The Making Of A Changemaker
Photograph by Xuan Nguyen
The Making Of A Changemaker
New Def.
Change-maker
(CHānj-ˈmākər)
noun
Someone who alters perspectives, brings forth a new solution that shifts narratives, changes norms, introduces new practices and habits never imagined before, disturbs the status quo, and delivers a whole community of people into an alternative future.
Synonyms: Social, Political, and Business Leaders, Startup CEOs, Entrepreneurs, Captains of Important Missions, Revolutionary Poets, Artists, and Statespeople, Gamechangers, Chiefs with heart, Social Guides, Community Developers, Engineers, Builders, Philosophers in Action, and Biospheric Humanitarians.
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The ancients tell us that change is the only constant. However, at the turn of this century, anyone who is paying attention can easily tell that the rate of change is accelerating significantly. On the one hand, this change is upsetting the proverbial apple cart, but on the other hand, it is also bringing with it new opportunities. Old roles, titles, and symbols are being tossed aside, and new ones are emerging. A new metaphor for a social role, called changemaker, is finding its way into a commonplace vernacular. Although, as of this writing, if you search Merriam-Webster dictionary, it defines the word changemaker as a "device that mechanically supplies change in coins of desired denominations upon the operation of the proper levers or keys." In the digital era of value creation, money, and currency, Merriam-Webster is off its mark. Via this article, I propose a new definition for changemaker, that might be more apropos to the era we live in.
When change happens, most people, most of the time, find themselves at the mercy of the change, without recourse, and as victims of what's going on. Then there are those, who embrace change, take responsibility for it, and participate in the emergence of change in such a way that we could say that those people are bringing change. No single person can single-handedly bring change, but those that get in front of change, and become guides, leaders, and innovators, could be honored with the name of changemakers.
In this conversation, we are going to look at two distinct and interrelating sets of questions regarding changemakers.
First, what is a changemaker? What is the job of a changemaker? What is the historical significance of a changemaker? What do changemakers do, and what difference do they make?
Second, are changemakers born or created? What virtues (as habits of thinking, speaking, and action) constitute the making of a successful changemaker? What constitutional environments and institutional backgrounds produce changemakers?
I propose that a changemaker is someone who alters perspectives by bringing forth a new solution that shifts narratives, changes norms, introduces new practices and habits never imagined before, disturbs the status quo, and delivers a whole community of people into an alternative future.
A changemaker, in the face of serious societal breakdowns, does not hide under a rug and assumes that dealing with these breakdowns is going to be someone else's responsibility. But they instead take it upon themself to take the bull by the horns, confront what is broken, and then pave the way for a new world to emerge. A changemaker sets up the conditions for the change to occur in such a way that a significant improvement is felt by those that were otherwise in denial, in benumbment, and at the effect of the change without a recourse. A changemaker takes a solemn responsibility to bring about and catalyze a profound shift in the communities they participate in and care about.
I have decided to write this article to help those changemakers prepare themselves for the enormous responsibility and projects of transformation that are either upon them or await them in the near future.
Of course, the changemakers are not sitting around and waiting for some article to be written before they can take on important missions and commit their lives in service to the people and domains of concerns they care about. All too often, changemakers jump head-first without much preparation. All too often, I have seen would-be changemakers suffer from roadblocks, failure, disappointment, and tragic loss without ever having investigated what the source of their failure is. Our society, in general, fails to cultivate virtues and design human beings to take leadership and go on and become changemakers.
We erroneously believe that changemakers are born—either you are, or you aren't a changemaker. Consequently, there is a lack of focus on the cultivation of habits and virtues that make a successful changemaker.
When failure occurs in changemakers' lives and careers, it is almost expected and accepted as a part of the Darwinian natural selection process. Almost no one talks about the foundational changes that must be brought about at personal, familial, institutional, and cultural levels in our educational systems to prepare changemakers better. Every nine out of ten entrepreneurial adventures fail, and the metaphor of "go big or go home" is accepted as common-sense without hesitation. This rate of failure and waste is unnecessary and unacceptable.
Nonetheless, our times call for changemakers, and the changemakers are showing up. Age, race, gender, religious background, culture, and ethnicity do not seem to be the deciding factors in the making of a changemaker. Anyone courageous enough to prepare themself could be a changemaker. It used to be so that you have to get a proper college education, then work for a big company, have some experience and savings, and then launch your own adventure. Not anymore! Whether I agree or disagree with them, Mark Zuckerberg, Kylie Jenner, Malala Yousafzai, and Greta Thunberg have redefined the required age limit for participating in game-changing business and social missions.
