311 - Cascades of Change - Greg Satell (rebroadcast)

Summary

Podcast Summary: You Are Not So Smart – Episode 311: Cascades of Change - Greg Satell

Podcast: You Are Not So Smart
Host: David McRaney
Guest: Greg Satell
Episode Title: Cascades of Change (Rebroadcast)
Date: April 14, 2025

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Overview

In this episode, David McRaney talks with Greg Satell, author of Cascades and Mapping Innovation, about how ideas, behaviors, and social change spread through groups, organizations, and societies—not by simple “virality,” but through complex social networks, resistance, and the phenomenon of “cascades.” Drawing on psychological research, network theory, and real-world revolutions, they dissect why facts alone rarely change minds, what really drives societal shifts, and how successful movements plan for—and survive—the inevitable backlash that comes with victory.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Myth of “Just the Facts” and the Information Deficit Model

• Facts Alone Don’t Change Minds: The episode opens by challenging the common assumption that people only hold “wrong” views because they lack the right information.
  • “People tend to think that the righteousness of their cause will save them, but it won’t. People think that if people really understood the idea that they would adopt it. That's almost never true.” – David McRaney (01:53)
• Resistance and Motivated Reasoning: Presenting facts can trigger emotional resistance, not acceptance, due to motivated reasoning, identity, and worldview protection.
• Summary: Change efforts fail when they rely solely on information, neglecting strategy for overcoming resistance.

2. Greg Satell’s Background: Real-World Change and Communications

• Lived 15 years in Eastern Europe; witnessed the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.
• Professional experience in marketing, publishing, and movement-building.
• Firsthand knowledge of both mass protests and how communication works during societal upheavals.

3. How Change and Ideas Really Spread: The Concept of Cascades

• “Viral” Is Misleading: True behavioral change seldom spreads like a meme or news of a celebrity’s death. Risk to self, reputation, or identity changes everything.
  • “You don’t need hyperconnected individuals or mass communicators. What you need are ways to affect the network so that any person can become the spark that leads to a social wildfire.” – David McRaney (13:45)
• Greg refers to cascades—borrowing from network science and sociology—as a way to understand explosive, organization-wide change.

4. Three Principles of Cascades

1. Asch Conformity Experiments (17:27–19:14)

• People are highly influenced by group consensus—even in obvious, factual matters.
• Quote: “We conform to other human beings. We're social primates. Majorities have influence over our behavior.” – Greg Satell (18:56)

2. Threshold Model of Collective Behavior (19:14–29:36)

• Each person has their own “threshold” for joining a behavior, depending on how many around them already have.
• Example: Some join in a riot if 5 others are participating; others only if 10 are.
• Clusters form where change can propagate—or fizzle—depending on threshold mixes.
• “Each person who joins adds to the pressure of the collective for the next person who arrives…” – David McRaney (27:32)

3. Strength of Weak Ties (29:36–39:36)

• Weak connections between clusters allow cascades to jump across the network.
• Weak ties allow a saturated behavior (like a riot, a strike, or a new technology) in one group to prompt saturation in another.
• “If one cluster saturates, it can cause another cluster that doesn't have the right mix of thresholds to saturate as well.” – Greg Satell (31:12)

5. Forest Fires, Sparking Change, and the Importance of Networks

• Persistence and Striking at the Network: Most “sparks” die out, but if conditions are right—a percolating local cluster—one spark can ignite massive change.
• Networks are fluid, dynamic, and their “flammability” changes constantly.

6. Organizational and Social Change: Strategies that Work

• Plan for Resistance, Not Just Righteousness: Effective movements plan for the backlash that comes with initial success.
• Majority Principle: “You want to start with a majority... even if that majority is three people in a room of five.” – Greg Satell (53:20)
• Avoid the urge to persuade a opposed majority—find and expand your existing local majority, build success, and provide co-optable resources.
• Example: TEDx as a “co-optable resource”—TED gives others tools that help advance its brand while serving the organizers’ own purposes.

7. Anticipating and Harnessing Resistance

• Five sources of resistance to change:
  • Lack of trust
  • Change fatigue
  • Competing incentives
  • Switching costs
  • Identity and dignity (the most insurmountable: “you cannot ask someone to be someone different from who they think they are.”)
• “Most change efforts fail because resistance isn’t voiced. The worst thing you can do... is give them a head start to quietly undermine you.” – Greg Satell (56:29)

8. Movements Must Be Built on Shared Values, Not Just Tactics

• Mobilize people to influence institutions.
• Change falls apart when it isn’t anchored to shared values (“a movement without values is nothing more than a mob”).
• “You can never base your change effort on any particular person or policy or program. It always needs to be built on shared values, and that's how you survive victory from the start.” – David McRaney (63:36)

9. Prepare to Survive Victory

• Every revolution or significant social change triggers a counter-revolution. The moment you achieve initial success, intense resistance or counter-mobilization will arise.
  • “Once you start building traction and it becomes a reality, that's when the knives come out.” – David McRaney (62:52)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Why Movements Fail:

  • “When somebody has a very different view from you, they find it hard to believe that you sincerely hold your view.” – David McRaney (01:37/46:01)
  • “Change is about overcoming resistance... anytime you set out to achieve anything significant, there's always going to be people who aren't going to like it, and they're going to work to undermine what you're trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest and underhanded and deceptive.” – David McRaney (01:53/46:18)

• On Organizational Change Strategy:

  • “The urge to persuade is a red flag. If you feel the need to convince people, you either have the wrong idea, the wrong people, or you need to back up and go find your majority.” – Greg Satell (53:20)
  • “You want to start with the cause... focus on the ‘hair on fire’ users who need their problem solved so badly, it's urgent.” – David McRaney (54:22)

• On Resistance:

  • “When those attachments are threatened, we lash out for reasons even we can't explain. That doesn't make them bad people. In fact, we all do it.” – David McRaney (56:29)

