Learning to patiently push for positive change
This past weekend, a few hours after Daylight Saving Time ended for the season—and as the days here in Southeast Michigan start to grow ever shorter—the wonderfully insightful author Elif Shafak wrote, “Words are the lanterns that brighten darkest skies.”
My word this week is patience. Patience, in the context Shafak sets out, could well be the lantern that will light my path as I move steadily, slowly, and persistently toward a more positive tomorrow.
In her essay, Shafak cites this poetic line of Emily Dickinson’s: “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and then I look at it until it begins to shine.” I’ve been contemplating the profound nature of patience all week, and though the days may be growing darker, the word—and what it can make possible—has been making my world more than a bit brighter.
To be clear, I’m not thinking about just any form of patience. The patience that’s been lighting my way is not the all-too-common passive kind that leads us to wait quietly on the sidelines for better times to come around. Nor is it the sit-tight-while-someone-else-sorts-things-out-for-you brand of patience. Rather, the metaphorical linguistic lantern that’s been brightening my mood is a much more purposeful, forward-focused patience: the kind that gets us slowly, surely, and—if things work well—successfully to the positive changes we’re pursuing. It’s a patience that allows things to unfold more gently without feeling totally forced, while we continue to move peacefully forward in the right direction.
Again, Elif Shafak explains it well:
Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn.
With election week here and current events colliding in ways that are anything but calm, continuing to be patient under pressure is neither easy nor an insignificant achievement. I like to look to Wendell Berry—a person I would suggest was a paragon of effective, positive patience over the course of the 92 years he graced the planet with his presence, before passing away this past August—who said,
The important thing to do is to learn all you can about where you are. … The situation you’re in now is a situation that’s going to call for a lot of patience. And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
As usual, Wendell Berry’s point is well taken. Being patient at any time can be terrifically challenging; doing it when pressure is at its peak is 20 times harder. And yet, with a high degree of frequency, patience pays off. It can appear in the form of a business leader avoiding an impulsive decision, a quarterback who waits a split second longer for a receiver to come into the clear, a 10th-grade teacher sticking with a student who started the semester struggling but begins to blossom by spring, or a poet who can hold mentally still long enough to let their intuitive sense of a line break rise to the surface of their writing. Good things come to those who can wait at the right time. Combined with an inspiring, strategically sound long-term vision; a good deal of skill; and a little bit of luck, patience, it turns out, can help make possible a revolution.
Many people, I know, believe that revolutions are big, cataclysmic events—huge changes that happen in an instant, on a given day, in a given year, in a given place. The reality, though, is that most revolutions are almost exactly the opposite—they unfold slowly and steadily, pushing forward over long periods of time with imperfectly patient persistence. This is the case with what has been unfolding in Serbia of late. The revolution took not two days but two years. In the context of thinking in circles, it took over 700 revolutions around the sun from the time the student resistance started until last Sunday, when they won an impressive, even shockingly large victory in the national elections.
The press, of course, immediately began to speculate about how the students’ good work may now go awry, to find the flaws in their approach, to look for what might lead them to failure. That sort of response is easy. It requires no research, no deep study, no real reflection—just a rather cynical mindset seeking out potential problems instead of diving more deeply into the positives of the present moment. It might be wiser, I’ll suggest, to focus instead on what the students accomplished, in the belief that we can effectively adapt it to our own organizational ecosystems.
Going back to the beginning—or at least one beginning—of the Serbian success story: it was two years ago this week that a newly renovated canopy at the central rail station in Serbia’s second-largest city, Novi Sad, suddenly caved in. Fifteen innocent people were killed on the spot, and a 16th died not long thereafter. The canopy’s collapse, it became clear, was the result of shoddy, corruption-driven construction work. Three weeks later, students in Novi Sad began to demonstrate. Every day from 11:52, the time of the collapse, until 12:07— one minute for each of the original 15 victims—they observed a period of silence. Soon the government began to attack the demonstrators, at times resorting to the terrifying use of sound cannons that caused anyone close by to buckle in pain.
Rather than react with violence, or give up and go home, the students patiently doubled down on peaceful demonstrations. They organized boycotts of university classes, and, as their numbers grew, they set up a series of plenums through which direct democracy could be practiced and their work could be coordinated. Throughout, all the way to last weekend’s election, they studiously avoided appointing any overt leaders. In essence, they applied anarchist principles to their movement.
