How Unexpected Connections Can Lead To Surprising New Breakthroughs

In 1998, Srdja Popović walked into a Belgrade cafe to meet some friends. A biologist by training, he also played bass in a goth rock band called BAAL. Lately though, his passion turned to politics. He’d become an organizer, eventually rising to lead the youth wing of Serbia’s Democratic Party. It was that passion that brought him to the café that day.

A few years earlier, and half a world away in Ithaca, NY, a young graduate student named Duncan Watts walked into the thick woods surrounding Cornell University to record the chirping of snowy tree crickets. He had recently entered the graduate program in theoretical and applied dynamics and was studying a strange, obscure phenomenon known as coupled oscillation.

Srdja’s meeting led he and his friends to start the activist group Otpor, spark the color revolutions and create a repeatable model for overthrowing dictatorships. Duncan’s nightly sojourns lay the groundwork for a new science of networks. Although they never met, their journeys would become intertwined with mine and reveal the hidden dynamics of change.

Early Antecedents

Srdja and his friends were hardly the first activists to dream of overthrowing a tyrant. But their efforts got a boost from a little-known academic named Gene Sharp, who had begun a systematic study of political revolutions back in the 1950s. He would go on to establish the Albert Einstein Institution to support resistance groups around the world and become known as the “von Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare.”

Sharp’s key insight, as he explained in a documentary about his work, was that every regime depends on sources of power to keep it in place—and those sources of power have an institutional basis. The institutions, in turn, depend on specific constituencies. If you can mobilize people to influence those institutions, the regime’s foundation begins to crack. No institutions, no power; no power, no regime.

The seeds of Duncan’s journey were planted centuries earlier, in 1665, when the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens noticed that two pendulum clocks in a single case would synchronize their behavior so that they were swinging in exactly opposite directions. This phenomenon took on a new importance when it was learned that similar behavior occurred in lasers, semiconductors, fireflies, and, of course, snowy tree crickets, among other things.

Duncan’s advisor at Cornell, Steven Strogatz, was a leading expert on coupled oscillation—he would eventually write a book on the subject. It was this line of research that led Duncan into the woods with a microphone and a question: How were the crickets coordinating their behavior? Was there a conductor cricket? Or some hidden mechanism that allowed the system to self-organize?

Nobody knew.

Working The Problem

Srdja and his friends started their campaign with street pranks. But it wasn’t just jokes and giggles. There was a method and a plan. Their strategy was simple but powerful: Recruit—Train—Act. First, they used clever antics to grab attention and recruit new activists. Then they would train them and encourage them to act, even if the action was small, because it is through action that people begin to take ownership of the movement.

They knew from experience that they could organize effectively and get people to the polls. And they also knew that if they did, Milošević—the strongman who ruled Serbia with an iron hand—would almost certainly try to steal the election. So that’s what they planned for. Not just to win at the polls, but for what would happen when the inevitable conflict came.

Duncan, for his part, wasn’t making as much progress. He pored over the available research about coupled oscillators, but didn’t find much. Then, during a casual chat with his father back home, he came across the odd notion that everybody in the world is separated by only six handshakes. He wondered whether this “six-degrees” phenomenon could be related to how crickets coordinate their chirping.

That sent him off in a completely new direction. It led him to Stanley Milgram’s original six degrees research. That, in turn, led him to Mark Granovetter’s work on collective action and the strength of weak ties. Slowly, but surely, the pieces began to come together and a picture began to emerge of how information cascades through a network.

Breakthroughs

The Otpor movement in Serbia grew slowly at first. A year after that fateful meeting in the café, it had only a few hundred members. But momentum quietly built, and eventually a tipping point was reached. By the time the Serbian elections came around in September 2000, Otpor’s ranks had swelled to 70,000. They mobilized voters, got people to the polls—and just as they expected, Milošević tried to steal the election.

That triggered what became known as the Bulldozer Revolution. Milošević was overthrown and soon sent to The Hague, where he would die in his prison cell. A popular documentary about the events, How to Bring Down a Dictator, inspired activists from the Georgian Republic and Ukraine and led to the Rose and Orange Revolutions.

Collectively, these became known as the color revolutions, and they changed the course of history. Those five kids meeting in a café would turn out to be the spark that ignited a wave of democratic uprisings—proof that small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose, could shake the foundations of authoritarian power.

These events echoed what Duncan had discovered in his research: that many networks are “small worlds,”—tight knit clusters connected through links over long distances. It’s this structure that allows information, influence, and behavior to leap across vast networks with surprising speed. Small groups, loosely connected, have a strange power to synchronize.

When Duncan applied the model to real-world data—IMDB’s movie actor network, the neural map of the worm C. elegans, and the western U.S. power grid— it aligned precisely with actual network behavior. The paper he wrote with Strogatz became a landmark, so influential that the journal Nature published a 20 year retrospective to commemorate it in 2018.

The Birth of Cascades

When I arrived in Palo Alto for a publishing course at Stanford in 2006, I’d never heard of Srdja Popović or Duncan Watts, but their stories were about to become tangled up with mine. Facebook was just taking off and “social networks” became a hot topic. I was running a sizable digital business and it seemed that networks were something I should learn about.

That led me to Duncan’s work and it immediately struck a chord. It felt deeply relevant to my own experience during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution two years earlier. That’s how I got hooked on studying change movements and, eventually, led to my friendship with Srdja who introduced me to his insights about bringing down authoritarian regimes.

Over time, I kept digging. The more I explored, the more it became clear that Duncan and Srdja’s work were deeply connected. I also began to see how their ideas could apply to business transformation—something I’d learned a lot about running media companies in post-communist Eastern Europe. In business, just like in revolutions, change rarely succeeds through top-down mandates, but spreads through networks.

That’s what led to the research that eventually became my book, Cascades. Sometimes I joke that I stole half of my book from Duncan and the other half from Srdja—my contribution being that Duncan knows nothing about Srdja and Srdja knows nothing about Duncan. But that’s not really true. As the legendary mathematician G.H. Hardy once wrote:

The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them.

Most people have never heard of my book—or of Srdja or Duncan, for that matter. But just as their work has made a difference for me, I can hope that my work has made a difference for others. Some have told me that it has. They, in turn, can do the same for others and slowly, slowly, we creep along, making progress where we can.

Sometimes the world’s problems can feel so vast that it seems pointless to try. But in doing what we can, we find purpose—and maybe help others find theirs too. That, I think, is what Camus meant by existential rebellion.

Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.