Agreed, though I think there’s an additional factor to consider: what goes into ensuring that you succeed. I view it in terms of power expansion and power consolidation.
When you try to get something unusual done, you “stake” some amount of your political capital on this. If you win, you “expand” the horizon of the socially acceptable actions available to you. You start being viewed as someone who can get away with doing things like that, you get an in with more powerful people, people are more tolerant of you engaging in more disruptive action.
But if you try to immediately go for the next, even bigger move, you’ll probably fail. You need buy-in from other powerful actors, some of which have probably only now became willing to listen to you and entertain your more extreme ideas. You engage in politicking with them, arguing with them, feeding them ideas, establishing your increased influence and stacking the deck in your favor. You consolidate your power.
Then you stake it to expand your action-space even more, and so on.
Agreed, though I think there’s an additional factor to consider: what goes into ensuring that you succeed. I view it in terms of power expansion and power consolidation.
When you try to get something unusual done, you “stake” some amount of your political capital on this. If you win, you “expand” the horizon of the socially acceptable actions available to you. You start being viewed as someone who can get away with doing things like that, you get an in with more powerful people, people are more tolerant of you engaging in more disruptive action.
But if you try to immediately go for the next, even bigger move, you’ll probably fail. You need buy-in from other powerful actors, some of which have probably only now became willing to listen to you and entertain your more extreme ideas. You engage in politicking with them, arguing with them, feeding them ideas, establishing your increased influence and stacking the deck in your favor. You consolidate your power.
Then you stake it to expand your action-space even more, and so on.