Over the past year, Rafi and I have sat down with 28 extraordinary people on The Impact Equation podcast. The patterns that emerged tell a much bigger story about how real change happens.
Over the past year, Rafi and I have sat down with 28 extraordinary people on The Impact Equation podcast. Social entrepreneurs building schools in Pakistani slums. Climate activists getting arrested to save the planet. CEOs turning billion-dollar companies green. Housing innovators creating net-zero homes for $14,000.
Each conversation lasted an hour. But the patterns that emerged tell a much bigger story about how real change actually happens and why most of our assumptions about it are wrong.
We love stories about lone geniuses changing the world. Steve Jobs in a garage. A brilliant scientist having a eureka moment. It's compelling, but it's also largely rubbish.
Every single leader we spoke to succeeded because they built ecosystems, not empires.
Take Chris Hook at Uber. When London introduced clean air zones that would have crushed drivers with old cars, Chris didn't just build electric vehicle charging stations. He created partnerships with car manufacturers, leasing companies, and charge point operators. He negotiated group discounts. He turned Uber's entire platform into a financing mechanism that made electric vehicles affordable for drivers who couldn't get traditional loans.
"We knew we couldn't do it alone," he told us. The result? Uber drivers are adopting electric vehicles eight to ten times faster than the general public.
Or consider Ian Shapiro at Reall, who's building affordable green housing across Africa and Asia. When we asked him about strategy, he was crystal clear: "We want to disrupt a market, not dominate it. Our job is to show that green affordable homes can work, then share that knowledge as freely as we can. Because the scale needed is far beyond what we alone can do."
Think about that for a moment. His explicit goal is to make his own organisation less essential by spreading the model so widely that others can carry it forward.
This isn't altruism, it's strategic brilliance. The problems these leaders tackle are too big for any single organisation to solve. Climate change. Educational inequality. Housing crises. These are systems problems that require systems solutions.
Here's another myth that needs to die: that you have to choose between doing good and making money.
The most effective leaders we spoke to have figured out how to make impact financially sustainable, not as an afterthought, but as a core design principle.
Chris Hook didn't appeal to Uber drivers' environmental consciousness. He made electric vehicles the economically smart choice. Haroon Yasin didn't just create engaging educational content for Pakistani children - he convinced the government to fully adopt his curriculum by making it so effective they couldn't say no. Even gave up his organisation's name in the process, white-labeling it as the "National Institute for Teacher Education."
"If the idea spreads without us, that's success," he said.
These leaders understand something crucial: unsustainable impact isn't impact at all. It's a vanity project with an expiration date.
Joel Makower, who's spent 40 years building the sustainable business movement, put it perfectly: "Government isn't stepping in. Consumers talk a good game, but rarely deliver. Business is how we got here - good and bad. So it must be how we get out."
This isn't about selling out to capitalism. It's about using capitalism as a tool for change instead of hoping someone else will fix the system from the outside.
Perhaps the most striking pattern was how many of these leaders started absurdly young, with minimal credentials and maximum conviction.
Haroon Yasin was running schools in Islamabad's slums at 18. Clover Hogan launched into climate activism at 11 and founded Force of Nature at 19. Gail Bradbrook had no formal organising experience when she co-founded Extinction Rebellion and helped it become what someone called "the fastest startup in history."
What they lacked in expertise, they made up for in audacity and learning speed.
But here's the crucial part: they all combined that youthful boldness with remarkable humility about what they didn't know.
Ian Shapiro told us about his early days working in Nepal: "The best lesson I took from those early times was that it's alright to not know something. That drive to be the cleverest person in the room? That probably means you're in the wrong room. The real strength is recognising others' wisdom and learning from them."
Haroon learned this lesson the hard way. Early in his journey, he hired smart people to run his school while he studied. "But it crumbled fast because they weren't mission-aligned," he reflected. "That's when I learned: skills aren't enough. You need people who obsess over the dream, who think about it in the shower, while daydreaming. That intensity, that shared obsession, is what builds something that lasts."
Youth brings something that experience often loses: the inability to see why something is impossible. Combined with genuine humility and fierce learning, it becomes a superpower.
The leaders who create lasting change don't just solve technical problems - they solve human problems.
When Haroon first started teaching street children in Pakistan, his approach wasn't working. Then he had a revelation: "To truly teach kids who are exhausted and hungry, I had to treat it like theatre. You can't bore them into learning, you have to perform, pull them in."
His background in improv became his secret weapon in the classroom. He learned to weave the lives of farmers' children into math lessons about crop pricing. "That's how you go viral," he said, "by honouring the learner's world."
Clover Hogan makes a similar point about climate activism: "Most people won't act on abstract ideas like 'net zero' or polar bears. But they understand rising energy bills, unaffordable food, and poor health. These aren't separate issues - they're symptoms of the same broken systems."
The most sophisticated technical solution in the world will fail if it doesn't account for how people actually live, think, and feel. These leaders succeed because they design for real humans, not idealised versions of humans.
But perhaps the most important insight came from the tensions between our guests - the places where they might fundamentally disagree.
Some, like Joel Makower, believe the system can be reformed from within: "We have this once-in-a-millennium opportunity to shift direction without losing profitability, jobs, or value."
Others, like Gail Bradbrook, argue for more fundamental disruption: "There's a spiritual crisis at the heart of all the meta-crises we're in. We're getting our arses kicked off the back of that."
Both might be right. As Rafi observed after our conversation with Catherine Howarth: "There's a role for activists who sound the alarm and a role for those working within the system to mediate the message. We need all of it."
This is the uncomfortable truth: real change requires both reformers and revolutionaries, both insider strategy and outsider pressure, both incremental progress and quantum leaps.
The mistake is thinking we have to choose.
So what do we do with all this? Most of us aren't going to found the next Extinction Rebellion or build schools in slums. But we can apply these principles wherever we are.
Start with economics, not ideology. Whether you're trying to change your company's sustainability practices or convince your local council to invest in cycling infrastructure, lead with the business case, not the moral case. Make the right thing the profitable thing.
Build coalitions, not monuments. Look for the overlapping interests. Find the people who care about different aspects of the same problem. Catherine Howarth didn't just ask pension funds to invest responsibly - she organised pension savers to demand it.
Design for real humans. Whether you're launching a product, running a campaign, or trying to change behavior in your organisation, start with how people actually think and feel, not how you wish they would.
Embrace both/and thinking. Work within the system and outside it. Push for immediate wins and long-term transformation. Be pragmatic about tactics and uncompromising about vision.
Most importantly, start before you feel ready. As Joel Makower put it: "You don't need to do everything. Just start somewhere. Raise your hand, raise your voice. Even 5% of people speaking up can create a tidal wave."
The most striking thing about these 28 conversations wasn't the individual stories - remarkable as they were. It was the collective picture they painted of how change actually happens.
Not through grand gestures or perfect plans, but through the patient work of building systems that make the right thing the easy thing. Not through heroic individuals, but through networks of people who understand that their success depends on everyone else's success.
Not through choosing between idealism and pragmatism, but through the harder work of making idealism pragmatic.
This is the quiet revolution happening all around us. Not in the headlines or on social media, but in boardrooms and classrooms, in shareholder meetings and community centers, in the decisions of young people who refuse to accept that the world can't change and experienced leaders who've figured out how to change it.
The question isn't whether this revolution will succeed. It's whether you'll be part of it.
Listen to The Impact Equation podcast to hear these conversations in full.
