The law of gravity

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Every organisation has decision gravity: whatever takes the least effort is what eventually happens—regardless of what anyone decided, intended, or believes is important.

I spent the first part of my career not understanding that, and it nearly derailed me.

I started out in Liberia, where only a handful doctors served four million people. The person keeping a village alive was usually a woman with no medical training and no salary, going door to door, catching the pneumonia before it turned, keeping the newborns breathing.

We had overwhelming evidence that paying and supporting people like her transformed care—some of the steepest drops in child mortality ever measured. For years I took that evidence to health ministers. They read it, told me it was compelling, and did nothing.

I decided I hadn't made the case well enough, so I kept making it, louder. But I was fighting gravity.

For a minister, saying yes meant finding salaries, changing laws, putting her name on a reform that might not show results before the next election. Saying "let's keep studying it" cost nothing and happened by itself.

What finally worked was regrading the hill. We cut the ask to four words a minister could repeat in a cabinet meeting and put every country's status on a public scoreboard, so standing still stopped being the comfortable, invisible choice.

Once acting was easier than not, the thing moved on its own. It's now policy in 56 countries. The evidence had barely changed. The slope had.

So here's what I'd take from fifteen years of this:

You don't have to push harder, and it was never your fault that pushing didn't work.

If you're discouraged or exhausted remember: change the world the same way you run a room: make the right things easy.

Try this

Leave the argument alone. Instead, write down what doing nothing currently costs the person who has to say yes: budget, risk, effort, exposure.

Most of the time it's close to nothing. Your job isn't to convince them. It's to make yes the cheapest thing on that list.

🌿 Gravity is your friend.