Ten years ago, when Tesla was still in its infancy, Elon Musk concluded a blog post with a summation of Tesla's strategy:
- Build sports car
- Use that money to build an affordable car
- Use that money to build an even more affordable car
- While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options
- Don't tell anyone.
In other words, Tesla's strategy was a gradual iterative process. The strategy was iterative in the sense that it took discrete, small steps in order to acheive its long-term goals.
The strategy was gradual in the way that it took an indirect method to achieving its methods. Instead of developing an economy electric car from the get-go, Tesla began with the un-sexy, intermediate goal of building a sports car. They then iterated on the sports car to build more affordable cars, moving towards their final, sexier goal. I call building a sports car unsexy because it's not the ultimate goal; rather, the sexy goal of Tesla is building an affordable electric car; ironic, and a bit confusing.
An iterative strategy like this could prove effective in other arenas such as social change. Let's consider resopnses to climate change as an example. The ultimate goal of climate change activism is to reduce carbon emissions, and thereby mitigate the threat of climate change. It would be sexy if climate change activitists could enforce a ban on carbon emissions and prevent the creation of new fossil fuel technologies. However, achieving such a ban is nearly impossible in the short-term. What is needed for the short-term is a less sexy goal that can be iterated upon to achieve to long-term goal: A goal that doesn't quite ban carbon emissions, but it would make it easier to ban carbon emissions in the future.