Tough, important battles are won with good strategy and tactics, which is why successful change agents learn to adopt the principle of Schwerpunkt. The idea is that instead of trying to defeat your opponent everywhere, you want to deliver overwhelming force and win a decisive victory at a particular point of attack.

Yet Schwerpunkt is a dynamic, not a static concept. You have to constantly innovate your approach as your opposition adapts to whatever success you achieve. For example, the civil rights movement had its first successes with boycotts, but moved on to sit-ins, “Freedom Rides,” community actions and eventually, mass marches.

Defining the grievance and the vision, creating a resistance inventory and identifying viable institutional targets will help you apply strength to weakness. The key to success isn’t any particular tactic, leader or slogan, but strategic flexibility. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what most change efforts lack. All too often they get caught up in a strategy and double down, because it feels good to believe in something, even if it’s failing.

Change, like many things, largely boils down to strategy and execution. It’s not a simple matter of belief or passion. You need to learn how to operate effectively, by studying those who succeeded and those who failed, building on your successes, dusting yourself off after the inevitable setbacks, correcting mistakes and returning to fight with renewed vigor.

So activists adopt the goal of getting 3.5% of the population. Economists focus on GDP to evaluate prosperity. CEOs adopt shareholder value as the measure of their own performance. Yet people marching in the streets does not, by itself, create institutional change, just as GDP does not encapsulate the well-being of a society and a stock price does not tell you how well a company is serving its customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

Still, those metrics often create perverse incentives that shape behavior. An activist focused solely on populating protests is unlikely to do the kind of institutional work needed to bring change to a society. A government consumed by GDP will likely miss important indicators of societal well-being, such as health and happiness. A CEO rewarded for increasing the stock price is likely to focus on quick fixes like layoffs and stock buybacks, rather than doing the hard work of improving operations.

That’s why it’s important to manage for mission, not for metrics. Or as the Polish activist and journalist Adam Michnik put it:

"Do you believe in free speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely."

In other words, if you want to make an impact, think about the end state you want to achieve. There will never be a shortage of influencers, gurus, and other hucksters who try to sell you on a simpler answer in the form of a concrete metric supposedly backed by some form of pseudoscience. Don’t listen to them.

Anybody can create a number and call it an achievement. To truly accomplish something worthwhile, you need to define a mission and attract others to it.

"Consider a future device ... in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory,” he wrote.

Yet in envisioning the future he saw both possibility and peril. He predicted much of what we use the Internet for today, including doctors being able to track down symptoms of obscure cases and lawyers being able to quickly retrieve relevant case law. Yet he also foresaw much of what we struggle with, such as information overload and the use of technology for war.

Bush was, at the time, a figure something akin to Elon Musk, but if anything more prominent. An engineer of the highest order, he invented a proto-computer at MIT. He also co-founded the company Raytheon, oversaw the U.S. government scientific programs during World War II, including the development of the atomic bomb, radar, and penicillin.

Yet probably more than anything else, he was a master at designing institutions. When the war was winding down, President Roosevelt asked him to deliver a report about how to continue America’s scientific prowess. That report, Science, The Endless Frontier, delivered to President Truman in 1945, laid out the basic architecture of programs, such as the National Science Foundation, that would transform the US into a technological superpower.

To paraphrase James Carville, it’s the institutions, stupid. If we are going to seize the promise of AI and other cutting edge areas such as quantum computing and synthetic biology, while minimizing the peril, we need structures to organize our collective will for the common good, or we will end up subjugating our will to the technologies we fail to govern.

The choices made by those who came before shaped the world we live in today. The choices we make now will shape the world we leave behind.

We need to be far more humble about our persuasive powers. Anyone who has ever been married or raised kids knows how difficult it is to convince even a single person of something. If you expect to shift the opinions of dozens or hundreds—much less thousands or millions—with pure sophistry, you’re bound to be disappointed.

A simple alternative is to start with a majority. Focus on people who already buy in. Go out and find people who are as enthusiastic as you are, who are willing to support your idea, to strengthen it and help you work through the inevitable glitches along the way. Even if that majority is only three people in a room of five, you can always expand a majority out.

That’s how you can begin to gain traction and build a sense of shared mission. As you begin to work out the kinks, you can embark on a keystone project, show some progress, build a track record and accumulate social proof. That’s how you get out of the business of selling an idea and into the business of selling success. As you gain momentum, you can build support through peer networks.

Real change doesn’t come from persuading the unconvinced with more information. It is small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose that drives genuine transformational.

Yet the Netflix founders remember events differently. They claim that not only did Antioco meet with them, but actually laughed when they proposed that Blockbuster buy Netflix for $50 million. “That night, when I got into bed and closed my eyes, I had this image of all sixty thousand Blockbuster employees erupting in laughter at the ridiculousness of our proposal,” Hastings would later write in his book, "No Rules Rules."

As I’ve previously explained, Antioco’s version of the story is more credible, but that’s really beside the point. What’s relevant is that for the Netflix guys, the humiliation felt very real. They were on the ropes, trying to survive, and cooked up a pitch to the industry’s 800-pound gorilla, only to be rebuffed. That, more than ambition, drove them to reinvent their business, make it work, and become a 800-pound gorilla themselves.

