New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World—and How to Make It Work for You

by Jeremy Heimans

Power, as philosopher Bertrand Russell puts it, is the “ability to produce intended effects.”

They came from a world with clear boundaries between “us” and “them,” where only the lab-coated and credentialed were equipped to solve the mysteries of the cosmos.

Professional privileges and knowledge were hard-won currency. You are what you have amassed.

The looming crowd, she concluded, presented a threat to their core identity. This

These scientists stopped thinking “The lab is my world” and started thinking “The world is my lab.”

“We’re anti-excellence, pro-participation.”

Without that access, your ideas would be fringe at best.

In such circumstances, old power media companies were able to capture enormous value.

“Craft and blast” remained the dominant approach.

Simple—simplicity is the key Unexpected—surprises you and makes you want to know more Concrete—creates a clear mental picture for people Credible—uses statistics, expert endorsements, etc. Emotional—appeals to deep human instincts Stories—takes

you on a journey that helps you see how an existing problem might change

Actionable—The idea is designed to make you do something—something more than just admire, remember, and consume. It has a call to action at its heart, beginning with sharing, but often going much further. Connected—The idea promotes a peer connection with people you care about or share values with. Connected ideas bring you closer to other people and make you (feel) part of a like-minded community. This sets off a network effect that spreads the idea further. Extensible—The idea can be easily customized, remixed, and shaped by the participant. It is structured with a common stem that encourages its communities to alter and extend it.

The initiative gave people what we call permission to promote, and not just for ordinary people but also for celebrities. The Ice Bucket Challenge proved a perfect way to humanize the serious and powerful, like Bill Gates, to their audiences. It

the success of their lightweight content has helped enable a more serious investment in heavyweight journalism.

It would not be caught dead running a piece like “If None of These Pictures Make You Say ‘What the Fuck,’ Nothing Will.”

(Later in this book, we’ll tell the story of the Dutch media company De Correspondent, which offers a master class in how a media company grounded in serious journalism can mobilize its readership into a community.)

This has profound implications for those organizations that operate in soundbite mode. Capturing people’s attention can only get you so far.

nothing. The scientists concluded that the Facebook experiment led to a non-trivial increase in voter turnout, the kind that might be critical in a close election. And those people turned out not because the candidates had compelled them to, or because the ad at the top of their newsfeed exhorted them to, but because it is what they saw their friends doing. When we think about how ideas spread in the twenty-first century, the experiment makes it clear that they spread sideways. A

“People actually begin changing behavior when [an] idea gets validated by their community, rarely when it has not.”

Today, the most resonant ideas are not those that get flashed at the highest number of people but those that become individualized expressions of affiliation and identity among peers.

“Our data show that online sharing, even at viral scale, takes place through many small groups, not via the single status post or tweet of a few influencers. While influential people may be able to reach a wide audience, their impact is short-lived. Content goes viral when it spreads beyond a particular sphere of influence and spreads across the social web via…people sharing with their friends.” The good news here? You probably have much more influence over your friends than Kim Kardashian does.

Gold

But the 92Y team knew that by adapting #GivingTuesday, the university had increased its ownership stake. It was a boost to the project, not a threat.

Around the world, people take action at the same time and with the same intention, but the concept can be adapted to fit the local culture.

the center is trying to build a “network of positive messengers” to share not just counternarratives, but alternative narratives drawing people away from more extreme positions, amplifying the messages of its partners, from religious leaders to schools.

a new power world, this battle of ideas is not a standoff between bureaucrats and terrorists. It is a showdown between Scottish teenagers and Pakistani business students.

In fact, those darker forces often start at an advantage because their provocations compel our attention and our clicks. It isn’t enough to simply have the facts on your side.

But what happened next was even more important. The Howard government, and its allies in Australia’s Rupert Murdoch–owned newspapers, freaked out.

Airbnb now spends millions holding an annual gathering of thousands of its most active hosts, building solidarity and esprit de corps the way a church or Rotary Club might.

used their venture capital money to try to define a path up the participation scale beyond Yo-ing, such as adding location and photos with your Yo and creating groups to make the app more social. But because those steps weren’t in place during Yo’s initial surge, the opportunity passed to build on that early virality.

Today’s most cutting-edge activists understand both how to create frictionless entry points and move people up the participation scale.

The art of turning someone else’s crisis into your opportunity is far from new, but the new skill is doing it in an age when the opportunity to mobilize a crowd comes and goes in minutes.

on the lookout for storms that might galvanize their base, and be prepared to act on them within minutes or hours, when the need is greatest and people’s emotional response is at its peak.

Byzantine bureaucracies requiring multiple sign-offs aren’t the right tools for storm chasing.

Whether an organization is creating, chasing, or embracing a storm, some lessons stand out. For one, urgency matters. Research on crowdfunding shows that deadlines are everything—most funds raised in crowdfunding campaigns are in the final seventy-two hours.

The graphic above isn’t some kind of occultist symbol or anarchist cri de coeur. It’s

Super-participants: The energy of a new power community is driven by its super-participants—the most active contributors to the platform, and often those who create the core assets that power the platform and create its value.

One idea was to increase the referral fee for drivers securing new passengers. Another was free car washes. A third was to encourage regular meet-ups for drivers, funded by Lyft, because “the bonds you create with each other strengthen our community, too.”

“It’s all done over email communications, so you can imagine that a lot of new Uber drivers really feel like they’re out there on their own. They have no interaction with other drivers, they have no interaction with passengers, they have no interaction with a physical person at the company themselves. They feel like they have to figure these things out for themselves. They don’t have coworkers that they can talk to, they don’t even have someone at the water cooler, because their car is their office. I think that’s the sense that you get, right from the onset, that Lyft does care.” Campbell explains that Uber

St. Crispin’s Day speech. It was a promise of agency and

participant. Roadies were highly incentivized and bound together in tight-knit groups by a strong culture.

Once the Roadie team left town, Invisible Children did not leave people’s lives.

A new power leader who has no support within his own triangle has little chance of surviving a hostile encirclement.

The other kind of transaction was more altruistic. As a donor to Oxfam, for example, you don’t expect a financial return on your contribution, or really anything other than the intangible benefit of knowing you are helping people (and, in some cases, being recognized for having done it, like having your name listed as a patron). This kind of spending offers, above all, a sense of higher purpose.

Throughout the year, regular “popcorn” events take place all over the country, each bringing together hundreds of its super-fans to connect with the company (and eat a lot of popcorn).

2015, around the time of its incredible $45 billion valuation, Bin Lin could speak of 40 million members

Watt and Dickie

A conspiracy of optimism is hard to unravel. As

connection to an individual story or challenge. It’s no surprise, given the deeply unrewarding “user experience” of being a taxpayer, that people feel increasingly skeptical of and remote from government. But let’s imagine that

any seasoned movement builder can tell you, the greatest viral successes and most impactful moments usually come after months and years of consistent investment in your crowd.

He wasn’t. Individuals all over world had kept on building into their adulthoods, but they just hadn’t found one another.