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There are animals we adore — and animals we need.

The swan is the former. A beaver is the latter.

Take a moment to get that giggle out, for I am quite serious😊.

Swans delight us. They glide across still water with an elegance that reassures us the world is working as it should. When we see a swan, we don’t just register function — we feel meaning. Beauty. Harmony. Grace. Swans don’t merely survive in a healthy ecosystem; they elevate our experience of it. They are the visible proof we point to when we say, Look — everything is fine here.

Beavers, on the other hand, flood roads.

They fell trees. They reroute streams. They make a mess.

They don’t ask permission. They don’t coordinate. They don’t wait to be invited into the conversation. They intervene — relentlessly — and in doing so frustrate farmers, city planners, conservationists, and anyone invested in keeping the landscape recognizable.

And yet.

As I’ve been reading Eager: Beavers and Why They Matter (Goldfarb, 2018), one truth lands again and again: beavers are not a nuisance to riparian ecosystems, they are why the healthiest of those ecosystems exist at all.

Individually, a single beaver looks insignificant. Small. Interchangeable. Easy to dismiss in the grand scheme of things.

Collectively, they are irreplaceable.

Long before we engineered canals, dams, and reservoirs, beavers were shaping landscapes of astonishing vitality. Wetlands teeming with life (the very ecosystems most sustainability rating systems now try to protect). Water tables resilient to drought. Biodiversity so rich that we can barely imagine it today. Goldfarb is blunt about this: the land was once far more alive than anything we have since experienced or designed. We don’t even have a proper baseline for what “healthy” can mean until we take the beaver seriously.

Swans are the poster children of ecosystem health.Beavers are the infrastructure.

And we have made the same mistake — again and again — in how we think about transformation.

We reward delight — and punish the work that makes it possible

There is a pattern here that runs far beyond ecology.

We reward what is visible, elegant, and pleasing.We mistrust what is structural, disruptive, and inconvenient.

In organizations, movements, and institutions, we celebrate outcomes that look like success — alignment, engagement, momentum, morale. These are our swans. They delight us. They reassure us that the system is functioning.

But they are never the cause.They are a symptom.

The cause is almost always something far less glamorous: a shift in incentives, a redesign of decision rights, a change in narrative power, a redistribution of agency.

The work that actually makes transformation inevitable is rarely delightful. It is muddy. It interrupts flow. It surfaces conflict. It destabilizes arrangements that only kind of worked.

This is why so many change efforts fail — not for lack of effort, but for lack of honesty about what kind of change is required.

As I wrote in Why 70% of Transformation Initiatives Fail, we consistently confuse incremental change with transformation. We try to optimize systems that are not fit for purpose, instead of redesigning the conditions that make failure inevitable.

Incremental change trims the reeds along the riverbank.Transformation reroutes the river.

Beavers do not optimize damage. They do not patch broken systems. They do not offer bandaids. They change the conditions so ecosystems can thrive — and they accept the disruption that follows.

The beaver is not a helper.The beaver is the change.

Changemakers do the vital work no one asked for

Beavers don’t intervene because they want to.They can’t help themselves.

Beavers intervene because they must.They merely choose how to do so.

Source: Beaver Institute, the non-profit focused on interdependence with beavers. https://www.beaverinstitute.org

This is the part that resonates most deeply with changemakers. Not the drama of disruption — but the quiet ownership of responsibility. The moment you see that something is structurally broken and realise you can no longer unsee it.

Changemakers — like beavers — know many a moment when “not my job” stops being morally available.

Changemakers don’t wake up wanting to disrupt systems.They wake up unable to unsee structural dysfunction.

This kind of work is almost never wanted — even when survival depends on it. Preventative medicine works this way. Soil regeneration works this way. Parenting works this way. No one thanks you in the moment for doing what prevents collapse and establishes the conditions for an irresistible future.

Need is not validated by desire.Responsibility is not conferred by applause.

This is also why resistance shows up so reliably.

Resistance is not a misunderstanding.It is evidence of impact.

Malfunctioning systems are exquisitely sensitive to intervention — not because intervention threatens health, but because it exposes how little health existed to begin with. When a system has been held together by habit, hierarchy, or avoidance, even a small dam can reveal its brittleness.

Like beavers, changemakers don’t destabilise healthy ecosystems.They destabilise — and reimagine — arrangements that were already failing.

Can we trust the beaver?

At this point, a reasonable counterargument emerges.

What if beavers intervene too much?What if unchecked intervention becomes destruction?What if restraint is wiser?

Eager is clear on this: beavers are not ideological. They are context-responsive. They do not build if they do not need to. They do not build everywhere. And when they do, their dams — unlike ours — decay. Their systems self-limit through feedback loops rather than domination. Most of the “damage” attributed to beavers turns out to be damage to human convenience, not system health.

This distinction matters.

When changemakers become dangerous, it is not because they intervene — but because they lose contact with feedback, consequence, and responsibility.

Agency without accountability is compulsion. Transformation without restraint is chaos.

Wisdom lies in discernment: knowing when intervention is essential — and when grief, witnessing, or letting go is the more ethical choice. I’ve written about this tension before, particularly in how changemakers carry the cost of seeing what others cannot, and the grief that comes with it: Is depression the inevitable cost of changing the world?.

Agency includes the capacity not to intervene.But it also includes the courage to act when needed.

Naming the beaver in you

Image credit: Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay.

Many changemakers will recognize themselves here — not as the visionary at the podium, but as the one quietly fixing whatever is not working. The one who doesn’t just “show up” or “stir,” but does the work that needs to be done. The one whose reliability, loyalty, and commitment are tested long before they are — if they ever are — acknowledged.

In How to wield the power of one, I wrote about agency not as scale, but as orientation — the willingness to act from responsibility rather than permission.

That is the beaver’s orientation.

Not loud.Not performative.Decentralised.Tenacious.Irresistible.

Beavers don’t wait for alignment. They do what the system requires — again, and again, and again — until it works.

A single beaver looks small in the scheme of things.

But the collective impact of beavers — decentralized, persistent, compounding — is irrefutable.

A landscape shaped by beavers becomes the baseline.

Beaver: a changemaker’s spirit animal

Beaver energy is unmistakable:

* Looks small, acts structural → underestimated individually, indispensable collectively

* Decentralized by nature → doesn’t wait for permission, alignment, or applause

* Relentlessly constructive → intervenes not to disrupt, but to make life possible

* System-literate → changes conditions, not symptoms

* Tenacious under pressure → keeps building, even when misunderstood

Beaver doesn’t posture.Beaver doesn’t optimise broken systems.Beaver builds the future quietly, repeatedly, until it works.

If you were to get yourself - or another changemaker - a t-shirt (or a onesie, as is in vogue), it might say:

Changemakers’ spirit animal: BeaverSmall. Steady. Irresistible.And absolutely essential.

Questions for you:

* What is “the beaver” in your ecosystem? Who/what fulfills this vital role wherever you are across the 38 countries that Changemakers’ Handbook is read.

* Where do you most identify with the Beaver?

* Where can you imagine Beaver energy best guiding you?

If you choose to apply this insight:

* What it means to report to a beaver?

* What it means to manage a beaver?

* What it means to mentor or govern a beaver?

The nuance I am about to demonstrate for paid subscribers notwithstanding, the answer is the same: stop trying to manage intervention — and start designing with it.

If you recognize yourself here, the task is not to soften, shrink, or slow down your nature. It is to wield it responsibly, surround yourself with people who understand the work, and design systems that can carry what you are building.

Now, let’s get to practical applications for your teams, Boards, and communities.

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