• On Surviving Victory:

  • “Every revolution meets its counter revolution... It's that initial victory that triggers the resistance.” – David McRaney (62:52)
  • “You can never base your change effort on any particular person or policy or program. It always needs to be built on shared values and that's how you survive victory from the start.” – David McRaney (63:36)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:37] Opening thoughts on resistance to change
• [02:52] Greg Satell’s background/experience in revolutions
• [07:52–16:00] Introduction to “cascades” and the limits of “virality”
• [17:11] Explaining the Asch conformity experiment
• [19:14–29:36] Granovetter’s threshold model of collective behavior
• [29:36–39:36] Strength of weak ties and network clusters
• [39:36–40:58] Connecting clusters: how transformation spreads through “small groups loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose”
• [46:01–62:52] Practical movement lessons—planning for resistance, the importance of values, stories of revolution (Otpor, TEDx), co-optable resources, and the reality of counter-movements

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Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

• Facts alone rarely create change. Emotional resistance, identity, and social conformity matter most.
• Change cascades through networks when local clusters saturate and are connected by weak ties; not via direct persuasion or mass communication.
• Movements succeed when they plan for resistance, work with local majorities, and provide members with tools and resources they can co-opt for their purposes.
• Anticipate backlash at the moment of victory; plan from the start to survive the counter-movement.
• Shared values are the bedrock—without them, efforts can collapse or devolve into mobs.

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Final Thoughts

Cascades of change are messy, nonlinear, and impossible to predict with certainty. To create lasting transformation—whether in organizations or across societies—it’s critical to understand social networks, plan for resistance, organize around shared values, and prepare not just for victory, but for the backlash that follows. This episode offers a masterclass in both the science and realpolitik of meaningful change.

Transcript

[David McRaney]

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[David McRaney]

When somebody has a very different view from you. They find it hard to believe that you sincerely hold your view. I always found that interesting.

[Greg Satel]

They think that you only hold it because you haven't seen everything. If you just saw what they saw, you just haven't had the right experience yet.

[David McRaney]

And that's why change fails. That's why so many of these movements fail, because people tend to think that the righteousness of their cause will save them. But it won't. People think that if people really understood the idea that they would adopt it. That's almost never true. Change is about overcoming resistance. Because anytime you set out to achieve anything significant, make any sort of significant impact, there's always going to be people who aren't going to like it. And they're going to work to undermine what you're trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest and underhanded and deceptive.

[Greg Satel]

That is the voice of Greg Satel, a lecturer at the Wharton Communication Program, where he teaches students how to be effective communicators.

[David McRaney]

Hi, I'm Greg Satel. I am the author of Mapping Innovation and and Cascades, and I help organizations overcome resistance to change.

[Greg Satel]

Well, that's what Greg Satel does now. But he has seen some things. He witnessed the Orange Revolution firsthand in the early 2000s, back when he worked in marketing and publishing newspapers and business journals, first in Poland and then in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution, a period of mass and I mean mass, protests over election fraud that resulted in a rerunning of their presidential election with much tighter oversight and a much different Ukraine after more democratic, more transparent Greg Satell. He lived in Eastern Europe for about 15 years. So he has a lot of experience witnessing and participating in change and transitions of power, but also a lot of experience with communication, media and getting things to go viral. Well, not viral, what we call viral, we'll get into that later. But he was doing these things during intense moments of rapid and widespread societal change. And as you just heard, one of the things that you quickly learn when you dive into the literature on activism, public outreach, protest and science, communication, health, communication, just communication in general, is that when the message is something that you are sure supports your cause with facts, with data, evidence, matters of historical record, events that really took place, things that are true, when the facts are on your side and you have a mountain of them, it can seem like all you need to do to create change in this world is to just communicate that information, get it into the heads of the audience that you know needs to hear it and that hasn't learned it yet, hasn't been exposed to it yet. This concept is often called the information deficit model. We've talked about it many times on the show. It's this idea that the lack of mind and heart change that you want to see in the world is. Is the result of a deficit in information out there in the world. And sometimes that is true. But ironically and sadly, an enormous amount of psychological research suggests that the facts about facts just don't support this conclusion most of the time. The idea that all you need are facts to change hearts and minds, that's because the facts that seem incredibly compelling to you, the ones that support your cause, a cause that may be an incredibly important thing, that will change the world in a positive way, and you endeavor to really, truly do this, honestly change the world for the better for many, many people, those facts can all be on your side. And you can have a whole lot of them at your disposal, but they won't, on their own, necessarily generate change. And one reason for that is those facts will not generate the same emotional reaction in those who are hesitant, resistant, as they do in those who are supportive and empathetic. And you're probably one of those people, and you are surrounded by those people. It just seems like common sense after a while that all you need are the facts, and that's just what's missing. But in fact, learning those facts may generate even more resistance among those who are already resistant to change, usually in the form of motivated reasoning, mental gymnastics, and rhetorical strategies that all human beings will employ in an effort to either avoid reaching a particular conclusion or pursue reaching a different, more favored Conclusion. It's not that facts are bad or that you shouldn't support your cause and your message and your efforts with evidence and with facts. It's just that when you're seeking change, you must also have a strategy in place for dealing with resistance to change. And this is something. I think about this all the time now, and I've been thinking about it for years, but because I wrote a book about it, How Minds Change. And in that spirit, this episode is a continuation of the episodes in which I invited authors of books that were similar to my book that covered similar topics, or just people who are similarly curious or obsessed with the ideas explored within to come on this program and compare notes with me. And Greg Satel is one of those people, and he wrote one of those kinds of books, Cascades. And talking about this book and the topics within and the things that I share as obsessions with Greg Satel, that opens up a huge opportunity to tell you all sorts of things I've wanted to tell you about for a long time on this show.

[David McRaney]

I gotta tell you, I've been listening to your podcast.

[Greg Satel]

Yeah.