The students kept at it—again, peacefully, persistently, and very patiently—for 51 weeks. Day by day, they enlisted ever more men and women—of all ages and all persuasions—in their work. A week ago Sunday, what came to be called “the Student List” won the national elections by a landslide, ending a decade-plus of autocratic rule. They successfully modeled what Mahatma Gandhi said 80 years earlier: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” And the Student List did indeed do exactly that.
In an era when autocracy seems to be on the rise, their achievement is an awesome inspiration and reminder of what is possible. As Breza Race Maksimovic and Jelena Trajčevski write in an October 27 piece entitled “How Serbian Students Toppled an Authoritarian,”
Serbia has just shown that nonviolent action still works when it’s planned, patient, and carried by many hands.
What should we learn from this? The authors’ advice, to my eye, seems incredibly wise:
Don’t copy the slogan. Copy the method. Go beyond marching to real noncooperation, train for discipline instead of hoping for it, and build unity out of your differences.
One of the key ingredients of the students’ method—and an essential element of making things happen as they have in Novi Sad—has to have been a plethora of patience. Without a great deal of it, there’s simply no way to stick together and work constructively and nonviolently toward a creative vision of the future to which you’re so deeply committed. Young people are usually accused of being impatient, but the Serbian students seem to have turned that belief on its head.
I want to suggest here that the sort of patience that has played such a key role in the Serbian student movement for social change is exactly what we need to lead our own organizations to positive places over the long haul. Patience is never glamorous, but it is, nevertheless, very good work—work we can all learn from. As Wendell Berry writes, we must learn to “practice patience as a virtue.”
Of course, as I mentioned earlier, not all patience is created equal. The kind of patience I’m interested in is what University of Houston professor of social work Jean Latting likes to call “radical patience.”Latting, whom Brené Brown describes as “one of the most important mentors in my life,” lays out what she calls “Three Skills That Make Radical Patience Possible” in the book she co-wrote with V. Jean Ramsey, Conscious Change:
1. Surface Undiscussables—As Latting explains, this is about having the courage to bring forward the issues that need to be brought up, but that often go undiscussed because of the discomfort surrounding them.
2. Acknowledge Small Wins—Meaningful change, Latting affirms, almost always happens in a nonlinear series of small achievements. The metaphorical “home run” of change sounds great, but it hardly ever happens.
3. Gain Support One Person at a Time—Similarly, Latting makes clear, momentum doesn’t come when a couple hundred people sign up to support you in a matter of seconds. To the contrary, each person who comes on board counts, and, over time, they coalesce into a greater and greater force for change.
All three of these skills, I’ll note, are deeply embedded in the way the Serbian students went about their good work. Their movement began when they called out the corruption in the country—corruption that everyone knew about but that no one else was willing to speak of in public. There was very little drama to what they did: just a series of demonstrations, open meetings, long conversations, et cetera. And their support was not garnered in some sort of mass enrollment or marketing sleight of hand. Instead, they earned it the old-fashioned way, with face-to-face conversation, one fellow student at a time—and then, moving off campuses to the country at large, one citizen at a time.
This is the approach I have (sort of) patiently tried to teach myself over the years. Back in the day, when I wanted a change, I used to push hard to get it done as quickly as possible. The problem is that the more I pushed, the more resistance arose. Since then, I’ve learned to allow things to unfold more organically, rather than throw up my hands in frustration and let the project fail. I remain as determined and focused as ever; it’s just that now, when I have an idea I believe in, I trust that the truth inherent in it will gradually emerge and be recognized. I still need to lead toward what I believe. But there’s time and space to let things unfold at a gentler pace. As permaculturist Matt Whitaker puts it, “Permaculture demands patience. … Nature doesn’t rush. And neither should we. … Be patient—renewal takes time—trust the process.”
That’s pretty much exactly what happened with the work I wrote about in The Power of Beliefs in Business. By the time I finished three years of research and writing, I was very eager for it to be implemented almost immediately. It was obvious to me how much benefit we could get from introducing the approaches into our organization, and I was ready to move ahead ASAP. Instead, though, I held myself back, focusing on putting the concepts into play in my own work, sharing my learnings, and letting momentum build slowly. I wasn’t passive about it—I certainly exerted some of what I’ve come to call “GNP” (gentle, never-ending pressure). Still, it took about 10 years to make its way through the whole organization. And today? The Belief Cycle and our Statement of Beliefs are widely taught, used, and relied on throughout the ZCoB (Zingerman’s Community of Businesses). The work that emerged from the pamphlet “A Revolution of Dignity in the Twenty-First Century Workplace,” published in 2023—a year after the brutal full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine—is following a similarly steady path.
