What Gandhi Can Teach Us About Change
Today, we remember Mohandas Gandhi as an icon, but he didn’t start out that way. As a young lawyer, he was so shy he had trouble mustering up the courage to speak in open court. Undisciplined, with a violent temper, it took him years to gain a measure of self control. It would be difficult to look at the young Gandhi and see the man he would grow into.
The truth is that we revere Gandhi today not for some eternal essence, but who he became and that is what we can best learn from. It wasn’t any mysterious, superhuman quality that made him such a legendary figure, but the things he learned along the way and he learned those lessons from the mistakes he made.
He would later write, “Men say that I am a saint losing myself in politics. The fact is I am a politician trying my hardest to be a saint.” He was, in truth, a master strategist, luring opponents into a dilemma that would put them in the impossible position of choosing either surrender or damnation. If you want to pursue change, Gandhi is a model to follow.
The Himalayan Miscalculation
Gandhi’s failures as a young lawyer that led him to take a job in South Africa. It was there he faced a humiliation on a train that began his personal transformation. “I saw that South Africa was no country for a self-respecting Indian,” he remembered, “and my mind became more and more occupied with the question of how this state of things might be improved.”
It was there he would develop his own brand of civil disobedience, which he called Satyagraha or “truth force.” He took pains to distinguish it from passive resistance, which he felt was a “weapon of the weak.” His vision was something more forceful — to expose the faults of a repressive regime through strategic action. It was his success in South Africa that first earned him the title of “Mahatma” or “holy man.”
When he returned to India in 1915, he was an international figure and a leading light in the Indian nationalist movement. A few years after he arrived, incensed by the oppressive Rowlatt Acts that extended emergency measures put in place during World War I, such as indefinite detention without due process, Gandhi called for nationwide strikes.
At first, it seemed like a great success. Unlike in South Africa, where Indians were a minority, In India the numbers were far more favorable to his cause and millions took part. Yet things soon spun out of control, riots broke out and there was a terrible massacre at Amritsar. Gandhi would later call the incident his Himalayan miscalculation.
Building A Movement
It’s important to not confuse a movement with a moment. The passing of the Rowlatt Acts created a moment. People were angry and ready to hit the streets. Yet once they were there, dark elements took over and Gandhi lost all control. Not only was nothing achieved, there was a backlash and the struggle for independence lost ground.
After the Amritsar massacre, most people would have concluded that the British were far too cruel and brutal to be dealt with peacefully. Yet Gandhi realized that he had not sufficiently indoctrinated the protestors in his philosophy of Satyagraha. What many would have taken as an occasion to call out injustice and blame the British, Gandhi took as a learning opportunity. He realized he had the wrong strategy and changed his course. .
“I realized that before a people could be fit for offering civil disobedience, they should thoroughly understand its deeper implications,” he wrote. “That being so, before restarting civil disobedience on a mass scale, it would be necessary to create a band of well-tried, pure-hearted volunteers who thoroughly understood the strict conditions of Satyagraha.”
He spent the next decade building his movement, but instead of trying to inspire thousands or millions, he worked with a much smaller group of dedicated followers. At the same time, dissatisfaction with the British Raj grew among the Indian people. Things came to a point when, at midnight on December 31st 1929, the Indian National Congress adopted a resolution for Purna Swaraj, its declaration of full independence from Great Britain.
It’s difficult—some would argue impossible—to create a moment, but you can prepare for one and that was what Gandhi did for those 10 years. The declaration of Purna Swaraj would prove to be what triggered a window of opportunity and, this time, he was ready to take full advantage of it.
Designing A Dilemma
Having learned his lesson from his “Himalayan miscalculation”, Gandhi proceeded with caution. He knew he couldn’t just try to overpower the British Raj with massive protests, he needed to find a particular point of weakness to focus on. Military strategists call this principle Schwerpunkt, the delivery of overwhelming force at a specific point of attack.
Gandhi meditated for weeks, then announced he would march for the repeal of the salt laws, restrictions on the manufacture of salt. It was an idea that few took seriously at first. Given the scale of the injustice, bickering about salt laws seemed petty and meaningless. It was if Gandhi thought he could beat the British by fighting traffic tickets.
Yet it was an inspired choice. The salt laws were considered fundamentally unjust, even by prominent British politicians such as Ramsay MacDonald. While most Indians were desperately poor and didn’t much care whether they were ruled by British elites or Indian elites, the salt laws affected them directly. Also, because the salt laws were less emotionally laden, his march was less likely to spin out of control.
So when Gandhi set out with 70 or 80 of his most disciplined followers to march 241 miles to the sea at Dandi, the British had a dilemma: They could either allow their salt laws be defied or they could crack down. They chose the latter, faced international condemnation — even back home in Britain — and were forced to the bargaining table.
The Salt March became Gandhi’s most iconic moment because it leveraged the two essential elements of a dilemma action: A shared value, in the form of the widely held belief that the salt laws were unjust, and a constructive act in the form of Gandhi’s disciplined and nonviolent march. They could either let him march and manufacture salt peacefully and surrender or they would have to violate the shared value. Either way they were going to lose.
Leveraging Shared Values
As one of Gandhi’s followers would later note, before Salt March forced the British to sit down and negotiate with Gandhi as an equal, they “were all sahibs and we were obeying. No more after that.” At that point, Indian Independence was just a matter of time.
Many would say Gandhi achieved what he did because he had a natural ability to communicate the plight of the Indians, to differentiate their plight in ways that were meaningful and, that by speaking out against the powerful he was able to get the world to see the injustice that the British Raj was perpetrating against his people.
But they’d be wrong. In fact, he did exactly the opposite. He didn’t look for things that differentiated his people from the British, but what they shared, what they could agree on—and then exploited it. That’s what made him a master strategist, because he was able to identify where he was strong and his opponents were weak.
Our mistake is that we look back on Gandhi as if he was a saint, when the historical record is clear that he was nothing of the sort. For much of his life, he struggled with his temper, treated his wife poorly and gave into his worst urges. It was only when he was able to learn self-control and discipline himself that he was able to see opportunities that others couldn’t.
Most of all, he learned that identity is a trap and once you can escape your own, you can learn to identify the values that you share with others. That is the key to genuinely transformational change. Gandhi didn’t just beat the British, he won them over. When he died, they, like the Indians, celebrated him as a hero.
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.
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