[David McRaney]

I just started to be a podcast person maybe a couple of months ago, and I really like your podcast. Yeah. And I'm a big fan of your book. And I decided to do something different for this podcast. So what I did was I. I set up a page on my blog, Digital Tonto, just for you are not so smart. And I have a download of a free workbook there. And then depending on what we talk about, I'll put some more stuff there and. And you can put it in the show notes. That'll be a. Like a special you for you are not so smart audience. Like a special. If you act now.

[Greg Satel]

So as you could hear, Greg is a marketing expert and he really did do this. He really did make that page at Digital Tanto. That's his website, Ed, and it's in the show notes. So let's get into it. The other day I got this alert on LinkedIn that an author I follow, Greg Satel, had mentioned me in a post. So I went and checked it out, and what I found was that he had been reading my book again, How Minds Change, available everywhere. And he started to notice that one of the sections seemed very familiar to him. And as he continued, he. He saw that I had cited him as the source of the part that he was reading. And I've been on the other side of that. It's just a surreal moment where you're like, oh, wow, this is a thing in books, that can happen. And he shared that and I commented on it. And then we got together online and we said, hey, let's hang out and compare notes. So we did, and here we are. Greg Suttel is the author of a book titled Cascades. And we're going to talk all about this and and the phenomenon. The book Cascades is all about change in the form of new ideas and behaviors spreading through groups. And right off the bat, when we met, we nerded out hard on the concept of virality because we both learned in writing our books that a lot of what we thought that we just knew about this thing, things going viral, was wrong. Virality as a concept, it is a thing. It does occur, but only when there's almost no risk versus reward involved. You're just updating what you know about the world in a way that's not going to put anything on the line. Like when we all learned Robin Williams passed away, and then many of us, upon learning it, pass that on to the people we know and love and care about, passing that information along to people who then passed it along to others in the same way, that sort of going viral, that sort of updating your knowledge about Robin Williams, that is a thing. Yes, things can spread virally in that way. Each person just needs contact with the information to then become a carrier and then a spreader of that information and all the emotions that go along with it. But when it comes to adopting an idea or behavior in which there is some risk versus reward involved, or doing so would involve updating identity, affecting information in your brain, or changing an attitude you are currently highly motivated to hold. Or it would affect your beliefs in ways that would affect your worldview, or it would affect your behavior in ways that could risk your reputation or your status. Things just don't go viral in the same way as spreading a fact or a meme or a TikTok or a YouTube video will. In fact, the mechanism of that kind of spreading of information isn't viral. It isn't based on contact alone. And to sum all that up, the research actually says that you don't need hyperconnected individuals to spread ideas or innovations or change. Nor do you need people who are very good persuaders, nor do you need people who are skilled mass communicators. You just don't need all those things for revolutionary concepts to sweep across a population. What you need are ways to affect the network so that any person can become the spark that leads to a social wildfire. And you need lots of sparks in Lots of different locations. And to be fair to the people who have written about this in the past, we didn't know all of that until relatively recently. And one of the things Greg is adamant about is that if you want to create change in this world, if you are part of a group that wants to engage in activism, wants to affect legislation, then then more than anything else, your effectiveness will be determined by how well you organize in anticipation of resistance. That includes how well you communicate internally, communicate externally across media, how you develop strategies to avoid resistance, how you develop strategies to overcome resistance when it appears, and what you do when you're building momentum. And the people who don't want the change you want begin organizing in response to your growing success. We're going to talk all about that late in this episode with Greg, but right now we're going to talk about, well, if it's not virality as we understand it, what do you mean by all these sparks and everything? What is this? Well, it's how change rapidly sweeps across a business, an institution, a city, a region or nation. And that's what Greg Sattel's book is all about, really. It's titled Cascades and it details all the research, the scientific, mathematical, sociological, network based research, and that models and explains how new and often challenging ideas, new and strange innovations, and just plain old knowledge, goals, plans and behavior truly spreads through groups of human beings. In psychology and sociology and network science and all sorts of mathy math sciences, the term cascades is often used to describe what happens when a small set of changes or a set of seemingly inconsequential moments then lead to a sequence of events with significant and much larger consequences. Okay, so what is a cascade? Well, here's the thing. You've already experienced this psychological network effect, collective behavior phenomenon many, many times and in many, many different forms. Sometimes cascades lead to people not behaving. It's odd to see it that way. But remember, what we're talking about here is looking around and noticing how other people are behaving and then choosing whether or not to join. And sometimes the thing you're choosing to join is not doing anything. At other times it's looking around and deciding, okay, I will join a thing that is happening, which is the choice to opt out of something, to stop behaving as you currently are. You've probably been at a party before and you may have been hosting that party. And it seems like everyone all at once decides, party's over and everyone leaves. You turn around and you're like, whoa, what's going on was this coordinated? One minute you're all laughing and dancing and talking about TV shows and then the next minute the party just sort of ends. Everybody clears out, everybody decides it's time to go home. Well, this also, you may have noticed, happens at holiday get togethers with your family. That, welp, better be hitting the old dusty trail moment that seems to happen to everyone all at once. Or have you ever been in line a queue or been in a crowd of people waiting to get into a classroom or a restaurant or a coffee shop or a bakery, like you're waiting for it to open and then someone who works there, or the professor someone, they open the door and they say the door is open, y' all can come in anytime. And everybody in the group goes, oh. And they all scuttle in. Or how about this? Have you ever been part of a situation that got out of hand or left a situation that seemed to be getting out of hand? People getting increasingly more upset, more incensed. If you've experienced anything like this, you've also experienced the same phenomena that drive the collective behavior or that influences people to not behave in a collective way. That leads to things like riots and revolutions in the mass adoption of new technology and the mass shift in attitudes and behaviors that can result in enormous social change. The end of smoking in restaurants and airplanes, the legalization of marijuana and human huge society wide change like the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, the legalization of same sex marriage, and so on. Once again, Greg Satel.