It won’t win headlines, and there’s next to no drama involved, but in the long run, patience pays off. Resistance still comes up, naturally. But by resisting the resistance less rigorously, yet still staying firmly on course—as the Serbian students did—change does happen. And as we develop our own patience, the force with which others push back is lessened. Obstacles I used to see as a pain in the butt, I now believe are really helpful. As the amazing author May Sarton says, “Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help.”
While the world is perceived to be moving faster and faster, it actually isn’t: there are still 24 hours in the day, and patience remains a vital ingredient in making anything meaningful happen. The issue isn’t time; it’s how we relate to it. I like what Elif Shafak says:
Sometimes, it is in the quiet acts and the quotidian details that we find the most passionate manifestations of dissent and defiance. Of resilience. Of the quest for freedom and basic human dignity.
Author Ann Handley, who is holding her annual conference, Marketing Profs B2B Forum, in Boston this week (happy birthday, Ann!), has a new book coming out entitled ASAP: As SLOW As Possible—When to Take the Long Road in a Shortcut World. The word “patience” isn’t used in this lovely paragraph about the book, but the point is implicit in what Ann has written:
As SLOW As Possible reveals slowness as a generative force and for the first time gives you a way to harness life’s most important slow moments. Not by doing less, opting out, or becoming the kind of person who ferments things in a shed. But by knowing when speed helps—and when it hollows out the very thing you hoped it would serve.
It’s time to choose the long road when the shortcut costs too much.
Ann keynotes regularly about what she calls “strategic patience.” In a talk she gave last week entitled “Why You Should Slow Down and Market Intentionally to Make an Impact,” she said,
In a fast culture, speed very much reads as competence, right? Even when it’s not progress, even when it’s not pushing us in the direction that we want to move in. … The thing is, I think it’s time for us to stop the madness.
What would we do without the speed to which we’ve become so accustomed? As Ann explains with great passion, we can create settings where, rather than rushing to judgement,
We have patience. We notice patterns. We look at where we’re building resonance with our audience and relationships, and we’re resisting that urge to scale something just because it got a little spike. It’s asking you to look a little deeper. … Judgment beats speed.
So, too, I believe, does dignity. And if, as I wrote last month, dignity is akin to a “primary color” in leadership philosophies, then it makes perfect sense that dignity would be a prerequisite here as well. I’ve realized that, done well, dignity delivers us to patience.
Here are the six elements of dignity I write about in “A Revolution of Dignity in the Twenty-First Century Workplace,” with a patience-focused detail accompanying each:
1. Honor the essential humanity of everyone we work with. To do justice to the uniqueness of every person we interact with does take a bit of slowing down—including being patient with people who may not be ready to share openly. Ann Handley likes to quote the great Fred Rogers, who said, “Mutually caring relationships require kindness and patience, tolerance, optimism, joy in the other’s achievements, confidence in oneself, and the ability to give without undue thought of gain.”
2. Be authentic in all our interactions (without acting out). Authenticity is an invitation to proceed with patience—to take the time to really get in touch with our true feelings, to slow down enough to say what needs to be said in constructive ways, and to give others the space to do the same. No need for drama—just really positive, direct, dignity-based conversation. As my friends at Indigenous Resistance in Uganda write, “Dub values the quiet moments … all the subtleties in between the moments of silences.”
3. Make sure everyone has a meaningful say. This is about doing what South African leader Nelson Mandela modeled: “I learned to have the patience to listen when people put forward their views, even if I think those views are wrong. You can’t reach a just decision in a dispute unless you listen to both sides.”
4. Begin every interaction with positive beliefs. Pausing to breathe and shift away from the negative beliefs that arise unconsciously in nearly all of us—to bring our brains gently back to the positive—requires the diligent practice of patience.
5. Commit to helping everyone get to greatness. Learning not to impose our definition of greatness on those we work with—and to focus instead on patiently encouraging them to bring forward their own images of future success—is what this work is all about.
6. Create an effective application of equity. The effort to embed equity into our organizational ecosystems is not a quick process. It demands reflection, conversation, system review, adjustment, reallocation, and near-constant recalibration to get it right.
Over time, I’m confident that we can make radical patience into our daily reality. Putting the concept into a more poetic context, we can create what Minnesota musician Siri Undlin, who records as Humbird, sings in her beautiful “Cornfields and Roadkill”:
Patience, dignity, old growth, green leaves, deep roots.