Today, we have people fighting messes, wastes, and deeply institutionalized rigid and bureaucratic tyrannies in our public and private enterprises, in the domains of technology, business, politics, energy, healthcare, education, social justice, and so on. These changemakers are fighting for new frontiers of human will and possibility. They are fighting the monsters of profound resignation in their respective communities about what's possible.
These changemakers are not always succeeding in their goals. But in each case, such changemakers are taking stands against inequalities, injustice, and inhumanity and being the cause of inspiration for millions of others to take the same stand. Sanders may have lost the last presidential election but has forever transformed politics in the United States. In technology and business, changemakers such as Elon Musk may be far behind in their goals of leaving earth for an interplanetary journey but have initiated a new dream in the consciousness of humanity.
A changemaker's commitment is a commitment of a lifetime.
There are a significant number of changemakers emerging across the world in all fields of action. Massive shifts occurring in global climate, social equities, and politics; accelerated by the waste accumulated from the last 100 years of mindless production; catalyzed by the emergence of new diseases, and social unrest, the polarization of masses at macro and micro-levels; and joined by the invention of new technologies and unequal access—may be provoking the emergence of changemakers across the earth. People are committing themselves, and their lives to serious challenges ignored comfortably (and criminally) by their preceding generations.
Some thinkers have noted this emergence of changemakers. In his less known but historical doctoral thesis, "The Emergence of A Biospheric Humanitarian," Dr. James McManis proposes that a new class of human beings is emerging in response to catastrophes across the globe. He has termed these social changemakers Biospheric Humanitarians. He writes,
"[The Biospheric Humanitarian] makes a conscious, deliberate choice to act on behalf of the environment while also acting on behalf of humans. Each has an awakened and developed sense of the interrelationship that exists between humans and the earth. Each sustains her/himself and her/his faith in committed action, through the course of encountering obstacles and difficulties. Each recognizes the importance of localized action (act locally), as it contributes to the betterment of the whole (sees and thinks globally.)"
In his thesis, published in 2004, Dr. McManis studied the lives of eight women and men who practice as Biospheric Humanitarians. In 2006 at his invitation, I became obsessed with the notion that someone may commit themselves and their career to care for important societal concerns. I left Microsoft and had the good fortune to spend a decade studying and working with Dr. McManis on launching entrepreneurial projects and preparing for the responsibility for the cultivation of such people.
Over my career, I have met many changemakers who have committed themselves to ideas, missions, causes, and narratives larger than themselves. These human beings have inspired me to investigate this phenomenon further and seriously.
With my aim to continue my research and the work of my predecessors, I launched a startup incubator, Conceivian, in 2010. After a few years of running Conceivian and advising hundreds of entrepreneurs, I noticed that such entrepreneurs' success did not solely depend on the quality of their product but certain traits of their characters. Three years later, I closed the incubator to investigate these emergent traits and how we may cultivate these individually and systematically.
Upon closing Conceivian, I went to study with Chauncey Bell and then Fernando Flores, who taught me important distinctions for observing history and preparing changemakers engaged in history-making. Their philosophical frameworks are my foundations for further research and pursuits in this direction.
In this conversation, my intention is not to provide a list of steps on how to design a changemaker but to open a new dialogue with serious people concerned about the future of humanity. This is a dialogue of designing and cultivating cultures where change-making itself is nourished, embraced, honored, and celebrated as an art, as an educational science, and as a tradition. So here are five virtues that make a powerful changemaker.
Virtue 1. Mastery with Moods
The primary virtue for a changemaker, which could be said to be the basis of all the other virtues, is mastery with moods. The skills for dealing with moods are the most foundational skills for living a powerful life, building new enterprises, and bringing profound changes in our society. What are moods? Moods are our opinions about our future. A changemaker is a bridge to a new possibility in a world where the current moods look glum. When tidal shifts in societal structures begin to take place, most people freak out. If you join the moods of the masses, your possibilities are limited to the possibilities available to the masses.
Leaders emerge as beacons of light in the scenes of a dark night with moods of possibility, rage about indignity, and radical hope. A changemaker's work is to shift the opinion of their community about their future. A changemaker is essentially a mood-maker. Change is simply an opportunity for the reconfiguration of power. Our power is about our sensing and caring for our existence. And our moods shape our existence.
At the time of this writing, an epidemic has turned our world upside down. Many businesses, governments, and enterprises are facing significant challenges. And at the same time, new opportunities for global solidarity, the democratization of power, and reconfiguration of roles and economic status are opening up for minorities and suppressed classes worldwide. New conversations and new networks are emerging.
