I’m in a reprise mood this season… recently thinking about a blog post from 2015 with a lesson learned in an old movie on how to blow up a dam. A lesson about the expectations when making a big change to the world.
The lesson comes from Force 10 from Navarone, starring Harrison Ford and Robert Shaw. This is a movie I first saw on a Sunday afternoon on TV as a pre-teen, and then dozen times over the last forty years. Force 10 is a WWII film about destroying a bridge, which quickly turns into a movie about destroying a dam to destroy the bridge.
The key lesson how to blow up a dam.
You can knock down a dam by dropping tons of bombs, but in the movie they were limited to just two backpacks of explosives. That seemed quite insufficient for the job, but (to spoil the predictable ending) it worked.
The lesson is that a small nudge can make a big impact, if placed in the right place, and if boosted by some external pressure.
To take down a dam you just have to weaken the structure, then the water pressure will do the rest. For a startup, that pressure can be the momentum of social media, or the momentum of early sales and customers singing your praises. In social change, that pressure can be a pent up demand that didn’t have an outlet.
Entrepreneurs tend to be impatient, and thus many never think of this strategy (until I recant the movie’s plot to them). Most entrepreneurs want to raise a ton of money and buy their initial market share. Most entrepreneurs expect the world to come calling just because they’ve solved some problem. Entrepreneurs forget that compared to the big wide world, they have basically zero resources and no money, and thus have no power. Unless that is they think about the world as a dam, find the hidden pressure, make a small dent, and wait for that pressure to do the work for them.
The same for people seeking systemic change. That change is not going to happen in one day, or one month, or probably not even one year. Visible systemic change is best measured in decades. Sometimes by generations.
and… if there is no pressure to assist you, take it one bit at a time.
