Critical mass is understood as a strategy for making things happen by mobilizing large numbers to effect a desired change. Driven by political, business, and military concepts, we seem to have an image that this kind of strategic thinking translates into maximizing output. Constructive social change requires a different image of strategy. Strategy in peacebuilding means thinking about what gives life and what keeps things alive. In the simplest terms, to be strategic requires that we create something beyond what exists from what is available but has exponential potential. In reference to social change, it means we must develop a capacity to recognize and build the locus of potential for change.

That which counts can rarely be counted. –Einstein

Movements for social change often tend to conceptualize their challenge as a battlefield whose success is measured by the number of people who have joined “their side.” 

Side-taking, unfortunately, seems to accompany social battlefields and therefore accepts the premise that change is inherently a dualistic struggle. While many of us in the peace movement feel a deep sense of discomfort with politicians who framed our challenges in this manner, for example, as issues that force a choice between the “good guys” and “the evil empires,” we have often fallen prey to the trap of replicating that which we abhor. We, and here I refer to our broad community under the title of the peace movement, tend to frame the processes of change we wish to promote as the challenge of gaining the upper hand of influence in the public sphere. Thus we conceptualize social change as linked primarily to raising public awareness of a greater truth and then measuring how many of our compatriots within the public sphere have moved toward the awareness of what we believe in and how many are willing to act on it. This yardstick of success boils down to a numbers game: how many voted for a certain idea of how many people came to the street in protest against a particular issue or proposal. At a popular level, social change advocates often understand their goal as creating the numbers that count, what in everyday coins has come to be called “arriving at the critical mass.” 

The age of the mass media has certainly added to this phenomenon. In less than a sound byte, the success of social change is measured in a single statistic. A protest march is reported and interpreted by friend and foe alike as if it were a ball game recounted by a sportscaster. If the numbers are high, it means the movement and issues are serious. If the numbers are low, it has not become a political concern worthy of attention. You will often hear reporters say, “There doesn't appear to be a critical mass of public opinion that will sway this administration from its proposed goal.” In response, the challenge is laid: Those who want the change must create the mass. 

In this framing of the change process there is an important dynamic that is often overlooked: Social change that depends heavily on the magnetic attraction of shared opposition creates social energy that can generate large numbers in discrete time frames but has difficulty sustaining the longer term change. Social movements rise and fall as visible moments rather than as sustained processes. This seems related to two important observations about how change happens. 

First, social movements find that it is easier, and in many cases more popular, to articulate what they are opposed to rather than what they wish to build. Change is seen as linear: Raise awareness first, then promote action by increased numbers of people to stop something, and finally, once that thing is stopped, develop action to build something different. Awareness and action have at times gone together and create extraordinary moments of change—from local communities stopping a new proposed highway, to whole societies achieving the recognition of civil and human rights, to nations overthrow oppressive regimes. It has rather consistently been during the third part of the theory—developing action to build something—where we run into difficulties and where the change processes seem to collapse. 

Second, framing the process as one that must create like minded communities produces a narrow view of change wherein little thought or work is given to the broader nature of who and what will need to change and how they will be engaged in such a process. In other words, the very way the issues and process are framed undermines the fundamental web of understanding that change must strategically build linkages and coordination with and across not-like-minded and not-like-situated relational spaces. Unlike a linear change theory, the web approach suggests that multiple processes at different levels and social spaces take place at the same time. The web approach does not think in terms of us versus them, but rather about the nature of the change sought and how multiple sets of interdependent processes will link people and places to move the whole of the system toward those changes.

In pragmatic terms the web approach asks early and often: Who has to find a way to be connected to whom? 

Nonetheless, there is a certain truth to the frame of reference that convincing large numbers of people to get on board with an idea is the key to social change. Awareness of information and the willingness to act on what one believes are indeed part and parcel of the larger challenge of how societies as a whole change and move toward new ways of relating and organizing their lives together. In settings of protracted conflict and violence, movement away from fear, division, and violence toward new modalities of interaction requires awareness, action, and broad processes of change. In this sense, numbers are important. However, it is equally important for us to look deeper at how we think this shift happens. Numbers count. But experience in settings of deep division suggests that what lies invisible behind the numbers counts more. In social change, it is not necessarily the amount of participants that authenticates a social shift. It is the quality of the platform that sustains the shifting process that matters.

The Missing Ingredient

The number of people in the streets captured the media's attention but were incapable of generating a sustained process of social change. When I paid careful attention to the times when I believed significant change processes actually happened and were sustained in spite of the violence, I came to the conclusion that these did not happen with a strategy of focusing on counting the numbers and on whether they amounted to a critical mass. In fact the inverse was true. Focus on quantity distracted from focus on quality and on the space needed to generate and sustain change.