Speaking of folk musicians from Minnesota: it was 80 years ago, in the spring of 1966, that Bob Dylan released his seventh record, the double album he decided to call Blonde on Blonde. The second song on the second side of the first LP was “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” Appropriately for this piece, it includes the line, “An’ here I sit so patiently.”
I can’t say I always attain what Dylan expresses in the song. I am, I think, by nature, actually rather impatient. Not impetuous—I just don’t like waiting for things that I want to happen … to happen. The patience I’ve gained over the years is, I’m pretty sure, very much a learned skill. I’ve come to imagine myself as “patiently impatient”: I really want good things to happen quickly, and I want my new ideas implemented a week from Wednesday, but I’ve taught myself to sit tight, to lay back, and, as the Serbian students did so well, to just keep getting out there day after day, moving my feet in the right direction. Radical patience, it turns out, is far more powerful than rushing to judgment, forcefully exerting authority, and then failing.
In the spirit of the Serbian students’ inspiring work, Rebecca Solnit writes in her now-classic book, Hope in the Dark,
The struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invisible in their determination to hold onto it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience.
Yes, of course, some situations call for quick action; we deal with them all the time. But far more often, it’s patience, not speed, that pays the big dividends. In a sense, our very future depends on our ability to reestablish patience as a significant part of our lives. Just last week, Solnit noted,
Campaigning for electoral democracy and stuff like that requires patience, even stubbornness, determination, perseverance. It asks for a lot of undramatic commitment unfolding over extended periods, a lot of acting without being sure of outcome and often without seeing any outcome at all for a long time, which is maybe another word for faith or acting on faith.
I like the way the then 36-year-old Ukrainian Jewish writer Isaac Babel—from the cosmopolitan Black Sea port town of Odesa—put it in a letter written to his family in 1930:
I am made of a dough that is a mixture of stubbornness and patience, and it is only when these two elements are strained to the utmost that la joie de vivre comes over me.
(In the spirit of the anarchist belief that the means we use should be congruous with the ends we want to achieve, we know of Babel’s statement only because of a foreword that author Irving Howe wrote half a century later, in the 1980s, for a book of Babel’s short stories. The book was never published, though, and Howe’s foreword was eventually found by his daughter and shared just a few years ago. Patience in action.)
Babel, who would tragically be executed by order of Stalin in January of 1940—when he was only 46—seems to have had patience prominently embedded in his life philosophy. In his 1923 story “How It Was Done in Odesa,” the narrator remarks, “A man eager for answers must arm himself with patience.”
Czech author Franz Kafka, whose life overlapped that of Babel’s even while the two never met (here’s a great essay by Cynthia Ozick about the parallels and differences between them), came to much the same sort of conclusion in his 1918 book Zürau Aphorisms:
All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue. … There are two cardinal human sins from which all others derive: impatience and indolence. Because of impatience they were expelled from Paradise, because of indolence they do not return. But perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience.
Can patience be taught? Yes, I’m confident that it can. In an essay entitled “Relearning the Lost Skill of Patience,” published in The Atlantic 13 years ago next week, journalist Jessica Lahey lays out the challenge:
Childish impatience—this rush to get the answer before really thinking through the question—appears in our adult world, too. It’s in the online readers who comment without finishing whole articles, in pundits who speak in soundbytes. It’s everywhere. Fortunately, though, it has a cure.
The answer lies in teaching methods that stress patience, critical thinking, and a delayed response based on deep and meaningful contemplation.
Here in the ZCoB, the sort of teaching Lahey is talking about occurs—slowly and imperfectly, of course—through the myriad systems and processes we’ve put in place. And, it seems clear, the higher the percentage of people in the organization who can effectively engage with radical patience, the more positive our collective work is going to be. In fact, now that I’ve taken time to reflect on it, it’s been happening here regularly for years:
- Our focus on traditional “Slow Food” is all about patience. More often than not, it emphasizes taking more time: Naturally leavened breads at the Bakehouse take 18 to 20 hours to prepare without the use of commercial yeast. Whole-hog barbecue at the Roadhouse takes about 15 hours of slow, steady smoke over oak logs. Artisan pastas are dried at low temperatures for days. Some of my favorites among our cheeses and cured hams are matured for many years. Traditional balsamic, of course, takes at least half a lifetime to craft. Seeking out raw materials of better and better quality can truly take many, many years.