[David McRaney]

The best way to understand cascade is to boil it down to three scientific principles that that have distinct experiments. So the first one is that famous Asch experiment from the 1950s.

[Greg Satel]

Ah, Solomon Asch. If you don't remember the Solomon Asch experiment or you've never heard of it before, here's a BR brief refresher. In Asch's lab back in 1951, they had subjects sit in a circle. And then a researcher showed the group a card with a single line printed on it. And then they showed the group a second card, this time with three lines printed on it. Then the researcher asked each person, one at a time, which one of the lines on the three line card. The second one that I showed everybody which line on that card was the same length as the line on the first card. And on that three line card, one line was obviously the same length. And that's not the one that people picked because the catch was everyone in the circle was working for the researchers, all except for the last person to be asked the question, and they had instructed all these people to answer incorrectly. So each one named the wrong line as the one that was the same length and all before asking this last person, the subject of the experiment, which line do you think is the same length?

[David McRaney]

Very, very simple exercise. And as they go around the room, the first seven all give the same wrong answer. And the last one conforms to the majority opinion, even if it's obviously wrong.

[Greg Satel]

So this is the first principle of Cascades. We conform to other human beings. We're social primates. We're very encouraged to look around and follow suit. When people in a majority are doing things, majorities have influence over our behavior.

[David McRaney]

That's the first principle of Cascades. The second one comes, as you know, from Mark Granovetter, which is the threshold model of collective behavior.

[Greg Satel]

So, yeah, to get into this, we need to actually go back to Asch, because that's a very well known experiment. But like most very well known experiments, a lot of nuance has been lost in its retelling over the years. Yes, one at a time around the room, the consensus grew. And when it was the last person's turn, the person who was the actual subject, that person often conformed to to the group consensus, even though it was obviously wrong. But in later experiments, when they varied the size of the groups, it really affected the outcomes. When there was only one other person, people rarely conformed. Two other people, people conformed about 13% of the time. And once you hit three people, adding any more didn't really affect the likelihood of conformity. Also, if just one person in the group dissented before it was the subject's turn to answer, it greatly diminished the likelihood that the subject would conform. After 123 runs of that first experiment, after seven people answered incorrectly, the last person conformed about a third of the time answering incorrectly because so did everybody else, which is a lot, but it's not every time. But it does reveal the power of conformity, which can and does have huge effects on the real world, as Greg Sattelle points out in his book. But as Greg also points out, the even bigger takeaway here, one that is only now really coming into focus, was that there was also a lot of variation among these individuals in the experiment. Some people never conformed, some people always conformed. And in between those extremes were many degrees of propensity to conform. It suggests that we each have our own individual setting, and it differs to that of others thanks to each person's personal roll of the dice when it comes to nature and Nurture in any group. There are some people who will conform if only a few people seem to be in consensus. And there are some people who will conform only when almost everyone is in consensus. And there are some people who need everybody to be in consensus the whole thing before they'll conform. And even then, there might be a few people who will disregard the consensus no matter what. And this finding would, over the decades, lead to incredible discoveries with immense implications, as studies like these became much more complex and the data about human behavior became much more robust and available to others, and the tools to examine all of these things became far more technologically advanced.

[David McRaney]

We all have different thresholds to partake in an action or adopt an idea. We all have different thresholds of resistance. There's some things that we have a very low threshold of resistance and will jump in quite easily, and other stuff will take more convincing. Some other stuff will almost never do.

[Greg Satel]

This is the threshold model of conformity. And this is where sociologist Mark Granovetter comes in. In this threshold model of conformity, each individual has what he calls a threshold for resistance, resistance to conform. I sometimes will be referring to this as just thresholds of conformity, but it's thresholds of resistance as well. As he outlined, labeled, and defined, there is a personal setting, a percentage, a proportion that must be met, a number of people around an individual that must participate or agree or fall in line or share the same view or do the same thing before that individual feels compelled to join in as well, to agree to do as others are doing. And typically, the mechanism behind this is an unconscious analysis of risk versus reward, a calculation the net benefits begin to exceed the net costs to behave in a certain way. And when this threshold is met, a threshold that's different for each individual, that person will feel compelled, motivated, driven to conform. In Mark Granovetter's paper on all of this, he uses the example of a riot. And to put it much more simply than he did, imagine it like this. You're watching people start to throw rocks, and you're imagining, maybe I would join in or maybe not. And the thresholds in play are like, so the person to your right will join the riot if they see five other people throwing rocks. But the person to your left, they won't join until they see six people throwing rocks. And you won't join until you see seven people throwing rocks. But when that person to your right does see those five people throwing rocks and they join in, they become person to six for the person who needs six people to join. And so they join. And when they join, they become person seven for the person that needed seven, which is you. So even though you don't conform as easily as the person to your right does, if that person conforms, you will too, thanks to the person to your left, who is just a tad bit more sensitive to conformity than you are. And so now you can see the concept of the cascade beginning to take shape. Each person with a lower threshold who joins makes it more likely that people with higher thresholds will have their thresholds met down the line. If the mix of people is just right, one person in a group of 100 throwing one rock could lead to 90 people throwing rocks. But let's imagine in that previous example, changing things up a little bit so that both you and the person to your left both needed seven people to join before either one of you would join. Well, in that scenario, the riot would have stopped at person six. Neither one of you got your thresholds met. You weren't influencing each other in that way. So one person throwing one rock would lead to six people throwing rocks, and that would be that. And I should note in the actual research, this all involves a lot of formulas and math and charts and graphs. It's not just philosophizing, it's science. And it's much more complex than my simple examples here. And some other science caveats include the fact that Granovetter emphasizes that the cost of joining versus the benefit will change as each individual joins. As more people choose to become part of the collective, the probability of getting like arrested would decrease the larger the number of participants, and this affects everybody's thresholds. Also, each person will have some sort of baseline, nature, nurture, personality difference that makes them more or less likely to conform. But on top of that, depending on who they know and what they do for a living, and their status in the community, their age, their height, their weight, their involvement in the issue, their intelligence, their understanding of the situation, their ability to perceive the situation, the time of day, how tired they are, how much money they have in the bank, and millions of other variables, millions of them, unconscious and non salient. Each person will feel, that is, they will estimate, assume, intuit, interpret and calculate unconsciously. A very specific sense of when reward exceeds risk. Each person has a sort of stable from one situation to the next baseline threshold for conformity. And then each unique situation interacts with that threshold to create a threshold for that situation unique to each individual. And what about all those examples from earlier where people are not doing something, they're waiting to get Into a classroom, let's say. Well, in this situation, the classroom is empty, and the first person who shows up makes a decision to not check the door. And they're doing that because of something in their individual disposition, what sociologists would call an internal signal. Maybe they tried to open the door their first week on campus, and there was a class inside. They got very embarrassed. And since then, they just don't check doors like that. Today, this person comes to the door. They decide to play on their phone because this person assumes the class is going to let out shortly one way or the other. The next person who shows up has never experienced this sort of embarrassment, but they don't want to make small talk with this stranger and make a fool of themselves. So this person avoids eye contact and starts playing with their phone. Now, the third person who shows up sees two people waiting. And most people, once you see two people doing something, you're like, well, they know something I don't know, and they join in. Well, now there are three people. Each person who joins adds to the pressure of the collective for the next person who arrives, Fourth, fifth, sixth people to arrive at the door. They base their behavior on a growing crowd behavior ahead of them. And it becomes more and more unlikely that any new person will be the sort of person who doesn't care about what all these people are doing. They're going to check the door. It's just safer to assume that everybody waiting to get inside has a good reason to do so, and so no one does anything. In this case, the environment is determining everyone's behavior, and someone either will have to come in and be a real miscreant, a real subversive, or the door is just going to have to open, and someone inside the professor most likely will say, what are you doing? Come in. Classroom is open. Cascades are like this. They can lead to the choice to not do something or the choice to do something, but either way, it's what you wouldn't have done if it wasn't for the influence of the crowd.

