Before you give up on making change, try these 5 things

You joined to make a difference. You’ve put in the hard work. But day after day, it feels like you’re banging your head against a wall instead of making progress.?

When is it time to give up on your goal?

Between our time in the Obama White House, Nick teaching at Harvard University, and Marina Nitze helping organizations of all sizes with crisis incident response, we’ve encountered thousands of people wondering if they should keep going or throw in the towel. Sometimes they had goals that were ambitious, like passing federal legislation or changing the way millions of veterans can access healthcare. Other times their goals were more modest, like automating an obnoxious manual report at work, or getting their homeowner association rules changed to allow keeping chickens.

Whatever challenge you’re facing, we’ve developed the following five strategies to try before you declare defeat.

Find your karass. A karass (a term coined by Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle) is an informal collection of aligned individuals. Your karass is not a single team on your org chart, but rather a set of individuals with a shared sense of mission. How can you find them?? Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• Who has tried and failed to achieve your objective before?? It’s highly unlikely you’re the first person with your idea or the first person to encounter your particular problem.
• Why do they think they failed—and what would they do differently if given another chance??
• Who else views the problem the same way you do??

Your karass could be people in other departments or branches, and even people who don’t work for your company or organization. A karass can be especially powerful if composed of individuals approaching the same problem from different angles and with different resources. These individuals can give you a renewed sense of purpose and fresh ideas about how to make progress. But they also have the wisdom of perspective and experience; they can give you the candid truth that it’s time for you to move on.

Understand how your organization makes decisions. Whatever you’re trying to do in your organization, you probably need other people to make decisions: to vote, to change, to buy, to budget, etc. The process might be carefully documented and instrumented, or might be less formal (“ask Dave after he’s eaten lunch—he says no to everything when he’s hungry”). Even in the smallest and newest bureaucracies, there’s some sort of process to evaluate and make these decisions. Learn what it is!?

It’s especially important to consider your proposal from the perspective of each individual stakeholder. What incentivizes them? Incentives include recognition, convenience, earning money, saving time, displaying loyalty, or even consistency. How do you find these out? Consider their past decisions, your own relationship and interactions with the stakeholder, and the experiences and insights of your karass. And sometimes, you can even ask them directly.

And the flipside: what do they consider risky? One risk that we often see people dismiss too easily: if someone has spent decades of their career perfecting a skill, like reviewing applications or keeping a server running, and you then show up and suggest doing it in a completely new way that renders them a beginner again, the risk to their reputation and career probably means they will fight you. Marina sometimes likens this to being told that, starting tomorrow, she has to conduct her entire job in Portuguese. If this happened, no matter what the rationale, she would kick and scream because she can’t speak Portuguese and would have to spend a long time learning it before she could get any work done. Realistically, she might never return to her previous productivity levels.

We suggest explicitly documenting each stakeholder’s incentive and risk frameworks. How can you tailor your pitch to adhere to these needs? As you consult this stakeholder map, consider how members of your karass could help influence or unlock in ways that you can’t. (And whatever you do, keep this map to yourself!)

When Marina was Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, this practice unlocked a particularly creative way forward on a tough problem. Marina wanted to update the VA website on a daily basis, instead of the existing quarterly cadence. This change required a majority (but, critically, not unanimous) vote from impacted IT teams. One particular team saw this as far too risky; they didn’t have the resources to review proposed changes at that pace, and did not trust that the automated tests would catch bugs. The risk of being left with a broken website was too high. Marina made little headway trying to convince them to vote in her favor; but since she actually only needed them to vote, not to vote yes, she proposed a compromise: every time the website was updated, it would automatically document a “no” vote from this team. They were thrilled at the automated documentation of their dissent, and Marina didn’t have to wait two weeks for their inevitable “no” vote, allowing her to reach her goal (which continues to this day) of daily website updates.

Stop trying to make your organization care. Making a case for change by appealing to others' emotions is often a recipe for failure.

