Andrew MacLeod described presenting evidence on child trafficking or systemic abuse in professional settings only to watch people’s eyes glaze over. Not in disagreement. Not in anger. But to escape the conversation.

I recently spoke with Andrew — a former UN official, military officer, politician, and founder of Hear Their Cries — about changemaking on terrain that is not just difficult, but socially and psychologically unspeakable. You can listen on Substack, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. I recommend that you do. What follows is how I am holding the ideas.

We are no longer in a world that lacks solutions.

We are in a world that struggles to deploy them. This premise has sharpened across my work.

This conversation revealed a harder limit.

Some problems remain endemic not because we don’t see them — but because we do not want to.

When awareness is not the bottleneck

I have argued before that we overestimate the role of awareness in driving change (see my earlier post, What if I Told You That You Don’t Need To Change Minds To Create Powerful Change?) This conversation pushes that further.

https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/what-if-i-told-you-that-you-dont?r=1i4aw7

Sometimes awareness already exists. Evidence is available. Solutions are proven. And still nothing changes — because people cannot stay with the reality long enough to act on it.

Unspeakable problems are not just complex. They are resisted. Especially when their existence implicates us — or threatens our identity, our institutions, or our sense of morality. Unspeakable problems are like flames: staying in them feels so unsafe that our very instincts force us to flinch and recoil.

Andrew’s glazed-over audiences are not a failure of communication. They reveal a limit of what people and systems can tolerate without turning away.

What this means for changemaking

If this is true, the work changes. It is no longer only about creating the conditions for transformation. It is also about creating the conditions for sustained engagement — and sometimes working within, or around, the limits of what people can face.

One of the most confronting ideas in this conversation is that naming the problem directly can shut down progress.

So, changemakers adapt: introducing evidence indirectly, building legitimacy through institutions, shifting what is sayable over time. Not because they are avoiding truth — but because truth in its raw form is sometimes not adoptable.

This leads to something I cannot resolve: if naming the full reality of a problem causes people to shut down, are we obligated to find another way? At what point does protecting people from the full weight of a problem become a form of complicity? And at what point does insisting they face it fully become a barrier to the very change we need? Both paths carry a cost. Neither is clean. And I don’t think we should be comfortable with either.

A second shift: from systems to people

Andrew described a change in his own work — from exposing institutions and orchestrating systems change to enabling individuals closest to the problem.

Not because systems no longer matter but because change often moves through people before it moves through systems. And because, at certain moments, enabling a single person to act may be the highest leverage available. For how powerful first followers can be, see my earlier post, Want a Sure Way To Change The World? Follow Another’s Lead.

https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/want-a-sure-way-to-change-the-world)

What this adds to the map

Some of the hardest problems are not resisted by power alone. They are resisted by our limits — of attention, tolerance, and willingness to remain present. That means changemakers are not only working against systems. They are working within human psychology, social norms, and moral thresholds — including their own.

I am sharing this not because it is comfortable or resolved, but because if we are serious about how change happens, we cannot only study the problems that are easy to talk about.

When you listen to the conversation, notice where your attention starts to drift — or where you feel the impulse to tune out. If you feel that, what does that tell us about what we can realistically expect of others?

What happens when the biggest barrier to change is not the system — but what we are willing to see?

If this resonates — or feels incomplete in important ways — I would genuinely value your perspective. This is not settled ground.

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