[David McRaney]

So that's the second principle, the threshold model of collective behavior. And the last one also comes from Mark granavetter. And that's the strength of weak ties.

[Greg Satel]

Remember the riot example from earlier? You remember how in one mix of thresholds, almost every everyone started throwing rocks, but in another mix of thresholds, it stopped at six people? Okay, so in the grand model of how cascades play out, those groups would each be considered a cluster, and the everyone is throwing rocks group would be considered a saturated cluster. The behavior Change in that group has saturated the entirety of every interaction in an entire nation like, say, Ireland. There are many clusters of human beings who share strong ties, people who know each other's stories, who help each other move, who exchange gifts on birthdays and holidays. Any large group of humans, like nations is made up of lots and lots of strongly connected clusters like this. And you may have heard of Granovetter's 1973 paper, the Strength of Weak Ties, one of the most widely cited and influential articles in all of social science. In it, he showed that weak ties, casual acquaintances, have an enormous impact on social networks, on the flow of information, on the flow of change and behavior. So a very large group of people like Ireland is made up of lots of clusters of people who know each other well but don't interact much with people outside those clusters. Weak ties form bridges between clusters of strong ties. Okay, we have everything in place now to make sense of this. If one person within a network of close friends and family and co workers and neighbors is an acquaintance of one other person in a different cluster of close friends and family and co workers and neighbors, that weak tie between those two people becomes the conduit by which information will flow from one closely connected network to the other. And here's the absolutely amazing and bonkers point we've been marching toward this entire time. When you have the right kind of weak ties between two clusters, if one cluster saturates, it can cause another cluster that doesn't have the right mix of thresholds and to saturate as well. Saturation is when everyone in the group follows suit, everyone conforms, or almost everyone. Right. That's a saturation moment within a cluster. So in this scenario, that weak tie adds a person from outside a cluster whose threshold, should it be met, this other person in another cluster, if their threshold is met, that will then influence the threshold of the person that. That they know in another cluster. Okay, let's use an example. The riot, once again. Okay, remember how the riot stopped at 6 people if there was no one whose number was 6? Like if you have a threshold of 7 and the person next to you has a threshold of 7, and there's a gap, there's a gap there. It's not getting crossed. You need that seventh person to join in. They don't join in, the cascade stops. Well, what if you got a text message right then from a person you met once at a conference who said they were getting into baking sourdough just like you were because they overheard you talking about how you just got into baking sourdough bread. And you exchanged numbers at the conference, but you never talked again. For some reason, today, that person is in another riot in another city, Started over the same grievance as your riot. And just now they share with you by text that they just threw rock. Well, there it is. You now have your threshold met. That's the seventh person you needed to throw a rock. It's just they're not in the group you're in, they're in another group. So now you throw a rock in your group, and the cascade crosses the gap and continues to build from there. And to make this even more amazing, imagine that over in this other riot, this acquaintance, this person, is a holdout. This is the kind of person that needs 80 other people to throw a rock to meet their threshold of conformity. But in that group, that's happened. And when they text you, even though their disposition, their threshold is very high, they serve the role that a person with a very low threshold would have served in your group. If you had that sort of person in your group, they become that person via the weak tie. So now your cluster will begin to saturate. And you can further imagine that someone in your group with a medium threshold, once your cluster has saturated, might text someone mid saturation in some other group, some third group, just to let them know about the riot that seems to be happening out of nowhere. And that one message will then meet the threshold of that acquaintance in this third cluster, Allowing their stalled out saturation to keep going as well. And all of these clusters will influence each other and their neighbors via weak ties. And a group like this, a group of groups, clusters of people with strong ties, some of whom are connected to other clusters of people via weak ties, form what they call a percolating local cluster. And this, as Sattell points out in his book, as many sociologists and psychologists and network scientists have demonstrated via both mathematical models and examining the real world, this is the dynamic, the natural phenomenon, the mass collective psychology at play in the sort of social change that will eventually spread rapidly across entire populations. Percolating local clusters, that's the key. Groups of people who are strongly connected can be weakly connected to other groups in a way that allows change to leap from cluster to cluster to cluster to cluster, as thresholds are met and those clusters saturate. And when you get clusters of clusters and clusters of superclusters, Everything scales into a massive system, wide s curve of status quo, shattering change or adoption or innovation, and then it levels off into a new normal until the Next cascade comes along, and mind you, this whole thing is constantly in flux. It's planet wide today, but not too long ago, these networks were bound by geography. But no matter their size, human social networks are constantly changing in dynamic, as events and information flows and affects thresholds themselves, and as people with different interests and goals and anxieties join and leave groups, making and losing friends, coming into and out of contact with ideas. And this is why most on purpose efforts to generate this kind of widespread change took place, because there were people in many different places continuously striking at the system until they made contact with one of these percolating local clusters. But the system is far too complex to predict most of the time. So that percolating cluster, it moves around, which means you have to keep striking, and you might strike your entire lifetime if so. Many of these movements, they pass down the hammer, a continuous, relentless striking at the status quo. That's the final piece of all this, at least in our examples. Cascades, whether they're naturally forming or they've been set in motion by directed, on purpose human action, they begin all the time in social networks. They get going for a while, and then, usually without much impact, they fizzle out. And if you'll forgive all the mixed metaphors here, let's move from hammers striking to forest fires. That's how sociologist Duncan Watts puts it. He says they're like forest fires caused by lightning strikes and tossed cigarettes, inciting moments that could be very big or very small. But these create continuous fires year round, and most of the time, those fires quickly die out. But every once in a while, when the conditions are just right, no matter the size of the initial spark, if it ignites a flame in just the right place at the right time, the resulting fire will persist and grow and spread for millions of acres. And that's due to the state of the network where that fire began. Now, when the cascade is part of a human interaction passing from human brain to brain, there's all sorts of factors that affect the likelihood of a movement persisting and growing and spreading. Like media representation, activism, events big and small. All of these things can either lower or raise people's existing thresholds, either all across a population or just in isolated clusters that may or may not have weak ties across them. So there are millions of variables that can alter the conditions of a network. But when those conditions are just right, one spark, one rock in just the right place at the right time, among the right mix of thresholds, can lead to a global cascade of change.

