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.

Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who teaches the incredibly popular course "Building Power to Lead," defines power as the ability to get things done your way in contested situations and that gets to the meat of it. People don’t encounter our ideas in a vacuum, but in a sea of other ideas, ambitions, prerogatives, and priorities.

For people to adopt an idea, it needs to cross their thresholds of resistance, points at which joining in no longer feels risky or costly. To get them over that hump, we need to access power and influence, which comes in three forms: hard power, soft power and network power. Hard power creates incentives. Soft power persuades. Network power builds momentum and propagates the idea forward.

These don’t work in isolation, but in combination. Hard power can force a decision, but risks resentment. Soft power can win buy-in, but without connection to authority, it can’t deliver results. Network power can get you access, but not action. When you use all three in tandem, you can unlock the power to achieve what you want.

So don’t just ask whether your idea is good enough. Think about how you are going to access the power and influence you need to set it up for success. That, more than anything, will determine whether you succeed or fail.

Francis Fukuyama noted at the time that we had reached an endpoint in history, when one model had achieved dominance over all others. Yet even as he laid out the rational case, he invoked the ancient Greek concept of thymos, or “spiritedness,” to warn that even at the end of history, some would insist on going their own way, no matter the consequences.

The truth is that every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution and the pendulum will continue to swing until there can be some agreement about shared values and how to move forward. Today, we can see the consequences. Populists aren’t so much “anti-elite” as they are anti-institution, and today’s media environment rewards those who undermine institutional authority. The result is a world that feels far more divided and dangerous than it did even during the Cold War.

Our mistake was that we were far too triumphant about a “unipolar world” to recognize that we needed to redesign our institutions to adapt to a new era. We are still largely living in a society governed by postwar institutions designed for how the world was nearly 80 years ago—no Internet, no cheap air travel, global GDP roughly five percent of what it is today.

Today, much like after World War II and in 1989, we are in the midst of a fundamental realignment. To build a different future, we need to rethink our institutions—what values we want to embed in them and what our relationship to them should be. How should schools educate? Corporations produce? Governments serve? And the media inform?

We don’t need saviors or messiahs. We need to redesign and rebuild institutions that can serve and sustain us for the 21st century.

That’s what he meant by the term “existential rebellion”: to create meaning for yourself in a universe that provides none. In two decades researching innovation, transformation, and change, one constant I have found is that you can’t control your luck. Anything can happen. “Sure things” often fail, while low-probability events occur all the time.

We can easily imagine a world in which Einstein remained a clerk in a patent office, doing physics in his spare time; Ramanujan died an anonymous pauper, his genius never recognized; and William Coley’s vision of a revolutionary cancer cure remained a pipe dream. But each persevered against an indifferent universe, and we’re all better off for it.

We can’t control our luck, but we can decide for ourselves how we seek meaning. Einstein spent the final decades of his life in Princeton, NJ, working on theories that would never pan out. On his deathbed, Ramanujan defined a new class of mathematical function and the number that bears his name. Dr. Coley, now recognized as the “father of cancer immunotherapy,” died surrounded by his loving family who were dedicated to his legacy.

And, like Sisyphus, we can imagine each of them happy, and maybe hoping for a bit of luck.

Today, the world is a very different place. Beyond the worsening economic situation, we have the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. Russia, China, and other bad actors are engaged in a massive information war against the West, fueling populist surges and political turmoil in western nations. The Atlantic Alliance, once a force for stability, is in shambles.

Many would argue that, today, we are in a new Gilded Age, in which powerful industrialists, unbeholden to the rule of law, regularly engage in predatory behavior, but their actions are often shielded from view by technology, buried in complexity. When they are called before Congress, politicians seem lost, unable to meaningfully challenge their power.

And much like the Gilded Age was marked by continued cycles of government-sponsored overinvestment and financial panics, today we are likely on a path to an AI bubble that will rival the massive panics we had in 1873 and 1893. Unfortunately, unlike during the 2008 financial crises, our capacity to manage the fallout will be greatly diminished.

