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by
Seth Godin
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April 24 - May 15, 2025
Not sympathy. You don’t have to agree with how any node in a system will choose to act. And not, “If I were you,” because you’re not them. Only they are them. This is the empathy of, “I don’t know what you know, see what you see, or believe what you believe. And that’s okay.”
You can be right or you can make progress. It helps if you’re right, but progress actually comes from helping other people feel as though they’re right. It’s easier to help someone get to where they’re going than it is to persuade them to go somewhere else.
How did Dorothy persuade the Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow to join her on the trip to see the Wizard? Did she make a case about how much she missed home? The lesson here is worth remembering. She created the conditions where the others could get what they wanted by joining her.
We can show up with a story that resonates, and we can create the conditions for people to make different choices. But we cannot easily persuade someone that they are wrong.
So go ahead and kill the butterfly—the problems and challenges of tomorrow’s world will remain unchanged.
first step, then, is to seek to shorten the delay, to look for early signals that usually lead to later ones. More likely, though, we’ll need to have a strategy that helps us navigate when the feedback from the system is slow or confusing.
188. Systems + Games + Feedback Loops
Here are some of the precepts of strategic impact.
Require effort and expense from the early adopters: When working with the pioneers, require effort and offer status. It’s not convenient, easy, or free to go first—there’s no tension in that. Embrace the effort. The appearance of risk is actually a benefit for this cohort.
Persistence: People become what they do, so reward them for consistently showing up to do the new thing.
Moving forward: Create one-way ratchets where sticking with the new approach is easier than giving up and moving backward.
Reinvest: Use the resources earned from early users to invest in creating what the next s...
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Gabe Anderson blogged about the bigger hoop analogy. NBA players don’t complain that the hoop on the net is too small (a bigger hoop, after all, would make everything easier). Instead, they embrace the opportunity to focus on court speed, teamwork, or shooting accuracy. All games have constraints. We can deny them or we can work with them.
When we see who benefits from the persistence of the system, we’ve identified the people who will work to maintain it. People adhere to a cultural system as long as the perceived safety and comfort in maintaining the status quo outweighs the potential risks and uncertainties of departing from it.
191. Six System Traps
Drift to low performance is the disappointing path of comparing our low performance to others’ even worse performance, and creating a feedback loop of lowering the bar. Once a neighborhood starts to be unkempt, it’s likely that someone might care less and make it a bit worse, which amplifies the downward spiral.
The system adjusts. We can influence it, but it’s unlikely we can simply replace it.
If you change what gets measured, you’ll change what gets done.
The best tactic I know for someone seeking to influence a system is simple: Elevate the useful proxies and diminish the presence of the false ones.
Things like: • The percentage of failed searches • The trending sentiment of loyalty and trust in the brand • The health of the ecosystem that the network depends on • Impact of philanthropic ventures • Shift in the literacy rate • New projects built on the API • Daily average users of email
This was what the decision-making system in their marketing department looked like. She understood that there was no point in hiding it—if vendors didn’t know how it worked, they’d simply waste everyone’s time and energy.
Systems change. They are dynamic. When an event occurs that stresses a system, the rules of the system change, as do the outputs. In our lifetimes, one of the most significant agents of change has been technology.
The agent of change often takes the form of: • Communications • Competition • Community action and regulation • The means of production and access to capital • Easing or creation of constraints • Cultural shifts
Here are some change agents through the ages:
These are either threats or opportunities. The smart strategy is to bet on change. How will the new system create opportunities for people brave enough to take them?
It was only the invention of the telephone that permitted knowledge workers to have an office in a skyscraper. Alexander Graham Bell changed real estate. If you look for a change agent, you can find one.
Status and affiliation. Kehler isn’t in the cow business. He’s in the business of taking a commodity raw material and turning it into a high-value food item. It shouldn’t matter to him whether the raw material is from a cow, a chickpea, or a nut. But it does. This is similar to the way the book industry acts—as if it’s in the cutting-down-trees business instead of the enterprise of bringing new ideas to people who want to pay for them.
The irony is that the very status and affiliation that allow them to bully insurgents could also be powerful tools to help them invent the future instead.