[David McRaney]

All these different clusters are connected to each other in the same way. And adjacent clusters of nodes, these can be people or computers or whatever. If one supersaturates, as in the last example when the riot broke out, that can help to influence adjacent clusters. And when that happens, that's what creates this cascading viral behavior. So what? What we like to say is it's small groups loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose that drives this cascading behavior, which leads to. To transformational change. Our job as leaders isn't to push people or to make them do anything, but to help those groups to connect, empower them to succeed, and to provide them with a sense of purpose.

[Greg Satel]

And now we take a break from our program for a word from our sponsors. Sam, if you could hear love, what would it sound like?

[David McRaney]

Son, can we talk about your drinking?

[Greg Satel]

Yeah, Dad, I think we should. Helping those closest to you think about their excessive drinking. Maybe that's what love sounds like. [e-mail] An OHA initiative.

[David McRaney]

I'm gonna put you on, nephew.

[Greg Satel]

All right, unc. Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order, miss?

[David McRaney]

I've been hitting up McDonald's for years.

[Greg Satel]

Now it's back.

[David McRaney]

We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.

[Greg Satel]

The School of Thought. I love this place. I've been a fan of the School of Thought for years. It's a non profit organization. They provide free Creative commons critical thinking resources to more than 30 million people worldwide. And their mission is to help popularize critical thinking, reason, media literacy, scientific literacy, and a desire to understand things deeply via intellectual humility. So you can see why I would totally be into something like this. The founders of the School of Thought have just launched something new called Kitted Thinking Tools. K I T T E D Thinking Tools. And the way this works is you go to the website, you pick out the kit that you want, there's tons of them. And the School of Thought will send you a kit of very nice, beautifully designed, well curated, high quality. Each one about double the size of a playing card, matte cello 400 GSM stock prompt cards, and a nice magnetically latching box that you can use to facilitate workshops, level up brainstorming and creative thinking sessions, optimize user and customer experience and design, elevate strategic planning and decision making, mitigate risks and liabilities, and much, much more. Each kit can, if you want to use it this way, interact with this crazy cool app. Each card has a corresponding digital version with examples and templates and videos and step by step instructions and more. You even get PowerPoint and Keynote templates. There are so many ways you could use this. Here's some ideas. If you're a venture capital investor, you could get the Investor's Critical Thinking Kit and use it to stress test and evaluate different startups for Series A funding. If you're a user experienced designer, you can get the User Design Kit to put together a workshop with internal stockholders for a software product. Or if you're an HR professional, you could mix and match these kits to create a complete professional development learning program tailored specifically for your team over the course of the next two years. So if you're the kind of person who is fascinated with critical thinking and motivated reasoning and intellectual humility and biases, fallacies and heuristics, the sort of person who listens to podcasts like you are not so smart, you're probably the kind of person who would love these decks. If you're curious, you can get a special 50% off offer. That's right, half off offer right here. You can get half off of one of these kits by heading to Kitted Shop K I T T E D Shop and using the code smart50 at checkout. That's smart50 at checkout. 5% of the profits will go back to the school of thought. So you're supporting a good cause that distributes free critical thinking tools all over the world on top of receiving a set of thinking superpowers in a box. Check all of this out at Kitted Shop or just click the link in the show notes. And now we return to our program. Welcome back. The rest of this episode features excerpts and moments and conversational highlights from my interview with Greg Satel, the author of Cascades.