Clearly, we are on a path that is taking us into rough waters. As Soros described, once the pattern of self-reference and self-reinforcement has taken hold, systems don’t correct gently. They overshoot—and the eventual snapback is rarely orderly or kind. Correction will not come from markets alone. It will come through backlash—political, social, and institutional—when those left bearing the costs decide the system no longer serves them.

What Gene Sharp showed us is that change isn’t about persuasion, it’s about power. To bring about transformation, we need to undermine the sources of power that underlie the present state while strengthening the forces that favor a different future. If you can influence the institutional stakeholders keeping the status quo in place, change can happen. If you can’t, it is unlikely things will ever change.

That also helps explain why so many change efforts fail. They start with tactics designed to create a specific effect, such as “build awareness” or “create a sense of urgency.” Leaders roll out communication campaigns, design training programs, or host events like hackathons. Then they congratulate themselves when the action achieves the intended effect, and wonder why genuine change never happened.

Until you identify, analyze, and understand exactly what your actions need to be targeted at, you’re just wasting your time. Every enterprise, whether it’s an organization or an entire society, is governed by institutions that maintain the status quo. Once you are able to internalize that simple truth, you are ready to lead change effectively.

Change isn’t about snappy slogans or clever campaigns. It’s what happens when you build the capacity to influence institutions.

The truth is that change isn’t about persuasion, but collective dynamics. Decades of research has shown that change spreads through peer networks rather than communication campaigns. Or, as network science pioneer Duncan Watts once put it to me, ideas propagate through “easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people.”

That’s why you need to be wary about the urge to persuade. You want to go where the energy already is, not try to create and maintain it yourself. Find those who are already enthusiastic, empower them to succeed and they'll bring in others, who can bring in others still. As Watts’ research shows, even a small initial shift can cascade into massive transformation.

The evidence is clear: You don’t need to win over everyone at once. If you find yourself spending most of your energy trying to convince the skeptical or overpowering resistance, you're either focusing on the wrong people or the wrong idea. Instead of trying to push through, you need to regroup, reassess and identify where your efforts can be better placed.

Stop trying to persuade the immovable. Genuine transformation begins when you organize those who already want it to happen. Don’t sell change. Seed it.

Still, that doesn’t mean change is mysterious. We actually know a lot about it. In Diffusion of Innovations, researcher Everett Rogers compiled hundreds of studies performed over many decades. Around the same time, Gene Sharp led a parallel effort to understand how large-scale political movements drive social and institutional change.

So while any change effort involves no small amount of uncertainty, there is also quite a bit of consistency. Much as Tolstoy remarked about families, successful transformations end up looking very much alike, while unsuccessful transformations end up failing in their own way. Here are four numbers to keep in mind as you embark on your change journey.

Inclusive institutions protect property rights broadly across society, establish fair competition, and reward innovation. Extractive institutions, on the other hand, concentrate wealth in the hands of a small elite who exploit the broader population. These elite players control resources and use state power to enrich themselves at society's expense.

We are clearly in a liminal period in which we are struggling to adapt to shifts in technology, economics, and identity. Will AI oppress or empower regular people? Will we trade openly or retreat behind national barriers? Will we focus primarily on our local communities or see ourselves as citizens of a larger planet?

As ever, there will be no shortage of pundits predicting the paths the future will take. Many of their narratives will be persuasive—but also mutually contradictory. The real tell will be what kinds of institutions we build and which ones we allow to decay or be destroyed outright. Are we creating institutions that strengthen rights and the rule of law, or ones that serve those that are already powerful?

The outcome is still unclear, but the lines of battle have been drawn. If you want to know what to expect in the near to mid-term, pay less attention to predictions about technology, politics, or ideology and focus instead on institutions. Those are what create the norms and rituals that will shape the behaviors of the future.