blockbuster’s case), and so might not be as powerful as his formal position implies. Meanwhile a subordinate, by being connected to both the CEO and crucial stakeholders within the organizational network, might wield much more influence than her position would imply.

  This is what General McChrystal realized in Iraq. He saw that by virtue of being at the top of the hierarchy he had enormous authority, but often lacked the ability to influence events on the ground with the speed and agility he needed to win. That’s why he put so much emphasis on increasing horizontal connections in his network, so that those lower down on the totem pole with important information could create their own information cascade and bring the required resources to bear. In a similar vein, by keeping networks open, Silicon Valley was able to connect to new ideas forming in the marketplace and adapt to them, while the much denser networks along Boston’s Route 128 closed themselves off and paid the price.

  The results of network studies yield important insights for any movement that seeks to create transformational change. First, you need to create strong bonds within individual groups. That’s how you build trust and operational effectiveness. Yet at the same time, you must also keep your network open, not only so that you can keep the movement growing, but so that new information and insights can flow through.

  Also, to gain power, nascent movements must work to position themselves in the center of the networks around them. This has nothing to do with ideology. Many movements, including the struggles for independence in India and South Africa, and more recently, the LGBT movement, took what would once have been considered extreme positions. Yet by continually making new connections, they were able to shift the center of networks and gain influence.

  HOW OTPOR WEAVED ITS NETWORK

  * * *

  In 1992, when Serbia’s war in Bosnia was already raging, Srdja Popović was 19 years old, a freshman biology student at the University of Belgrade, and a bassist in a rock band. “At the time,” he told me, “being a part of the rock community meant that you were against the war. It was very much like the identity of the sixties in the US and the war in Vietnam. Both of my parents were top journalists, so were really aware, and they were very unhappy with what was going on.”21

  It was almost inevitable that Popović would get involved when demonstrations broke out at his university to protest against the war in June of that year. The students occupied Belgrade University for 26 days and demanded Milošević’s resignation, but it didn’t amount to much. The protests began on the very last day of school, and pretty soon the summer beckoned, the demonstrations broke up, and the students went their separate ways.22 As Popović remembers, “These were very ‘Occupy’ type of protests where we occupied the five biggest universities and lived there in our little islands of common sense with intellectuals and rock bands while the rest of the country was more or less supportive of Milošević’s idea. And this is where we began to understand that staying in your little blurb of common sense was not going to save the country.”23

  Soon after, a friend convinced him to cut an organic chemistry class to attend a meeting of the center-left Democratic Party. Before long, he formally joined the party, became president of its youth organization, and met Zoran Djindjić, the leader of the Democratic Party. A former dissident who earned a PhD in philosophy while in exile in Germany, Djindjić’s combination of an informal but direct style and a powerful intellect had an immediate effect on Popović.24

  “I learned so many things from Djindjić,” Popović remembers. “He was a Western type politician. He knew a lot about campaigning. He understood why it is so important to build networks on the ground. He was an organizational freak, in terms of that he was obsessed with structures and organizations and having little cells in every community. . . . He understood that it is not only the software, which is the ideology, that is important, but the hardware, which is the machinery. So this is how we started to understand the structures and activities on the ground and why it is important to have an organization on every corner.”

  Djindjić also indoctrinated Popović into what he called his RAT triangle: Recruit-Train-Act. The idea is that when you first recruit an activist, you want to immediately invest in the skills of that person. You want to teach the recruit how to campaign, how to organize, how to fundraise, and how to design actions. Most of all, you want to get that person immediately involved, because when people take action, they begin to take ownership and feel that the movement belongs to them, too. Eventually they become recruiters and bring new people in, and the process becomes self-perpetuating.25 />
  Djindjić took Popović under his wing and encouraged him to run for city parliament in 1996. Although he was contesting a seat representing a district he had never lived in, Popović ran a vigorous campaign, personally meeting over 3,000 out of 11,000 constituents, and, at 23 years old, became the youngest person ever to win an election in the Belgrade city government. “That was the first time the opposition was united and Milošević was caught off guard. That was the first time I understood the value of unity,” he remembers.26

  Shocked by the defeat of his party, Milošević had the election results annulled, and protests erupted once again. Marches were held every evening, and Popović took a central role in organizing student protests, many of which were immensely creative. As the journalist Tina Rosenberg would later report, “A Belgrade art student made a large puppet of Milošević in prison stripes that was carried through the streets. (The student was arrested and badly beaten.) Students did street theater with bodies outlined on the ground, as at a crime scene. They poured detergent on the ground to clean up the streets after a pro-Milošević rally. When state media called the protests destructive, students built a brick wall in front of the Parliament building to argue that they were, in fact, constructive.”27 These were a foreshadowing of the tactics that Otpor later became famous for.

  The student protests and the party marches were separate but coordinated. If the party march was at 3, the students would demonstrate at 1 or at 5. It went on for 100 days and was the largest mobilization in Serbian history. “This is where you needed to think about a new tactic every day to keep people busy. And you are talking about a very cold December in Belgrade,” Popović remembers. So the actions they devised had to be engaging and fun for people to participate in. “This is where basically we learned the tactics; . . . 1996 was Otpor before Otpor,” he told me.28