One day, by my recollection during an extended conversation with Somalis around an afternoon tea in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Djibouti in 1991, an alternative popped out. We were perplexed with what would make possible a shift to overcome the paralysis people felt when faced with the power of the warlords. Some commented that what was needed was a critical mass of opposition. Some argued for a force greater than the warlords, an outside intervention of military might that would set it all straight. On the spur of the moment I made the comment, “It seems to me that the key to changing this thing is getting a small set of the right people involved at the right places. What's missing is not the critical mass. The missing ingredient is the critical yeast.”

It is a metaphor that asks the “who” rather than the “how many” question: Who, though not like-minded or like-situated in this context of conflict, would have a capacity, if they were mixed and held together, to make other things grow exponentially, beyond their numbers? While the process and secrets vary, there is a commonsense understanding to bread baking that cuts across almost any cultural setting. Here are the five common observations about yeast, bread baking and social change:

1. The most common ingredients for baking bread are flour, salt, water, yeast, and sugar. Of all of the ingredients, flour is the largest, the mass. Among the smallest is yeast. There is only one that makes the rest grow: yeast. Smallness has nothing to do with the size of potential change. What you look for is the quality of what happens if certain sets of people get mixed. The principle of yeast is this: A few strategically connected people have greater potential for creating the social growth of an idea or process than large numbers of people who think alike. When social change fails, look first to the nature of who was engaged and what gaps exist in the connections among different sets of people.
   
   
2. Yeast, to do its thing, must first move from the jar or the foil packet and into a process, initially of its own growth, and then into the wider mass. Sitting on a shelf or never being removed from the package, yeast has only potential but no real capacity to affect any kind of growth. Mixed directly and quickly into the mass, yeast dies and does not work.
   
   
3. Initially, yeast needs a small amount of moisture and warmth to grow. In early or preparatory growth, yeast will be stronger and more resilient if it has a dash of sugar and if it is not placed in glaring sunlight, that is, if it is located a bit out of the way and covered. The core steps for building initial growth are mixing the dry ingredient of yeast with water, sweetening it a bit, and placing it in a somewhat warm environment. Following the same principles, social change requires careful attention to the way people in their environment mix in relational spaces that provide a warm, initially somewhat separate, and therefore safe space to bring together what has not usually been brought together with enough sweetness to make the space conducive for the growth of those merged.
   
   
4. The yeast must then be thoroughly mixed into the mass. This is no minor process. In bread baking, it is called kneading. It is intentional and requires a good bit of muscle. Further, breadbakers rarely accept the first signs of growth as legitimate. To be authentic, growth must find a source that rises, again and again, despite everything that pushes it down. Yeast is defined principally by this capacity to be resilient. In social change, the critical yeast must find a way to sustain the purpose of who they are as yeast yet be mixed back into the full mass such that despite ups and downs, they are characterized as displaying the capacity to generate growth.
   
   
5. Don't forget to preheat the oven. Bread baking and critical yeast are multitasking par excellence. While one set of things is set in motion in one place, attention is always given to the horizon of what's coming and will be needed in another. What is being done now simultaneously must connect with other things that will need to be attended to and kept present, not as a linear sequence of first A and then B, but as a simultaneous understanding of interdependence through different processes. In this sense, social change requires a keen sense of relational spaces even when those are not in direct physical proximity. Based on relational spaces, critical yeast constantly moves across a range of different processes and connections.

In this image the largest ingredient, flour, is an analogy for the critical mass. However, the smallest ingredient, yeast, is the only one with a capacity to help the other ingredients grow. If we follow the analogy, yeast needs moisture, warmth, and to be mixed in order to make the other ingredients grow. The Place where the critical mass and the critical yeast meet in reference to social change is not in the number of people involved but rather in creating the quality of the platform that makes exponential growth strong and possible, and then finding ways to sustain that platform.

Conclusion

In its everyday application, critical mass is understood as a strategy of making things happen by mobilizing large numbers to effect a desired change. Driven by political, business, and military concepts, we seem to have an image that this kind of strategic thinking translates into maximizing output. Success is measured in numbers and wins. 

Constructive social change requires a different image of strategy. We need to generate a greater quality of process with the available, often few, resources. In peacebuilding, when we think about strategy, we should think about what gives life and what keeps things alive. In the simplest terms, to be strategic requires that we create something beyond what exists from what is available but has exponential potential. In reference to social change, it means we must develop a capacity to recognize and build the locus of potential for change. 

In sustaining peace, the critical yeast suggests that the measuring stick is not a question of quantity, as in the number of people. It is a question of the quality of relational spaces, intersections, and interactions that affect a social process beyond the numbers involved. To think quality requires that we think about the spaces, connections, and platforms that hold potential for affecting the whole.