[David McRaney]

When somebody has a very different view from you, they find it hard to believe that you sincerely hold your view. I always found that interesting.

[Greg Satel]

They think that you only hold it because you haven't seen everything. Or as you, you know, like you gotta. If you just saw what they saw, I mean, you know, you just haven't had the right experience yet.

[David McRaney]

And that's why change fails. That's why so many of these movements fail, because they think. People tend to think that the righteousness of their cause will save them, but it won't. People think that if people really understood the idea that they would adopt it. That's almost never true. Change is about overcoming resistance. Because anytime you set out to achieve any, anything significant, make any sort of significant impact, there's always going to be people who aren't going to like it, and they're going to work to undermine what you're trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest and underhanded and deceptive. And that's your first job. That's the biggest difference between the change movements that succeed and the change movements that fail. The change movements that. That succeed, plan for that. And one of my favorite stories about change is, as you know, in the book, I write quite a bit about my friend Serjah Popovich and the. The Serbian movement Otpor, that overthrew Milosevic. And it's incredible story. It's almost a microcosm of. Of every successful change movement because it starts off with a failure. In 1992, they had these student protests against the war in Bosnia. They had a bunch of concerts. He says, this was our Occupy moment. All the students in the street, and then they go. And then the school year ends and everybody has to go home. And that was the end of that movement. Then they got a bit closer in 2006, where there was an opposition political movement that came together. It was called Zayedno, which in, in Serbian means together. And they actually had a lot of success with the. The local elections. And then Milosevic tried to essentially ignore those elections. And so they had these weeks of. Of protests. And that's when they really began to learn how to keep the excitement and keep the. The things going. But eventually they couldn't. They couldn't keep the unity, and it fell apart. And that's usually that. That's usually how authoritarians stay in power. We've. We've seen this a lot recently, not so much people love them so much, but. But usually the opposition can't unite and authoritarians win because they say they're on the side of order. But in 1998, they were really frustrated and they saw that war was probably coming again. So five of them from different parties, they met. These were just kids in their 20s, they met in a cafe and they said, listen, we've had some successes and we've had some failures. So they look back on what worked, what didn't, and took a hard look at themselves, and they said, listen, we know that we can mobilize people, and we know we can get them to the polls, and we know if we get them to the polls, we can win the next election, which was two years later, in 2000. And we know if we win the election, Milosevic is going to try and steal it. So that's what we'll plan for. Not to Win the election. But what happens when he tries to steal it? And then the next day, six of their friends joined them. Those were the, Those were the 11 original founders of Otpor, the resistance movement in Serbia. Otpor means resist in Serbia. And then a year later, there was about 2, 300 of them. And they were doing all these street pranks. And anybody who looked at Serbia would have to conclude that Milosevic would be dictator for life. And then a year after that, there was seven. Their movement had grown to 70,000. Milosevic loses the election, tries to steal it, his regime is brought down, and next thing you know, he's on the his way to the Hague where he would die in his prison cell. But most change stories, successful ones, they start off with that. A failure, a learning from the failure. And then change becomes, progresses in a nonlinear way. There is this incubation period where these networks are being built, and then you have the instantaneous phase, transition, to use the network science term, which is usually tr, which is almost always triggered by some external thing. And that movement finds its moment. And then that's when change happens. And change usually happens not because people are persuaded, but because those who oppose it discredit themselves in some way. And that's also why so many change movements, so many change efforts fail, because they look back and they see the moment and they confuse that moment with the movement. Well, from a practical point of view, and this is what one of the things we work on with the organizations we work with is, you want to start with a majority. It's a very, very simple concept, but it's incredibly powerful. Even if that majority is three people in a room of five, you can always expand a majority out, even if it's a small local majority. But as soon as you're in the minority, you're going to feel immediate pushback. And when that happens, you're going to feel the urge to persuade. And that urge to persuade is a red flag. Once you feel the need to convince people or persuade them, you either have the wrong idea, the wrong people, you need to back up, go find your majority and empower them to succeed with a keystone change. And that's how you get out of the business of selling an idea and into the business of selling a success. And one way that you can help spread that is something we call a co optable resource. So giving them something that they can use for their own purposes to move your movement along. So my favorite example of this, and then I later met the woman who helped start it was, was TEDx, is TEDx. If you think about TEDx, thousands of people across the world, you know, invest probably millions of man hours, tons of effort, all to promote somebody else's conference. Not doing it for the conference, they're doing it for their own purposes. All TED did was allow them to co opt the resource.

[Greg Satel]

You give me some ideas. Well, here's some things you need to do now that you've got this in your head, one of which is revolutions do not begin with a slogan. What do you mean?

[David McRaney]

Well, people tend, when people tend to look at a change as an exercise in persuasion and most change efforts within organizations start with an internal communication program them which is, tends to be the worst thing you can possibly do because here's a change, there's nothing's been achieved yet. Most people aren't going to be on board and some people are going to hate it and they're going to want to undermine it and attack it. So instead of actually going quietly and, and building success before you get to those haters you're broadcasting, so you let them know that unless they start undermining it right away, it might actually, it might actually succeed. What, what you want is, you want to start with the cause. And it's one of the things that, that entrepreneurs often get wrong is they start looking for the, the largest addressable market. The largest addressable market by definition is already pretty well served if you have something new and different. What you want is the hair on fire use case somebody who has a problem that they need solved so badly that their hair is almost literally on fire. Let me ask you this, have you ever had this situation happen? You're in a meeting and somebody proposes something and during the course of the next hour the people in the room are slowly moved towards a consensus and at the end you're moving to next steps and somebody who hadn't said a word the entire time throws a hissy fit in the middle of the conference room and completely discredits themselves.

[Greg Satel]

Yeah, for sure.

