When you believe there’s a gap between what the system needs and what the system wants, it is your duty to change the system. In doing this, you have two options:
- You can start from what the system needs—AKA “swimming upstream.” This means leveraging brute force to change the system from the outside.
- You can start from what the system wants—AKA “swimming downstream.” This means leveraging the system’s existing mechanisms to change it from the inside.
While it may seem heroic and virtuous, swimming upstream is, by definition, incredibly hard because systems strive for self-preservation. The system will treat you like a foreign body and resist you at every turn, and you will be much more likely to fail in your endeavour.
In most systems, the correct strategy is actually to swim downstream. As impossible as it may seem in the short term, by learning the system’s rules and operating within its boundaries, you can gradually get the system to where you want it to be.
In practice, there are a few strategies to make this happen:
- Point to the new tower. Rather than focusing on what the system must leave behind, focus on what it is gaining. This allows you to redirect the current energy in the system to a new, more productive endeavor.
- Tell a story. Stories help bridge the gap between what the system needs and what it wants. A compelling story can help you show that everything the system wants is on the other side of the change you are envisioning.
- Look for the bright spots. In any given system that requires change, there are usually bright spots that have already internalized that change. Use them to educate yourself and inspire others about how such a change can exist within such a system.
AKA: Systems want to be danced with.