Your bureaucracy doesn’t care about how noble your mission is. You have to first understand why a thing is done a certain way, how a decision to change it is made, and how the new way positively impacts the process or business objective. Emotional pleas, begging, requests for exceptions, complaints, heated outbursts, and/or making changes in secret while hoping not to get caught are not what drives lasting change in organizations. (That final one—making changes and hoping not to get caught—is especially bad, because it will trigger organizational antibodies that make the next change ten times harder for the next person.)

You may be familiar with the story of Stanislav Petrov, who is widely credited with saving the world from nuclear annihilation. A Soviet Air Defense Forces officer in Russia in 1983, he received a satellite report of an incoming missile attack from the United States. It was strict protocol to report this attack, which would have resulted in an immediate counterattack. Russia and the United States attacking one another with nuclear missiles was not going to end well for anyone on Earth.

But Petrov broke protocol and did not report it. He believed—correctly—that it was a false alarm, and waited until it was clear the “missile” was actually just the sun hitting the clouds.

But this is not how Petrov’s organization made decisions. His organization’s protocol did not allow for hunches, and it did not care that he saved the world. The Soviet government reprimanded him for not using the correct form to file his report and forced him into early retirement.

If you’ve been trying emotional persuasion, try changing your approach: carefully document, and follow, your organization’s decision-making process to get the “yes” you need. Pay attention to the details: use the stakeholder map and risk/incentive framework we mentioned earlier to understand who needs to be involved, what details they need, and the most strategic way to frame those details for different individuals.

Rethink your role. Perhaps a new job or team can unlock the resources and people you need to make your dream a reality. When Nick saw a void in the Harvard Kennedy School curriculum, he pitched a new teaching role for himself that filled this void, which became the class “Tech and Innovation in Government.” This change doesn’t even have to be a literal new role; draft a project description or position description of the role you believe you need to fill, and see if you could incorporate it into your existing position or get approval to formally work on it as a short-term pilot project.

If you’re being held back by a skills gap, could you take additional training or even sign up for an externship? (Or if the problem is someone else’s skills gap, is there a way to provide or require additional training or externships for their role or team?)

Maybe changing your perspective on your role is the trick. In an earlier LinkedIn News’ Big Ideas Book Club article, the authors of Designing Your New Work Life (who previously wrote Marina’s favorite book of all time, Designing Your Life) lay out four tactics for refreshing your current role in “Thinking About Quitting? Become Your Own Boss First.”

Even if it might be time to leave your particular role or organization, consider whether joining a different organization, or even creating a brand-new one, could overcome the challenges you’re experiencing in your current one, before giving up altogether. (But be aware that new roles and orgs will come with new challenges, too.)

Take a final look around. When people ask Marina if it’s a good time to quit, she likes to ask, “Do you see a door?” Just as you would take one last look around your hotel room before checking out for any possible item left behind, make sure you haven’t missed any opportunities before you depart. There may be another door you can walk through! Is there a step you missed towards achieving your mission? So you didn’t get the vote or budget you needed this year—can you apply again next year and develop a stronger case in the interim? Is there another avenue to get the resources you need or another person you can reach out to for support or direction? Could you pursue the same goal from a different vantage point??

Brainstorm any remaining ways you can still make progress. You won’t solve your entire problem in one fell swoop, but if you still see something you haven’t tried (or that you can try again), it might not be time to throw in the towel just yet.?

When have you felt stuck in a role or pursuit of a goal? What helped you decide whether to persevere or start over?

Our latest book, Hack Your Bureaucracy, is a collection of over 55 tactics for getting things done inside organizations of all sizes, regardless of your role or team. Every tactic is coupled with stories of how people like you achieved their goals, even in some of the most challenging bureaucracies on Earth like the White House and Harvard University. Our hope in writing this book is that it gives every reader more tools to be successful at making the changes you want to see in the world.