Leadership Quote by Flora Lewis

“Many, many, many” is doing the real work here: Lewis is insisting on accumulation over epiphany, process over manifesto. As a journalist who spent decades watching institutions lurch through wars, decolonization, and the slow-motion construction of postwar Europe, she’s allergic to the grand fix. The repetition is a pressure tactic, a way of crowding out the fantasy that change arrives as a single, heroic decision. It’s also a subtle rebuke to technocrats and ideologues who treat history like a problem set.

“Small moves of many kinds” widens the aperture. Lewis isn’t just endorsing incrementalism; she’s arguing for pluralism in method. Protest and policy, negotiation and culture, local experiments and international agreements - each counts as a “move.” The subtext is practical and slightly impatient: if you’re waiting for the perfect framework, you’re already behind. Management, not mastery, is the goal. “Manage change” implies turbulence is the default state, and the best we can do is build steering mechanisms.

Then comes the kicker: “The theory can come later.” That line punctures a certain intellectual vanity. It suggests that people often build theories to justify what they wish had happened, or to claim ownership of messy, collective progress. Lewis flips the hierarchy: action generates understanding, not the other way around. In an era (and profession) obsessed with explaining the world, she’s defending the unglamorous truth that workable solutions often appear before anyone can name them.