Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić’s loss in recent elections was startling for a number of reasons. First, during his 14-year reign, Vučić had come to rule the country with an iron hand. Second was the scale: The opposition Student List candidates won 52.65% of the vote, while Vučić’s United Serbia party took only 39.2%.
But even more important, which you couldn’t see from all the big crowds and headlines, is what my friend the Serbian activist Srdja Popović calls the student’s “analog strategy.” Named Student in Every Village, it eschewed high-tech targeting databases and AI-generated graphics for old-fashioned door-to-door campaigning.
This is part of a larger phenomenon that leaders need to recognize and act upon. As trust in institutions has diminished, traditional channels, such as carefully crafted press releases, slick promotions, and announcements from behind a podium are increasingly ineffective. Today, organizations need to build more visceral, on-the-ground networks to gain traction.
The “Leaderless Revolutions”
In the early 2000s and 2010s, a series of popular revolutions brought down powerful authoritarian regimes. First came the color revolutions, which overthrew the remnants of communist dictatorships in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. Then the uprisings of the Arab Spring sprang up across the Middle East, bringing similar pressure on hard-line despots.
Many referred to these as “leaderless revolutions” because they had no charismatic figurehead (like a Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., or Mandela). It seemed as if the streets just spontaneously filled with self-organizing networks of protesters, empowered by technology, to demand change. The brittle 20th-century-style regimes hardly knew what hit them.
In 2013, political scientist Moisés Naím published The End of Power, in which he argued that because of increasing mobility and technological change, along with declining poverty, the power of institutions was diminishing. Power hadn’t ended exactly but, as he put it, power was becoming “easier to gain but harder to use or keep.”
While there was some truth to all of this, much of it was a mirage. I was there, in Kyiv, Ukraine, during the Orange Revolution in 2004, and it was clear even then that the protests were designed and planned by well-trained activists. Yes, technology played a part. Online message boards and text messaging were critical communication tools, but none of it just happened on its own.
As Srdja recently put it to me, “There are two kinds of movements: spontaneous and successful.” Something else was going on.
Saddleback’s Secret
When Rick Warren first arrived in Orange County, California, in 1979, he saw the opportunity to build a new kind of church. He had spent three months going door-to-door and found that while many residents identified themselves as Christians, they found church services boring and irrelevant. So he began to tailor his services and programs to meet their needs.
Today, his Saddleback Church is one of the largest congregations in the world, with 20,000 people attending services every week. Yet looks can be deceiving. What makes Warren such a powerful force isn’t those massive weekend events, but the thousands of small prayer groups that meet during the week.
The heart of the Saddleback movement is the groups of six to eight people who meet each week, build strong ties, and support each other in matters of faith, family, and career. It is the strong bonds, combined with the loose connections between those small groups, that give Saddleback its combination of massive reach and internal coherence.
My experiences in the Orange Revolution were similar. Yes, there were enormous crowds, but we largely operated in small groups, sometimes coordinating with other small groups, going online and texting to give and receive information. Later, as I got to know and work more closely with Srdja, I learned that these movements were designed that way—in no way leaderless, but very much decentralized.
As I wrote in Cascades, transformational change is driven by small groups, loosely connected, but united by a common purpose. Decentralization is not the absence of leadership. It is a different form of leadership. The job of a leader is no longer to plan and organize tasks but to help those groups connect and inspire them with a sense of shared values and shared mission.
The Disinformation Wars
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci became a household name. Signaling institutional authority, he stood behind a podium, wore a white lab coat, and talked passionately about the “science” of the disease and its spread. He asked people to change their behaviors, wear masks, and distance themselves from their neighbors.
Yet many didn’t trust him. He felt distant, and they were skeptical that someone who felt so remote from their lives could have their best interests at heart. It was as if Fauci were a minister at the pulpit, but congregants never made it to the service. They were still in their prayer groups, reading from an entirely different hymn book, written by other people they saw in white lab coats just like Fauci’s on social media and YouTube but saying very different things.
Recently, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked into how we share information—and misinformation—in our little “prayer groups.” What they found was troubling. Their model suggests that when we’re surrounded by people who think like us, we share information more freely because we don’t expect to be challenged. We’re also less likely to check our facts, because we know that those we’re sharing with are less likely to inspect the facts themselves.
In Naím’s 2023 follow-up to his earlier book, The Revenge of Power, he showed how many of those same players that had been disrupted in earlier revolutions, like autocrats, corporations, and criminal networks, adapted the same tools that the movements used, such as the internet and social media, to discredit their opponents, reconstitute their power, and disrupt institutions.
That’s what leaders are struggling with today. The old institutional channels are clogged. Messages must compete with myriad sources of information, ranging from good-faith institutions to nefarious players, rumor, and innuendo, before they can reach each of those small groups.
All change is local, now more than ever
In the 1950s, sociologist William Whyte made an observation about the spread of air conditioners. Back then, units were installed in windows, and he observed that these didn’t propagate evenly, but in clusters from building to building. People weren’t buying air conditioners after just hearing about them. They bought one after visiting a neighbor who had one running on a hot day.
Yet this was also the beginning of the era of mass communication. New electronic media, like television and later the internet, were measurable in ways that traditional channels were not. Increasingly sophisticated marketers divided audiences, tracked metrics, and built complicated mathematical models in an effort to make persuasion more predictable and accountable.
Yet the human brain never changed. We evolved to manage relatively small social networks that max out at about 150 people, a phenomenon known as Dunbar’s number. Beyond that, our capacity for trust diminishes greatly. Decades of research have shown that we rarely interact with information directly, but rather filter it through our peer networks.
What recent events in Serbia, Hungary, and other places have shown is that this process can be countered, but as General Stanley McChrystal has put it, “It takes a network to defeat a network.” While it is true that institutions, nation-states, and oligarchs today have the capacity to broadcast messages that permeate every facet of our lives, it is becoming increasingly clear that people are no longer listening.
It’s no longer enough to communicate a vision to shape opinions. Leaders today must learn to shape networks.