Drip by drip and the thunderclap
Sea levels are rising. It happens every day, and it's been going on for a while. Most people aren't noticing, and won't, until it gets worse.
On the other hand, a hurricane or a flood captures everyone's attention and causes us to leap into action.
The thing is, incremental daily progress (negative or positive) is what actually causes transformation. A figurative drip, drip, drip. Showing up, every single day, gaining in strength, organizing for the long haul, building connection, laying track—this subtle but difficult work is how culture changes. It takes a generation to change the political landscape or to build a hundred-year company.
If you want to cause action in the short run, the opposite is true. In the short run, drip by drip rarely puts people on alert. It's the thunderclap, the coordinated, accelerating work of many people, that causes those in power to sit up and take notice. Do it a few times in a row, or fifty, or a hundred, each with more impact, and you can successfully intervene.
Money makes it complicated, because money promises a shortcut. A bigger ad budget, or more VCs or more hires. We use money to hurry up, but it distracts us from what we actually seek to build.
We fail in two ways: One, when we ignore the drips around us and discover that we've been swamped by incremental culture change that we didn't see coming. And second, when we think a few chaotic but heartfelt claps are going to be sufficient to have an impact.
And we succeed when we combine the best of both worlds. When we settle in for the hard work of daily, bottoms-up institution building, and use thunderclaps not as a distraction, but as the rhythm of our forward motion.