How will you participate in these conversations? If you run around scared while keep repeating "we just don't know what is going to happen" in a state of fear and paralysis, of course, the new opportunities won't open up to you. When investigating major breakdowns like the ones caused by a major catastrophe and societal interruption, it is crucial to cultivate the moods of curiosity, care, and learning, so that the cracks of the current configuration of power could become visible to you.
In times of change, the moods of serenity, resolution, and commitment can take you to an ecstatically powerful life. While the moods of fear, overwhelm, and confusion can eat away at your future possibilities.
The practices for cultivating moods of ambition, passion, wonder, and awe, open hidden doors to treasures. Whereas the reoccurring moods of resentment, mistrust, resignation, and skepticism (found abundantly in our modern enterprises today) are sure to take us in the wrong direction and waste our time and life. Changemakers with the lack of capacity for dealing with moods would have a very difficult time building networks, partnerships, and teams essential for bringing forth world-changing innovations in business, technology, politics, science, or any other field.
The skills for learning to recognize, characterize, and articulate moods are like superpowers for changemakers. As a changemaker, you must start by investigating moods that get in the way of powerful life and then cultivating moods that open new maps of power for you. Mastery with moods also includes sensing and dealing with stuck, fake, hypocritic, and wasteful moods and transforming these into moods of authenticity and courage.
Virtue 2. Competency with Language
If we pay careful attention, we will notice that everything in our world that is important and everything we care about is invented in language.
The worlds and cultures we inhabit, and all the improvements and symbolization brought forth historically as innovations, emerged first as linguistic distinctions and then preserved in language for successive generations. The late 20th century German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin, in his "Order and History," a historical diatribe against Gnostic ideology, writes,
"The order of history emerges from the history of order. Every society is burdened with the task under its concrete conditions of creating an order that will endow the fact of its existence with meaning in terms of ends divine and human. And the attempts to find symbolic forms that will adequately express the meaning, while imperfect, do not form a senseless series of failures."
He goes on to say,
"Compact blocks of the knowable will be differentiated into their component parts and the knowable itself will gradually come to be distinguished from the essentially unknowable. Thus, the history of symbolization is a progression from compact to differentiated experiences and symbols."
We invent ourselves and our futures in language. Before there is world, there is word; and of course, we are not the first to notice or philosophize this. Many religious texts and ancient philosophers point towards this phenomenon. J.L. Austin from Cambridge University was the first modern philosopher to emphasize the importance of language as generative instead of being descriptive in his book, "How to Do Things With Words."
The practices that seem so rigid, fixed, wasteful, and unmoveable - that innovators and changemakers are up against - those practices live in the linguistic habits of human beings. Humanity lives in a long-running story, and changemakers are conscious editors of this story. When a changemaker makes a presentation, they are not solely describing their idea but inventing a new world, and inviting partners, investors, and employees to join that world. When an investor says, "We are on," or a priest says, "I declare you husband and wife," they are not just providing information or describing some reality. They are declaring a new world, a new reality, that changes the course of history. Language can also destroy a world. "You are fired" or "I divorce you" is a destruction of a certain world.
So, it would behoove a changemaker to learn to use language, so they are not merely speaking to describe things but intently creating their reality as they speak. With language, we make things happen. This kind of competency with language will produce mastery with action and making things happen. Competency with language is about honoring one's word. This virtue enables changemakers to speak as a matter of invention and not as a matter of description.
When we train ourselves to speak with the awareness of the generative power of language, we begin to notice the commitments that we make and the worlds we invent as we speak.
To invent something new and to bring about a new future, we need to collaborate, co-invent, co-partner and co-invest together with people. When we don't have competency with language, we see the future happening and unfolding like some automatic thing. Competency with language allows us to see that standing in the present; one can articulate and commit to a future and make it happen. A changemaker's primary job is to stand in the present and invent the future in language. By making powerful and seductive offers, changemakers open new possibilities for others that join them in important missions.
Competency with language includes the skills for dancing in conversations, negotiating, inventing constitutional agreements and partnerships, dealing with breakdowns, and re-articulating new possibilities in the face of breakdowns.
Virtue 3. Openness to Learning
The virtue of openness to learning is among the essential virtues in the making of a changemaker. To bring about a serious societal shift, a changemaker must start as a new beginner in observing messes, wastes, and deep-seated pains.
If we start with obvious preconceived ideas of what the world needs and turn tone-deaf to the underlying habit patterns that are causing breakdowns in the lives of people, we cannot bring profound changes. Innovation happens in experimentation and by learning from each attempt.
Openness to learning could be characterized as a habitual mood that could be cultivated. Openness to learning requires curiosity, deliberation, willingness to explore new possibilities, willingness to listen, and willingness to fail temporarily.
