Buckminster Fuller? Mike Vance? Diane Deacon? Daniel Quinn? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: Inventor and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller once spoke about the best way to accomplish positive changes. He said that one rarely changes something by fighting it directly. Instead, one should build a new system or model that makes the existing model obsolete. I do not recall the exact phrasing used by Fuller. Would you please help me to find the correct quotation together with a citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: In 1995 Mike Vance and Diane Deacon published “Think Out of the Box”. The couple were business consultants. Previously, Vance had worked for The Walt Disney Company where he was part of a team working on innovative ideas for the Walt Disney World theme park.
Vance interviewed creative thinkers to help develop new concepts. He described meeting with Buckminster Fuller at a small beach motel in Santa Monica. The interview must have occurred before Fuller’s death in 1983. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
Bucky sat in a comfortable reclining chair, sipping thoughtfully from his tea cup, as we conducted an unforgettable interview with one of the world’s most unusual people . . .
He spoke quietly: “You never change anything by fighting it; you change things by making them obsolete through superior technology. Telstar replaced 500 tons of transoceanic cable. It used to take us three years to circumnavigate the globe in a wooden-hulled ship. It took three months in a steel ship, 90 minutes in a space capsule and now instantaneously with telecommunications.”
The text above seems to be an excerpt from a transcript; hence, it is probably the most reliable version of the quotation. The book “Think Out of the Box” also included a slightly different version of the quotation as an epigraph on a different page:2
“You can’t change anything by fighting or resisting it. You change something by making it obsolete through superior methods.”
— Buckminster Fuller
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In 1988 the “Tallahassee Democrat” of Florida reported on a speech delivered by Mike Vance to public school administrators. During the speech Vance presented another phrasing of the viewpoint articulated by Buckminster Fuller, but this version did not seem to be a direct quotation:3
Vance has worked with major corporations on product creation and marketing design, and he incorporates the lessons of original thinkers with whom he has worked—Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller—into his creativity creed.
From Disney: For entertainment to be good, it must be educational; but almost no education takes place unless it’s entertaining.
From Wright: There are few inferior people, but there are lots of inferior environments; people stay in environments that enrich them.
From Fuller: Superior methodology changes more things than fighting and struggling—but it requires innovation and creativity.
In 1995 Vance and Deacon published “Think Out of the Box” as mentioned previously. The book contained two versions of the quotation.
In 1998 “The News and Advance” newspaper of Lynchburg, Virginia printed a column by Darrell Laurant who presented another version of the quotation:4
I read a quote recently from Buckminster Fuller: “You never change anything by fighting the existing. Instead, form a new model and make the existing obsolete.”
In 1999 Daniel Quinn published “Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure”. Quinn printed a different phrasing for the quotation. The book presented no supporting citation:5
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Buckminster Fuller
In 2006 “Treasury of Wit & Wisdom” from the Reader’s Digest Association contained the following entry:6
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. — R. Buckminster Fuller
In 2017 “Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways To Think Like a 21st Century Economist” by Kate Raworth printed an instance:7
As the ingenious twentieth-century inventor Buckminster Fuller once said, ‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’
In conclusion, Mike Vance interviewed Buckminster Fuller before his death in 1983. Vance presented an excerpt spoken by Fuller in the 1995 book “Think Out of the Box”. The instance of the quotation in this excerpt is probably the most reliable. Other versions of this quotation do not have solid supporting evidence. Admittedly, Fuller may have expressed this notion in more than one way on different occasions.
Image Notes: Picture of a typewriter which illustrates the idea of an obsolete object. The image is from Peter Pryharski at Unsplash. The image has been cropped and resized.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to the anonymous person whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration.
- 1995 Copyright, Think Out of the Box by Mike Vance and Diane Deacon, Section: Profile in creativity: Dr R. Buckminster Fuller, Quote Page 138, Career Press, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1995 Copyright, Think Out of the Box by Mike Vance and Diane Deacon, Chapter 3: The nine-point formula for success, Quote Page 78, Career Press, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1988 February 7, Tallahassee Democrat, Cutting-edge schools leave legacy of fine, curious minds by Mary Ann Lindley, Quote Page E1, Column 1, Tallahassee, Florida. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎
- 1998 September 2, The News and Advance, A re-enactment of a quiet war by Darrell Laurant, Quote Page C1, Column 1, Lynchburg, Virginia. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎
- 1999 Copyright, Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure by Daniel Quinn, Part Six: The New Tribal Revolution, Quote Page 137, Harmony Books, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 2006, Treasury of Wit & Wisdom: 4,000 of the Funniest, Cleverest, Most Insightful Things Ever Said, Compiled by Jeff Bredenberg, Topic: Politics, Quote Page 238, The Reader’s Digest Association, Pleasantville, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 2017, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways To Think Like a 21st Century Economist by Kate Raworth, Chapter: Who Wants To Be an Economist?, Quote Page 3 and 4, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont. (Verified with scans) ↩︎