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Run the Room

You've can start smaller than you think

Published about 2 months ago • 1 min read

Run the Room

The case for winning something small

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When something big won't move, the problem is usually that it's too big.

A large, worthy goal invites everyone to imagine all the ways it will fail. You lay out the vision, and instead of momentum you get a hundred reasons it's “unrealistic.” No budget! No mandate! Not the right time!

The bigger the goal, the easier people find it to dismiss.

So we often do what determined people do: make the case again. Sharper, more enthusiastic, more undeniable this time. Naturally, it still doesn't move—and somewhere in there you start to wonder if you're just not persuasive enough.

Good news: you’re not the problem. You don't have to push harder, and it was never your fault that pushing didn't work.

The people who move big things almost never start big. They find a foothold: the smallest piece of the larger win that is 1) concrete, 2) produceable within ninety days, and 3) relevant enough to give those who participated a glimpse of what may just be possible.

Because frankly, you don’t need everyone to agree that the bigger thing can work. You just need a small group to get to work, get to win, and start to believe.

We built a global standard this way. Before anyone was talking about changing health policy across dozens of countries, we got a group of the best implementers in the field to agree on and publish a checklist of what those policies would need to succeed. It wasn't even an official publication! It was a widely mocked purple PDF—and it cemented the group who would go on to change everything.

Change the world the same way you run a room: make the right things easy—and the easiest place to start is smaller than you think.
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​Try this

Take the big thing you can't get moving. Instead of making the case for the whole thing yet again, ask: what is the smallest piece of this I could move in the next ninety days?

For example: the first press coverage of the problem, a short publication outlining the vision, a single funder with seed money.
Go win that.

🌿 First: foothold.

Work smarter, not harder

Finding the first winnable foothold—and the sequence of moves that turns it into an adopted standard—is what I do with organizations via the DRIVE Audit. Sitting on something big that won't move?

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Run the Room

Get in the room. Run it. Change what happens when you leave. That's the work I do with senior leaders moving standards from concept to institutional adoption. My work has been featured in The New York Times, TIME, The Lancet, and Foreign Policy. Each Saturday, one short note on making it easy to move decisions that matter—three minutes to read, used in next week's meeting.

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