Arrogance blocks learning, which says, I know better than anyone else what’s going and what to do here, I don’t need anyone else’s opinion, and I don’t care about the cost to me or others. Arrogance confirms itself with perceptual faith in facts and localized common sense, blocking one from seeing what is not visible. A changemaker chases anomalies that are invisible to the common sense of masses.
Arrogance is the changemaker’s top enemy.
For some time, I have been wondering how to deal with the arrogance of my own and those I care deeply about. In addition to coaching and advising adult entrepreneurs, I have also had the opportunity to run a private school of younglings with extraordinary capabilities. At first, when I encountered arrogance and refusal to learn alternative views from my clients, I considered it a natural occurrence of a kind. I thought that nothing could heal this kind of blindness other than prayer and wishful thinking. However, my years of experimentation have shown me that we could open the learner’s mind to new possibilities with commitment from both learner and coach. This feat is possible with ontological conversations and education that opens the learner to an appreciation of history and language and with regular and intense practice of a mind focus technique (during which the brain may develop new neural networks capable of higher perception). It is beyond the scope of this article to go into details of how precisely this kind of opening is possible and achievable. We will discuss these details in other articles and conversations.
Close-mindedness and lack of openness to learning essentially stem from the fear of the unknown and blind attachment to factualism. We cannot altogether remove the fear of the unknown, but cultivating moods of curiosity and urgency (to take care of some concern) could create openings for new perspectives. Courage comes from intense curiosity and intense hunger and then lives in the body and the mind as habits of speech and action. Courage and humility are the prerequisites for openness to learning.
Before closing our introduction to this virtue, I want to bring a poem by Rumi to you. He says,
There are many guises for intelligence.
One part of you is gliding in a high windstream,
while your more ordinary notions
take little steps and peck at the ground.
Conventional knowledge is death to our souls,
and it is not really ours. It is laid on.
Yet we keep saying we find “rest” in these “beliefs.”
We must become ignorant of what we have been taught
and be instead bewildered.
Run from what is profitable and comfortable.
Distrust anyone who praises you.
Give your investment money, and the interest
on the capital, to those who are actually destitute.
Forget safety. Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.
I have tried prudent planning long enough.
From now on, I’ll be mad.
Virtue 4. Sensing Change
The previously mentioned virtues become the foundation for a virtue of sensing and locating change looming on distant horizons. Capacity and practices for sensing change is a crucial virtue for the development of leadership and change-making.
New disasters and catastrophes trigger our genetic and historical mechanisms for coping. Most people want to return to the old normal and go back to the way things were before change emerged. The change could emerge as a natural phenomenon like the current epidemic we are dealing with or as a phenomenon of the new foundational technological invention that disrupts our lives. Luddism is about the rejection of the latest technology and is rooted in romanticism about the past. The past is never as great as we remember it to be. Changemakers decline the group invitations for resignation and resentment about the change that is upon them. Changemakers accept the occurrence as something to be curious about and investigate with rigor new possibilities.
Before Louis Pasteur invented the germ theory, the vaccines for rabies and anthrax, and laid the foundations for antibiotic medicine, it was considered business-as-usual that a certain percent of the cow population died of illness. While dealing with spoiled batches of beer in his friend's factory, Pasteur arrived at an insight that small invisible animals (microbes) may be responsible for the cows' deaths. He refused to accept the well-established common sense that some cows must die. This kind of refusal, to accept well-established reasons for breakdowns, requires cultivating a sensitivity to anomalistic phenomena. Pasteur wisely said,
“Chance favors only the prepared mind.”
The development of skills for sensing change begins by denying the impulse to circumvent anomalistic phenomena. We don't cultivate thought leaders in our schools and colleges today. In our modern era, we teach science by telling people to cast aside anomalistic occurrences in scientific experiments as mistakes and to extrapolate a normalized and validated dataset. In the business of building new enterprises, startup pundits advise the same approach for building products.
The enterprise of change-making is doomed when material, biological, or business sciences become solely an engagement of validating what is well-known. Changemakers must develop a sensitivity to waves forming on the fringes, far beyond the visible horizons. Changemaking happens first as marginal practices on the fringes. Today's changemakers are wide awake to the waves forming at the fringes, such as the rise of AI, machine learning, drones, robotics in technology, environmental changes, political and economic polarization of masses, rising water tables, and pending mass migrations, and so on. There could be many anomalistic phenomena to which I am blind, but another changemaker may well be well-attuned. When a changemaker begins to develop sensitivity to change, innovation becomes a habit.
