Waves and Change

A wave looks like a single, sweeping force moving through water. But if we look closer and examine what each drop of water is doing within a wave, we would see remarkably little movement. Each droplet bobs up, then down, tracing a small circle in place. No droplet actually travels with the wave - they are all just kinda doing their own thing, looping their loop.

I think this is how change works too. Change comes in waves, and it's easy to imagine that the main role that matters is that of the leader. We have in our heads images of great leaders of social movements, who dedicate all their energy to the movement and are ultimately consumed by it. But if we decompose the wave of change into its droplets, those leaders would only be those at the very top of the wave - their elliptical movement is the most dramatic and most visible from below.

But the further down the wave you go, the less amplitude the droplets have in their loops, and without this mass of looping droplets, those leaders have nothing to stand on. Ultimately the wave is not any one person's contribution. It emerges when enough people are able to dance in place for long enough, with just enough coordination. The wave builds on droplets that are doing smaller, sustainable loops over time.

Lant Pritchett once said something to a room full of education researchers that stuck with me. He said: each of us thinks we are contributing a diamond, that we've done such good work that suddenly everyone will sit up and take notice and change the way things are run. But really, we are each just adding a handful of dirt to the pile. It's only when enough people have added enough handfuls of dirt to the pile that we can tip the scales and get real change. And that's what it is to be part of a movement - people coming together and contributing their handful of dirt to the pile.

There is a humility in recognizing this. You are not the wave. You may not be sure you're doing anything that matters - you're just going up and down. But pick a loop that is sustainable over time, and keep doing it with the people around you, and the wave will emerge.