Doing Strategy in Politics

Here’s my thought experiment for how we might do political visioning in America, grounded in the aspirations of the entire polity.

The first bit is a good illustration of how I think about the American Dream. But for what it’s worth, I mean this post more as an exercise in how to “do” politics differently than just having a platform on 50+ issues that matter to the polity and shouting about it as loud as you can - not an unpacking of my own vision.

My main consternation as a citizen is this: I don’t want a policy platform unless you’ve shared a bona fide vision first! Rather than just griping, I figured I’d actually explain how I think things could work instead.

And, for what it’s worth, this is how I’ve seen great organizations function across sectors. This sort of discipline around strategy and execution is one of the things I most wish the public sector would adopt from private sector organizations and business school professors.

To start, let’s assume a visionary political leader believes these are the three overarching questions that unify the largest possible amount of our polity:

1. On average, do people have enough optimism about the present and future to want to bring children into this world?

2. On average, once someone is brought into this world, do they flourish from cradle to grave?

3. Overall, the simplest and most comprehensive way to measure the health of a society is Total Fertility Rate vs. replacement rate. Is our long-run population stable, growing, or declining?

Thinking about the fundamental need gripping the polity is key. I think whether or not people want to reproduce is a good bellwether of a LOT and therefore a good framework for contemplating political issues at a national level.

A vision statement based on these questions could be:

I imagine a country where our citizens believe it’s worth bringing children into the world and have reasonable confidence that those children will flourish during their lifetimes.

A vision statement statement has to describe the world after you’ve succeeded from the POV of the citizen, not the work itself.

A pithy slogan / mission (which does sharply focus and describe the work itself) to capture the essence of this vision statement could be:

“Families will thrive here.”

Let’s assume this is a vision / mission statement that the polity believes in. If so, then the political leader can translate their rhetoric into action by asking two simple questions:

1. Is the vision true today?

2. If not, what would have to be true for the vision to become reality?

From there, a political leader can create an integrated set of mutually reinforcing policy and administrative choices that they believe will allow the polity to make disproportionate progress toward the vision state.

Put another way, by working backwards from the vision, you can place bets on the initiatives that are more likely to succeed rather than wasting resources on those that won’t get us to where we agreed we want to go.

The problem with this approach is that you actually have to articulate a vision, understand the root causes that are preventing it from happening without intervention, do the extremely abstract work of forming a strategy, and then communicate it clearly enough so that people get behind it. That’s really hard, and you have to have major guts to go through this exercise of vision -> strategy -> priorities -> outcomes.

This is quite different, I think, than simply articulating a pro-con list of policy preferences across a widely distributed set of issue areas that aren’t contemplated in an integrated way. But the thing is, having focus and priorities tends to work much better than “boiling the ocean” or “being all things to all people.”

To be fair, I’ve seen some contemporary politicians operate this way. Not many though.

In a nutshell, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from observing the leadership of private-sector companies is that it’s a big waste to just start doing stuff in a way that’s not integrated and focused—as if every possible initiative is equally impactful. It works much better when you start with a specific end state in mind and work backwards. It’s an idea that’s useful for political leaders, too.