203. What Will I Tell the Others? That’s the second question. The first question is, “Why will I tell the others?” How will the network you’re building benefit me? Will it increase my status, enhance my social affiliation, or decrease my fear? The network effect powers us through this. It gives us a reason. And then the second question: Have we made it easy for you to tell the others?
When we offer utility, status, or affiliation to our users, they’re more likely to use the systems leverage they have to find us more users.
The forces on the system exist long before the system itself changes.
No one makes decisions for the system. The invisible hand has no owner. Not even the president/founder/COO/monarch has complete control over the system.
When pitching an idea, we imagine that the person we’re talking to cares primarily about the entire system, about what it should want. They don’t. They’re not even aware of the entire system. They’re simply thinking about their boss, or their urgent needs, or nothing much at all. • And when considering a change, we often revert to thinking about our limited agency and the person right in front of us, instead of probing for what might make the system itself pivot and shift.
208. Types of Elegant Strategies
Low cost is easy to claim but hard to do. Many organizations claim that this is what they do, but they end up with only the low-price part. If you don’t have a substantial process advantage, low prices are almost impossible to maintain. It’s a race to the bottom and you might win. Cut enough corners and there’s nothing left. And resilience disappears.
People don’t share because they like you. They share because it helps them achieve their objectives. Alcoholics Anonymous isn’t anonymous, and you can’t do it by yourself. That’s the point.
Potential risk remediation is a complicated way to say, “everything will be okay (if you listen to us).”
“No one ever got fired for buying IBM” was true for 40 years. It wasn’t because they had the best tech for any given problem (they rarely did). It was because they created so much reassurance, cultural advantage, and convenience that it was easier to say “yes” than to risk shopping around.
Several things determine how an existing system will respond to a change agent. • Does adapting to the change require a different set of metrics, rewards, and approaches? • Does the change lead to a significant change in the dominant status structure—one that those in power will seek to stop? • Does the change rhyme with previous changes, and does the system have a history of accepting and working with these sorts of changes? • Is the problem or insight the agent of change brings persistent and permanent, or is it transient or simply urgent? • Do other systems benefit from the change in a
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the words of Neil Levy, “We cannot undo the effects of luck with more luck.”
Systems contain feedback loops, and the loops often reward an early lead. It’s more productive to go faster now than it is to go faster later. When a six-year-old kid beats the other kids at tennis, that kid is more likely to be encouraged to play more, or to get a coach, and pretty soon, they’re much better at tennis than the others. That leads to more coaches and more tournaments.
We can decide to play in a system where our head start gives us a natural advantage. Or we can acknowledge that the feedback loops in the system are probably not going to help us at first, and we can work to find the support and coaching we need to overcome this. Scaffolding is hard to find and priceless. There are often ways forward if we’re willing to look for them.
Any strategy, scaled big enough, cannot be sustained, and it will be replaced by a new set of conditions, players, and rules. In other words: Every successful organization will fail unless it becomes something different before it does.
When a system is created, the intent is usually a good one. The pioneers of the internet weren’t trying to build a platform for trolls and misogynists. The creators of packaged foods weren’t hoping to increase obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks. But side effects often occur. Side effects are merely effects. The system produces them, often with the same reliable regularity as the desired effects. If we can’t accept the side effects, then we can’t accept the system. A strategy cannot ignore the side effects. Because side effects are part of the system, the same way that a shadow is part of the
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In moments of turbulence, new ideas and new organizations can gain traction and further the transformation. It’s easy to imagine that the turbulence will last forever, but it rarely does.
Sometimes, the job of a gatekeeper is to keep the gate closed.
215. Kinds of Tension
Our project relieves the tension once it’s adopted by those in our community. There’s a hump, and on the other side, there is better.
The smallest viable audience is most useful, but only when serving them is a seed that grows into a larger segment of the market, causing the change you seek.
Traditionally, organizations have focused on a few pillars to win in the marketplace: • Reliable quality through process innovation • Better price • Intellectual property • Persistent positioning advantage • Customer service • Distribution lock-in • Product innovation • Specialization • Partnerships