- Bottom-Line Change, our organizational change recipe, means we take far longer to reach a joint decision than an autocrat who arrives at one on a whim—though, in the end, we’ve brought diverse voices together to achieve a more holistic and effective outcome.
- Open-Book Management means that leaders need to learn to involve others before forming conclusions.
- Meaningful diversity and effective inclusion are a call to bring a plurality of perspectives into the conversation. This leads to higher-quality outcomes, but it does, in a good way, get us to slow down some.
- Working by consensus will, by definition, mean that none of us just “get our way.” We need, instead, to initiate conversation, lean into listening, and hear how others approach the issues at hand.
- Servant Leadership is all about learning what others are interested in and then working to assimilate those varied perspectives into positive action that benefits the entire organization.
- Our Path to Partnership process is robust and rigorous, and can take many months, if not years.
Last but not least on this list, Natural Law of Business #11 reminds us, “It takes a lot longer to make something great happen than most people think.” Like all the Natural Laws, this one is simply true; you don’t have to like it, but, no different than gravity, it’s going to happen anyway. While working on the forthcoming pamphlet on the metaphorical organizational ecosystem model, I was reminded that, as everyone knows, an ecosystem cannot evolve into a beautiful and fulfilling place to be in a matter of days, weeks, or even months. It takes years—more often than not, many of them. Similarly, what you experience at Zingerman’s today is the result of thousands of good people’s hard work over nearly 45 years. As Nelson Mandela, a man who demonstrated radical patience while painfully imprisoned for 27 years, once opined, “Patience is active. It means observing carefully, understanding timing, and refusing to let frustration make the decision for you.”
In fact, I suppose, working hard to restore the prominence of long-form journalism—like the piece you’re reading right now—is, in itself, a great way to practice patience. Social media sends us scrolling, while long-form work does just the opposite. (Check out Ann Handley’s e-news, Total Annarchy [I know! Annarchy! How could we not be getting along?], Good Food Jobs’ weekly newsletter, or Indigenous Resistance’s Substack for some exemplary examples.) We need to sit still, take in ideas, reflect, react, and consider what we’ll do with what we just learned. In fact, now that I think about it, one of the nicest compliments I frequently get on this writing is something along the lines of, “Most business books, I just breeze through in a few hours. With yours … there’s so much there that I need to stop regularly and think about what you said and what it means before I go on reading.” That each essay is an invitation into the world of radical patience is a really wonderful image.
A hundred years or so before the Serbian students started to demonstrate, 3,000 miles due east of Serbia’s capital city, Belgrade, the Uyghur dissident Lutpulla Mutellip centered his resistance to Chinese rule by writing poetry. While poets are generally pushed to the periphery in American society, under autocratic regimes, they’re frequently among the first to be imprisoned. Which is, sadly, exactly what happened to Lutpulla Mutellip, someone who seems to have possessed radical patience long before there was a term to describe it.
If you aren’t familiar, the Uyghurs are the Indigenous people of what is formally known nowadays as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. Located in the far northwest of the country, tucked into a triangularly shaped bit of geography between Mongolia to the east and Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, and Turkmenistan to the west, the region accounts for about 15 percent of the territory that is recognized as China today. Not ethnically Chinese and predominantly Muslim, the Uyghurs have been repressed for many years—first by local Chinese warlords, then later by the central government in Beijing. They have a long tradition of poets, and their resistance to oppressive rule from the capital of the country 1,500 miles to the east has demonstrated enormous patience. While the Serbian students won the election a week ago Sunday, the Uyghurs are still under massive pressure to relent.
Lutpulla Mutellip was one of the most famous of the historical Uyghur poets. His work and his words inspire me. In his most famous poem, “Response to the Years,” he has a line that serves as an appeal to long-term, radical patience in response to repression and provocation:
We will answer: our creations will make the years age.
Mutellip was born 104 years ago this month in Xian, on the 22nd of November, 1922—by coincidence, the same date in 2024 that the Serbian students in Novi Sad held the first of what would become many hundreds of demonstrations to call for an end to corruption in the country. In 1944, his words prophesied:
I will not get old at the peak of revolution.
My poems will shine like stars before me.
Loitering in the midst of revolution is like death.
I want to be victorious with patience and courage.
Three months later, on the 18th of September, 1945—11 months after Yugoslav partisans had liberated Belgrade from the Nazis—Lutpulla Mutellip was executed by the Chinese government.
Uyghur resistance continues, with radical patience, to this day.