Skills for sensing change are the skills for sensing history. While participating in our everyday life, we are resigned to making any important contributions to history. The capacity for sensing change can open up to us rifts in time and spaces of our everyday lives—presenting us with entry points for making important contributions toward making new history.
This virtue of sensing change coupled with the virtue of openness to learning enables changemakers to become masters of the time. It helps them navigate and appropriate technologies, practices, politics, moods, and styles of their era.
Virtue 5. Resolution for Committed Action
Changemakers that bring profound shifts in our society do so by making serious commitments to some domain of concern and action, long before a breakthrough innovation, an idea, and a solution could emerge. Without a serious commitment to some broad or specific domains of concern, no profound discovery or change is possible. Many wanna-be entrepreneurs continue exploring one idea after another, hoping to make some money, without ever getting serious about learning and committing themselves to a major concern. Either these entrepreneurs are asleep to the context in which they are operating, or they are dilettantes.
Dilettantes are like tourists who take lots of mini-vacations in various areas of interest without ever committing and risking their careers to some concern. Uncommitted people cannot become changemakers. As soon as the terrain and conditions get difficult, they run for the hills in the hope of finding another comfortable and easier way to get what they want (generally, they tell themselves that it is money or easy livelihood or passive income they are after). But they get none, and their golden years of life get wasted accumulating superficial inch-deep and miles-wide knowledge about a lot of things.
Rumi says,
"Don't run around this world looking for a hole to hide in. There are wild beasts in every cave!"
But how does one know what to commit to? Committing to some domain of concern, to some care where the path to a solution is not immediately obvious, does not appear (like) a rational act at all. Much like falling in love, it requires, to some degree, a fall. Commitment is a matter of choice that is about the future. We can distinguish this kind of choice-making from decision-making which is about carefully analyzing past data and picking a winning strategy, much like betting in a horse race. To a great degree, choices that matter require genuine care about some people and their life concerns, including work, personal, relationship, health, security, and so on.
To a great extent, these concerns must include you, and this care must include care for yourself. If you carefully assess each billionaire's story, each leader, you will notice that at the root, there was care for something that ran deeper than the care for making money or becoming famous. My guess is that, as a teenage boy, Mark Zuckerberg cared about him and his friends having access to the right clubs and the girls in those clubs! His project for solving that became Facebook. Larry Page and Sergei Brin might have cared about disjointed university libraries and the time it took to locate the right books and voices. Their project, Backrub, became Google.
Commitment is a source of changemaker's power. The Scottish Writer, W. H. Murray famously said:
"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way."
I am not saying that one cannot change or evolve one's commitment. But building the habitual practice of resolution for committed action delivers in dividends and forms the foundation of a changemaker's character.
The virtue of resolution for committed action also includes one's willingness for courage and risk and willingness to call out bullshit. In his small but poignant book, "On Bullshit," The Harvard philosopher, Harry G. Frankfurt writes,
"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, not attracted much sustained inquiry."
He goes on quite poignantly to distinguish what bullshit is and how it destroys our culture. His book, On Bullshit, is well worth a read for any changemaker.
Lastly, on the matter of willingness for courage, commitment, and what to choose as a changemaker's mission, I want to leave you with some wisdom by Rumi. He says,
"No more muffled drums!
Uncover the drumheads!
Plant your flag in an open field!
No more timid peeking around.
Either you see the Truth,
or you lose your head!
If your throat's not ready for that Wine, cut it!
If your eyes don't want the fullness of Union,
let them turn white with disease.
Either this deep desire of mine
will be found on this journey,
or when I get back home!
It may be that the satisfaction I need
depends on my going away, so that when I've gone
and come back, I'll find it at home.
I will search for the Love with all my passion
and all my energy, until I learn
that I don't need to search.
The real truth of existence is sealed,
until after many twists and turns of the road.
As in the algebraical method of "the two errors,"
the correct answer comes only after two substitutions,
after two mistakes. Then the seeker says,
"If I had known the real way it was,
I would have stopped all the looking around."
But that knowing depends
on the time spent looking!
You fear losing a certain eminent position.
You hope to gain something from that, but it comes
from elsewhere. Existence does this switching trick,
giving you hope from one source, then satisfaction
from another.
It keeps you bewildered
and wondering, and lets your trust in the Unseen grow.
You think to make your living from tailoring,
but then somehow money comes in
through goldsmithing,
which had never entered your mind.
I don't know whether the Union I want will come
through my effort, or my giving up effort,
or from something completely separate
from anything I do or don't do.
I wait and fidget and flop about
as a decapitated chicken does, knowing that
the vital spirit has to escape this body
eventually, somehow!
This desire will find an opening."
