The true story of change is that of a strategic conflict between your future vision and the status quo, which always has inertia on its side and never surrenders its power gracefully. It has had years—and sometimes decades or even centuries—to build up the sources of its power and it will be ruthless in defending it.

That’s why we always start every transformational effort by doing a resistance inventory, working to anticipate who will resist, what form that resistance will take, and how we can best mitigate it. Then we map the institutional forces that support the status quo, those that are open to the future vision, and those that are still on the fence. We also identify cultural triggers and how best to redesign rituals to encode new norms.

Genuine change is possible, but you have to approach it clear-eyed and hard-nosed. You can’t just wordsmith fancy slogans, set up some training sessions and expect people to drop what they are thinking and doing and start thinking and doing something else. You need to build a thoughtful strategy, execute it wisely, and adapt as things develop.

In the real world, most change efforts don’t fail because of a lack of heroes, but because they ignore the system they’re up against. If your strategy relies on heroism, it’s probably not much of a strategy.

We all know that life is messier than that, but that’s the type of thing you really have to learn for yourself. The management professor Henry Mintzberg once observed that we expect management to be like a conductor with an orchestra, with the leader on a pedestal directing each movement with expert precision.

“But,” he argues, “management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.” The truth is that you don’t want things to go exactly as planned. It’s the off-key notes that you learn from most and lead to your biggest opportunities. Here are four things I’ve learned from a very messy career that produced wonderful surprises.

Today, it’s easy to see how many things have gotten better, but it’s just as easy to see how others have gotten worse. While in the aggregate, incomes have improved, most of that has gone to top earners, leaving many households feeling worse off. While we have amazingly cool gadgets, costs for basic needs, like housing, healthcare and education, have soared.

The truth is that we’ve very good at innovating in the digital space because it’s fast, cheap and low risk. But the biggest opportunities are in the messy, physical world. So we’re ending up with lots of incremental digital innovation and not enough transformational change in the real world.

In sum, it’s hard to see how we’ve become meaningfully better off over the last 50 years. For all of the Silicon Valley blather, most American families are materially struggling and our mental health is declining. This isn’t because of some exogenous shock, but because of choices we’ve made. We have the technology to improve our lives, but the benefits are not accessible to most.

What we have to reckon with is that the world is not digital. We live, eat, travel and breathe in physical spaces and no amount of algorithms and data centers will change that. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger pointed out long ago, technology is less a creation than it is an uncovering. It brings us possibilities, but it is our responsibility to enframe and direct them in ways that will benefit us.

We live in a world of atoms, not bits. Technology only matters if it makes our lives better.

Yet the far more disturbing reality is that the Blockbuster leadership team was neither stupid nor lazy. In fact, they were innovative, made good strategic decisions, and executed them skillfully. If not for a seemingly minor compensation dispute, things could very easily have turned out very differently. I think the key to understanding what happened is something Antioco told me about an earlier initiative when I interviewed him for my book, Cascades.

“The experienced video executives were skeptical. In fact, they thought that the revenue-sharing agreement would kill the company," he told me. "But throughout my career, I had learned that whenever you set out to do anything big, some people aren’t going to like it. I’d been successful by defying the status quo at important junctures, and that’s what I thought had to be done in this case."

In other words, over the years he had been put in positions of authority and was able to implement changes and deliver results fast enough that he was able to overpower any resistance. Yet in Blockbuster's battle for survival with Netflix, key stakeholders—namely franchisees and shareholders—defected, and the floor fell out from under him.

Antioco had all the formal authority he needed to deliver genuine transformation. But it was the difficulty of managing and aligning stakeholders that led to Blockbuster’s demise. The truth is that change isn’t top-down, nor is it bottom-up. It goes side-to-side as it propagates through networks.

When coaching business leaders, I often pose a similar question: If a junior employee had a game-changing idea, how would they get it implemented and scaled throughout the organization? How would a transformational idea make its way to the top? For most, the exercise is an eye-opening experience.

In other words, how do you know you’re not being disrupted this very minute?

The only answer is that you don’t know. As Tony Soprano would tell you, it’s the dangers you don’t see that get you in the end. That’s why strong leaders learn to listen and empower people across their enterprise. That’s how you get access to the information you need to spot trouble ahead, identify viable strategies to overcome them and to make good decisions.

You don’t learn to listen and empower others just to be “nice.” You do it because it’s a survival skill. Or, as Andy Grove famously put it, “Only the paranoid survive.”

It seemed, as Francis Fukuyama famously wrote, like the end of history. The conflict between communism and capitalism appeared to be over. Just one model remained. But, as Fukuyama also noted—and as I saw firsthand living in Moscow—the human urge to assert identity remained. We weren’t witnessing an end, but the beginning of a major realignment, in which the neoliberal order, globalism, the Washington Consensus, and digital technology would reign.

But almost from the beginning, there were deep misgivings. Many developing countries, pressured by the IMF and World Bank to adopt policies that would never have been accepted in wealthier nations, chafed. And even in advanced economies, many felt left behind as globalization and offshoring hollowed out their economic lives.

Today, “new right” intellectuals like Patrick Deneen have argued that liberalism has undermined foundational aspects of society such as family, religion, and community. Others, like Curtis Yarvin, argue that democracy itself is inefficient and what we need are tech-style CEO-like sovereigns. Meanwhile, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have called for an abundance agenda that focuses more on building what we need than preventing what we don’t want.

We are now, much like America’s Founding Fathers, tasked with finding a way forward when the path is frustratingly unclear. Like generations that came before us, we will need to struggle with new paradigms made possible by advances in technologies. Yet, also like our forebears, our biggest challenge is not a lack of possibilities, but a lack of consensus.

We tend to replace questions about what kind of future we want with questions about technology. But as Martin Heidegger explained long ago, we can’t build for the world until we know how we want to live in it.

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.