The Late Majority: Sages of Change
Years ago, I applied for a senior leadership position at my school. During the interview, one of the interviewers told me that I relished being the “gadfly,” the one who critiques the administration for sport and pushes back for the sake of argument. He said that if I became a leader, I would need to toe the party line, and he wasn’t sure I could do that. I didn’t get the job.
He wasn’t wrong that I was critical, but he was wrong about why.
I wasn’t critical because I was a contrary person. (Anyone who knows me knows I’ve got a bit of a people-pleasing and diplomacy streak.) I was critical because of the distance I saw between what my school claimed to stand for and what it actually did. The ethics of that alignment are crucial. The integrity between vision and action mattered to me then. It matters to me now.
I eventually did become a leader. And I didn't like the term “gadfly,” but if there was someone on the leadership team who did a fair share of questioning about aligning vision and action, I’ll assume that mantle. I had come to understand that being a necessary skeptic and a committed change agent are not opposites. They are, in fact, the same thing.
What We Get Wrong About the Late Majority
In 1962, sociologist Everett Rogers published Diffusion of Innovations, a framework for understanding how new ideas spread through a population. He identified five categories of adopters:
innovators who chase new ideas first
early adopters who follow close behind
the early majority who come along once momentum builds
the late majority who need more time, more trust, and more evidence before they move
the laggards, who may never fully come around
If you’ve ever heard a leader say, “We need everyone's buy-in,” or ask how they can stop resistance, this is the model living beneath that language. The model accounts for how change happens, but not necessarily the quality of the change idea. Innovators and early adopters are great, but chasing a shiny object because of its novelty alone isn’t revolutionary; it’s unwise.
The late majority includes roughly one-third of any community. They can be a skeptical bunch, needing relationship, trust, or evidence of impact before they’re willing to move. We tend to treat this as a problem to be managed rather than a guardrail in a change process.
The late majority aren’t like the innovators and early adopters, but they aren’t like the laggards either, though they get lumped into that category often. They are not the entrenched resistance that clings to an inequitable status quo. The late majority are something more demanding and more necessary: the mirror holders. They reflect back to us whether our change is as real, as rooted, and as worthy of trust as leaders claim it to be.
Reframing the Late Majority
One of the oldest and most durable ideas in human thought is that when we hold seemingly opposing truths in tension, rather than forcing one to win, we arrive at something stronger than either could produce alone. But not every counter-perspective deserves equal weight. There is a meaningful difference between the skeptic who says, “I need to see that this will actually serve our students,” and the one who says, "These kids can't do that.” One is a mirror that the community needs to reflect on. The other is a barrier to change.
The late majority I’m writing about are about reflection and accountability. Their skepticism is grounded in experience, in pattern recognition, in having watched too many promising initiatives evaporate. They’re demanding that the change be real.
They are also often the people with the most historical reason to be skeptical: educators who have watched equity initiatives get championed one year and quietly dismantled the next; marginalized people asked to lead diversity work without power, time, or institutional support; longtime, committed educators who recognize when new language is packaging old thinking.
The late majority aren’t always waiting for evidence. Sometimes they’re waiting for solidarity and to be included. They need to feel the collective moving together, and that they won’t be left behind when it gets hard. The late majority are asking: Are we actually in this together?
The Sages of Change
The late majority don’t need to be convinced with defensive posturing. They need to be brought into the vision early and given the space to ask the questions no one else is willing to ask. They are the ones who remember what was promised last time. They are the ones whose hesitation, when honored rather than dismissed, makes the change more durable, more honest, and more worthy of the people it’s meant to serve.
What might it look like to treat the late majority in your community as the sages of your change effort? To seek their counsel before a plan is finalized—to design with them rather than defend against them?
The integrity between what we say and what we do, that gap I noticed as an aspiring leader (the one that made me a gadfly in someone else’s estimation), is exactly what the late majority are paying attention to. They’ve seen that gap before. Some have fallen into it. Many have been harmed by it.
Imagine what’s possible when we stop seeing the late majority as the people we need to move, and start seeing them as the reason we can all move together.
