Why Slow And Steady Might Be The Formula For Lasting Social Change

Sascha Haselmayer is a social entrepreneur who has worked with communities and city governments in over 50 countries. An Ashoka Fellow, non-resident Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and former New America Fellow, Sascha is a trusted adviser to some of the world’s leading philanthropists, transnational institutions, and government leaders. His book The Slow Lane: Why Quick Fixes Fail and How To Achieve Real Change was released in July 2023. Here, we discuss many of its central themes, including the space that slowing down creates for broad, democratic participation in social change.

Michael Zakaras: Sascha, you had a different title in mind originally, The Quick Fix. Why the pivot?

Sascha Haselmayer: Ha! I started writing the book with the assumption that if people understood how governments and social entrepreneurs work together to get things done, how effective these partnerships can be, it would all be a quick fix. Then Covid came. Many cities I had partnered with for years on better procurement came out with big budget cuts and austerity measures. What was being cut? Public services, work with communities – the same playbook we saw after the 2008 financial crisis. So, the book and its title evolved. In a way, it’s me thinking through the question, “What do people need to know when we’re facing another crisis, a future crisis?”

Zakaras: Among these are greater valuing of inclusiveness, participation, voice – the defining elements of slow versus fast. Tell us about the distinction.

Haselmayer: We obsess about things that grow fast, right? The rise of Facebook back in the day. The rise of Threads just this month. Yet, with every solution created for fast traction, the divide with those who are not part of the majority grows. The biggest myth that The Slow Lane busts is that a heroic disruptor is the boldest visionary. Instead, I’m interested in social entrepreneurs and movement catalysts who deeply care about people on the periphery and work to bring them to the center. These movements deliver much bolder, more audacious visions for the future. How do they do it? By reimagining an entire system: the coexistence of people, or democracy, or food systems, or social order. Ideas of vast scale that come out of the deepest participation.

Zakaras: Can you give an example?

Haselmayer: Take same-sex couples in the ’70s asking for marriage licenses. What an audacious idea at the time – an idea that grew, with participation, and sparked a global movement. Forty-five years later, we see marriage equality in the U.S. and today in many more countries. No venture capitalist would’ve placed a bet on that becoming a reality, yet people who lived the reality stepped up. They wanted to correct the injustice, imagine a new future – not just for themselves, but for everyone. They took the long view and built an inclusive movement that led to a new norm.

Zakaras: A great example. Yet, slowness and the principle of what you call “holding the urgency” – how do these square with something like climate change? I live in Vermont and our capital city flooded earlier this month and was underwater.

Haselmayer: I open the book with the story of Barcelona after the financial crisis, and the government’s quick actions on austerity. Those very actions threw millions of families into extreme poverty. Meanwhile, Iceland responded by saying, “We’re not going to bail out the banks. In fact, at this moment of acute crisis, we’re going to run a national referendum and ask people who will be affected by this for generations what they want to do.” They came out of the crisis much faster, within months – while Spain is still reeling 15 years later. In the case of climate, it’s been 60 years and a lot of fast lane messages, yet progress has been tough and polarizing – and I say this with a lot of respect for everyone trying. I guess what I’m proposing here is that we just try to trust a different approach that’s less about winning at all costs and more about bringing everyone along for the ride. What we see is that the result is often more resilient and enduring.

Zakaras: And this approach becomes especially important, you write, when challenges are public challenges, more complex than, say, building an app.

Haselmayer: Right. You know, we’ve arrived at the idea of perfection in the management of everything. The updated public management paradigm said that governments should run more like businesses. Then we realized that businesses are not so good for the planet, so we had to make the government more caring. The slow lane government is one that really sees eye to eye with citizens and appreciates what they contribute.

Zakaras: Isn’t much of philanthropy calibrated on fast lane principles, seeking quick scale?

Haselmayer: Yes. Much of the capital coming into philanthropy comes from people who succeeded in the tech industry. They are willing to place big bets on audacious ideas, which is great. Yet, they are deeply wedded to the startup playbook and a set of assumptions about how you scale fast. The most exciting conversations I had for the book were with social entrepreneurs who’ve experienced this tension and are partnering with tech leaders and entrepreneurs – while also embracing all the human complexity that the startup world doesn’t allow. Ultimately, they are asking themselves and their teams: what’s the best use of the next 10 years? Is it to get a quick fix out into the world, or lay the ground for something more transformative?

Zakaras: You circle back to democracy in the closing chapters. In a sense, you’re saying that the slow lane doesn’t just produce better results, but the process itself creates deep and lasting value.

Haselmayer: This is, to me, a central insight. Social entrepreneurs told me that, look, when you are organizing a community, you don’t know when and where this journey will take you. Will it take 40 years, as it did for Albina Ruiz in Peru, or 160 years, like reforming the Draconian abortion laws in Ireland? But what you can be sure of is that, if done right, you’re moving people who’ve been excluded from public discourse and democratic participation closer to the center. You’re normalizing their participation.

Take the German environmental movement and the Green Party. I’m German and in looking back at the journey, I first thought, “Germany is, out of 27 countries in the European Union, ranked 25 for CO2 emissions per capita.” Which could boil down to, “Well, 50 years of activism hasn’t made us a green utopia.” But then I realized, that view is too narrow. The green movement created a political party by new rules that reflected the slow lane principles. They transformed our political system completely. Maybe they set out to save the environment, and maybe they’ve made limited contributions there. But what is inarguable is that they’ve made the democracy more diverse, future-oriented, and created room for not just issues of the industrial legacy but of the future that are defining the country.

Or, in the U.S., I think of Denisa Livingston, a Navajo (Dine) changemaker who, with her community, passed the first unhealthy food tax in the country. That was an enormous win. But even bigger was the space she created for tribal members – and young people in particular – to participate in the change, to debate together, build relationships, and overcome divisive, short-term political practices. Now there’s a foundation for resilience and people power that will last well into the future.

Zakaras: Sascha, last question here. For someone who is encountering these principles for the first time, where do you advise them to start?

Haselmayer: Do a self-assessment of your fast lane mindsets and biases. You may be running a hypercompetitive business that is crushing its competitors. That’s an obvious case. But you may also carry subconscious biases when it comes to the future of your children. Do you really want to set them in competition against others? As I say in the book, in the slow lane, you need to allow yourself the trust-fall. You need to be able to say, “Doing it differently is the right thing to do and it will get us to the right place.” Yes, there are risks to this but it’s sometimes necessary. With slow lane principles, the key question here is, how do I respond in a moment of crisis? Do I shut everyone out and just dictate what needs to happen, or can I learn new behaviors, bring others in, and create a way forward together? Then you have two steps. The first is learning how to hold the urgency and not jump into immediate action. The second is to use that time to find out who you should listen to, and whose voice you might not be hearing yet.