[David McRaney]

So think about why that happened. When the idea was first proposed, they had a such a visceral resistance that they couldn't even articulate it, which is why they didn't say anything. The simple fact is we all have attachments to people, ideas and other things. And when those, when those attachments are threatened, we lash out for reasons even we can't explain. And it doesn't make when I say that, that people are going to undermine what you're trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest and underhanded and deceptive. That doesn't make them bad people. In fact, we all do it. But, so that's what happens in that conference room. So they're thinking, okay, people are going to see, they hear the idea, they have a visceral reaction that they can articulate, and they're sure that somebody else will see that this is a really bad idea and derail it. And that never happens. And then what triggers them, what triggers them is the initial success and the idea that the idea is going forward. And that's why so often change fails to survive victory, because they don't plan for that. You need to plan for that happening, right? So, but most of the time, they don't actually have that outburst and discredit themselves. They go out into the hallways and start sabotaging you quietly there. And that's why so many change efforts fail, is because that, that, that resistance isn't voiced. So the worst thing you can do by treating change as a communication exercise is give them a head start to quietly start undermining you and kill it even before it gets started. And there's some, some good strategies how to overcome that. And what you see is most, most successful change efforts learn to anticipate that resistance and use it to their favor. There's five reasons people resist. Thanks. The first is a lack of trust. They don't trust the idea or the person or the organization or whatever. The second is change fatigue. PwC had a survey, they had some research from even before the pandemic that about 2/3 of employees in this study, I think we like 2000 employees, have cited change fatigue. Nearly half didn't understand the initiatives they were being asked to do, and about a third didn't actually want them to happen. So that's the second one. The third one is competing incentives. The fourth is switching costs. So those are four completely rational reasons they're not trying to derail. They have legitimate questions. All of those things are legitimate. Lack of trust, change fatigue, switching costs, and competing or perverse incentives. Those are completely reasonable. It's the last category. When people oppose something for reasons of identity or dignity or sense of self, you can ask people to do something different. You can ask people to think a different way, but you certainly cannot ask them to be somebody different from who they think they are.

[Greg Satel]

You, you, you mentioned that you need to be explicit about your values. And you even say a movement without values is nothing more than a mob. Help me understand that a little bit better.

[David McRaney]

To bring about change, you have two kinds of stakeholders. You have constituencies of people who are targets for mobilization. And you have institutions that can actually bring change about and their targets for influence. So if you want to change education, you have students, you have parents, you have teachers, you have school boards, you have teachers unions, you have local governments, you have local businesses. Those are all stakeholders, important stakeholders in the education system. We can think of some others as well, I'm sure, but they're not the same types of stakeholders. You mobilize teachers, parents, students to influence school boards, teachers unions, local governments, so on and so forth. And so when you're thinking about tactics, you always want to be mobilizing people to influence institutions. And you need both those things. If you have pure mobilization, that's Occupy in that very same vein, if you have pure influence, you leave yourself vulnerable to a counter mobilization, which is what happened with Common Core. They had all of their ducks in a row institutionally, but then as they were rolling it out, people who didn't like the idea, they mobilized people to go to school board meetings. So you need both those things. You need the spectrum of allies and then the institutions, which are the pillars of support as the tool we use. And then when we're thinking about real actions, we need to think about who are we, who are we going to mobilize to influence what you have this.

[Greg Satel]

Idea, which is you must prepare yourself to survive victory. I love the framing of that. Help me understand it and help everybody listening understand that.

[David McRaney]

So every revolution meets its counter revolution. When we talked about the example of in the conference room, moving to next steps is what triggers the hissy fit. When, when you have an idea for change and it seems like an unlikely success, you're not, you're not going to meet much resistance people. You can talk about your idea. People like it, will like it. People who don't like it, they probably won't say anything. But once you start building traction and it becomes a reality, that's when the knives come out. Unfortunately, people believe just the opposite. They believe once they have that initial success, once they get that, that first win, that everything will be downhill after that. But that's, that's never true. It's that initial victory that triggers the resistance in, in, in California when, when Gavin Newsom, who was the, the mayor of, of San Francisco, I believe at the time when he started do doing same sex marriages at City hall, that's what triggered Proposition 8 and Proposition 8 is what triggered gay marriage. So you have to plan for that from the beginning, how you're going to survive victory. It's one of the things I love about the story of the Serbian movement was that as soon as Milosevic had been overthrown and as soon as the new government took power, they put billboards all over Belgrade. Now we're watching you and it's probably the most important thing to understand about change. And it was what we got wrong in 2004 in Ukraine in the Orange Revolution. You can never base your change effort on any particular person or policy or program. It always needs to be built on shared values and that's how you survive victory from the start.

[Greg Satel]

That is it for this episode of the you are not so Smart podcast. For links to everything that we talked about, head to you are not so smart.com or check out the show notes right there inside your podcast player. You can find my book how minds Change wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details are a David McRaney.com and I'll have all that in the show notes as well right there in your podcast player. Brit Frank just go to BritFrank.com, find Brit Frank on all the social media sites as Britt Frank. Her book is Align your mind. The David McCraney homepage you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts featured in the book how minds Change and you can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for a newsletter, read reviews and more for all the past episodes. Go to Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Audible, Spotify, or YOU are not so smart dot com. Follow me on Twitter and threads and Instagram and bluesky avidmcraney. Follow the showtsmartblog on Twitter. We are also on Facebook. You are not so Smart. And if you'd really like to support this one person operation, no editors, no staff, no writers, just me. Go to patreon.com you are not so Smart. Pitching in at any amount will get you the show ad free, but at the higher amounts you get posters, T shirts, signed books and other things. The opening music, that's Clash by Caravan palace and the easiest way and it's very helpful to support this show, this project, this whole thing is just tell somebody about it. Tell everyone about it, tell someone about the episode that you really, really liked, give them a link and check back in about two weeks for a fresh new episode of the you are not so smart podcast.

[David McRaney]

I'mma put you on nephew.

[Greg Satel]

All right, unc, welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order, miss?

[David McRaney]

I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap. It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.