Recently, I joined a room of rural sector leaders.
People who manage complexity for a living – land, weather, markets, staff, regulators, and community, often all at once. They are constantly making sense of emergent information and making tactical adjustments to maintain strategic goals.
Christian Walsh and I introduced DUCTRI design thinking. The group responded with energy and engagement, creating an ideal environment for facilitating new ideas.
But that’s the thing. These people had opted in for growth and connection. They’d already said, “I want to do things differently.”
Most leaders aren’t in that room on a daily basis.
They’re in a room full of people with different motivations, different expectations – some who didn’t choose to be there at all. So they do what feels logical. Big launch. All-hands. A burning platform message designed to make change feel urgent and inevitable.
The result is predictable. The initiative that had the right intent quietly dies – not because the idea was wrong, but because it met resistance before it had anything to show. Political capital spent. Momentum lost. Another transformation that “failed.”
The harder you push everyone simultaneously, the more resistance you activate – including from people who might have come around in time.
The research explains why.
Sociologist Damon Centola’s 2018 study found that a committed minority needs to reach roughly 25% before a social norm tips. Below that threshold, little changes. Above it, the whole system moves fast.
A separate line of research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute found something sharper still: when just 10% of a population holds an unshakeable belief, that belief reliably becomes the majority view.
And inside an organisation, where you can more easily map the network, the number drops again. Organisational analysts at Innovisor found that the right 3% of a workforce can reach over 85% of the rest, while formal leadership structures reach far fewer.
The central insight is clear: successful change depends not on persuading the majority, but on mobilising the right minority – the specific people whose influence can shift the system.
Leaders often default to the org chart. They convene the steering committee, brief the senior team, and ask the usual names to champion the change. But the most influential person is rarely in a prominent position on the org sheet. They are likely to be the most prominent person amongst peers – which are entirely different things.
Change practitioner Lena Ross calls these people hidden influencers. The subject expert everyone quietly consults before a decision gets made. The connector who lights up when they find an idea worth spreading. The introvert who says little in meetings but whose opinion, once known, shifts the room.
Now ask yourself: do you actually know who these people in your organisation are?
Most leaders don’t. And that gap is where change programmes stall.
This is where stakeholder mapping is useful to categorise a stakeholders level of influence and power over change, so you can understand how to best engage with them.
The Coalition Canvas goes further. It maps who’s missing from the picture entirely – adjacent players, peripheral observers, the people the org chart never captures. It asks ‘who else is in this space, what could we build together, and who is missing?’
Used together, these tools make the informal network visible.
Don’t focus on mapping resistance. Start by identifying leverage.
The Canterbury health system transformation demonstrated this precisely. Rather than beginning with a complete stakeholder map, the team created an invitation-only Showcase – a two-hour session accessible only if someone who’d already attended invited you. As Richard Hamilton describes it in Innovation in Action:
“Word of mouth revealed who the true connectors were. We watched networks form and energy build. Over time, 3,500 people came through that first showcase, followed by 6,000 more. That’s how we grew a social movement inside a system known for its caution.”
They didn’t find the connectors in advance. The process revealed them.
Effective change unfolds by building conviction through networks – not urgency or sweeping announcements.
Focus efforts on finding genuine influencers and building unshakeable conviction. Then, create visible early wins and let the informal network amplify the change.
Beachhead before buy-in.
A question to ponder: Who are the people in your organisation whose conviction could carry this further than you could alone, and do you actually know who they are?