That’s why we always need to be careful about competitiveness evolving into a will to dominate. When you humiliate people, you don’t defeat them—you motivate them. And sometimes, you create your most dangerous competitor. If you’re not careful, you can sow the seeds of a humiliation cycle and inadvertently trigger your own demise.

That’s the cycle leaders need to learn to break. You need to design for collaboration by making respect visible and repeatable. The desire for recognition is a basic human need. If you don’t satisfy it constructively, it will emerge destructively.

The most likely scenario is that the future will look a lot like the past. Many things will be improved, some will be transformed, but adoption will be uneven, with some organizations and industries moving quickly to put new applications into practice, while most will lag behind. As progress fails to meet expectations, disappointment and disillusionment will set in, and focus and budgets will shift elsewhere.

If you are truly an AI expert, with the knowledge and skill to shape the technology, you can still expect to do well. There will never be a shortage of organizations that need people to help leverage technology to do important work for them. But if you are just chasing the wave, you will be tying yourself to the ebbs and flows of market sentiment.

The truth is that you can’t separate a technology from the environment in which it operates. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger argued, to build for the world you need to understand what it means to live in it. Technology becomes powerful when people who understand solutions learn to collaborate effectively with those who understand the problems that need to be solved.

So while there is clearly a need for genuine AI experts, we still need experts in every other human domain. You’re much better off betting on yourself than betting on a technology you have little or no agency over.

Yet while answers tend to close a discussion, questions help us open new doors and lead to genuine insights. Asking, “What kind of change is this?” is essential to building a strategy to overcome challenges. Investigating shared values is key to getting widespread buy-in. Analyzing sources of power is how you identify institutional targets for action.

The truth is that every great breakthrough starts with a question. As a child, Einstein asked, “What would it be like to ride on a bolt of lightning?,” which led to his theory of special relativity. He then asked a second question, “What would it be like to ride an elevator in space?” and that led to his theory of general relativity.

Change leaders often feel they need to have all the answers, but what they usually need is to ask more—and better—questions. That’s the essence of the Changemaker Mindset: it’s not about building consensus around a plan and executing it, but about building a coalition to explore possibilities that lead to a better future.

Notice how the bulk of the profits went to Apple, which designed the product and the experience, and relatively little to the supplier that developed the technology that made it possible. That’s because the technology for developing hard drives was very well understood. If it hadn’t been that supplier, another would have eventually developed what Jobs needed. The iPod, however, was something new, different, and uniquely suited to its time.

To explore, you first need to come to terms with your own ignorance. It has little to do with intelligence or diligence. Einstein is revered today because he broke new ground, but was diminished because of where he was not willing to go and became, in the words of Robert Oppenheimer, “a landmark, not a beacon.”

That is why innovation needs exploration. If you don’t explore, you won’t discover. If you don’t discover you won’t invent. And if you don’t invent, you will be disrupted. But to be an effective explorer, you need to put your assumptions aside. Purpose isn’t something you start with, it's what you discovery along your journey.

And yet, venturing with no idea what you will find requires existential rebellion. Because without knowing what you will find, you will need the journey itself to sustain you. Not all who wander are lost.

Once a cascade begins, it takes on a life of its own.

Corporate leaders in America today face a similar dilemma. Their first responsibility is to their stakeholders, whatever their own personal feelings. Yet among those millions taking to the streets are employees, customers, shareholders and their family members. Hoping you can stay on the fence is dangerously naive. It is only a matter of time before someone in your corporate community is affected by ICE and CBP violence: an arrest, getting roughed up, pepper-sprayed—or worse.

The time to act is now. If Renee Good or Alex Pretti were one of your employees or their children, what would you want to have in place for them and their families? What legal, medical or psychological support are they and their coworkers going to need? You have to start preparing for that eventuality now.

In much the same way, you need to begin to audit your partners and suppliers. Make sure the people you do business with share your values and those of your stakeholders. If they are supporting or engaging in activities that could harm your corporate community, don’t wait for an incident. Cut ties.

Most of all, you need to be explicit about your values and make sure you are living up to them. That doesn’t mean taking a political position, but it does mean being clear where you stand. As someone who has had to rise to the challenge of running a business during a revolution, I can tell you from experience that someday you will want to look back on these times, reflect on what you said and did, and be proud of the actions you took.

They are usually sorely disappointed. Decades of evidence show that shifts in knowledge and attitudes usually don’t result in changes in practice. There is also a large body of research that suggests providing people with the right information is unlikely to meaningfully influence their behavior. People aren’t blank slates—they bring prior beliefs and biases that shape how they respond to new ideas.

The truth is that change isn’t some kind of hero’s journey to some alternative future state. It is a strategic conflict between that desired state and the status quo, which always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. It has sources of power keeping it in place and those sources of power have an institutional basis.

That’s why you need to begin to think about how you will overcome resistance from the start. You can’t just wait until you encounter it and react, but must work to anticipate it and devise strategies in advance. That’s what makes the difference between successful changemakers and mere frustrated dreamers who once had an idea.