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.

Exponential Talent Development

Most of us have a HUGE gap between the impact we actually make and what we are capable of.

Asking myself (and my teammates) this question helps me put it in perspective: How would you rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 100?

• A 100 represents making the highest possible impact that your talent and potential allow.

• A 1 represents completely wasting the opportunity to positively contribute to the world.

I think most of us, myself included, are much lower on this scale than we realize—maybe a 20 or 30 at best. This realization begs the question: Why is there such a discrepancy, and what can we do about it?

In my experience, there are three reasons we leave vast amounts of our talent and potential untouched. First, we may never be challenged enough to use it. Second, we're not in the right contexts to let our strengths shine. Third, we may not have the support we need to develop the untapped talent we possess.

If we were all fully auto-didactic, we’d have no problem. That's because an auto-didact can fully teach and develop themselves. But none of us are completely auto-didactic; we all need others' help to develop ourselves so that we make our fullest contributions.

Introducing Exponential Skills

The difficulty in fully developing ourselves and others is relevant in many contexts. In professional settings, we call this challenge "talent development." In family settings, it’s "parenting." In community spheres, it's "mentorship" in secular contexts and "faith formation" in spiritual ones. In all domains of our lives, fulfilling and contributing the totality of our potential to the world matters.

The question I like to ask to really push my thinking is: What would have to be true for everyone in the world to develop and contribute 100% of their potential? As I’ve reasoned through this, the only way we get to the point of the world contributing 100% of their talent is through an exponential feedback loop where the number of people helping others to grow and develop increases exponentially.

To make the jump to create a society with an exponential feedback loop for talent development, let me define some terms and introduce some concepts:

We are all contributors who bring our talent and potential to the world. Some of us contribute by making art, others by building bridges, creating knowledge, making cakes, or making decisions. In mathematical terms, think of this as a constant: c.

A coach is a contributor who also helps develop others. Coaches are a big deal because they help others close the gap between their potential and their contribution. Think of this as x(c), where x is the number of people a coach is able to develop.

A linear coach is a coach who also helps develop other people into coaches. Think of this as mx(c), where m is the number of other coaches the linear coach creates.

An exponential coach is a linear coach whose coaching tree goes on in perpetuity: the people I coach become coaches, and then those people create more coaches, and those people create more coaches, and so on. Think of this as (mx(c))^n, where n is the number of generations an exponential coach is able to influence the cycle of creating more coaches.

Visually, I think of it like this:

Barriers To Creating Exponential Coaches

To create exponential coaches, several significant challenges need addressing. These challenges revolve around how we internalize and transmit knowledge, and the intrinsic motivations behind our contributions.

Challenge 1: Recognition Gap — The further you get from a contributor, the less credit you get for your work. This recognition gap can demotivate those who do not see immediate returns on their efforts. Solution: To overcome this, we must cultivate inner motivation and focus on long-term impact rather than immediate recognition. Developing a sense of purpose that transcends acknowledgment allows leaders to dedicate themselves to creating a lineage of coaches, thus prioritizing legacy over accolades.

Challenge 2: Complex Idea Communication — For an idea to spread, the messenger must internalize it sufficiently to simplify and communicate it effectively. This requires a deep understanding of both the intellectual and emotional aspects of the idea. Solution: Coaches need to engage in profound introspection to grasp the nuances of their knowledge and experiences fully. This depth of understanding enables them to articulate these concepts clearly and simply, making them accessible and teachable.

Challenge 3: Teaching to Teach — Teaching others to teach is a complex task that involves not only passing on knowledge but also instilling the value and methodology of teaching itself. This requires a reflective understanding of one’s own teaching practices. Solution: Coaches should introspect on their teaching methods and motivations, understanding them deeply enough to convey their importance to others. This process ensures that the coaches they develop can, in turn, teach effectively, perpetuating a cycle of self-replication in coaching practices.

Mastering these challenges not only enhances our own potential but also multiplies our impact exponentially across our communities and industries.

Where Do We Even Start?

On a personal note, the person I call Nanna is not my grandmother by birth but rather by love; she's my father-in-law's mother. During a trip to England a few years ago, I asked her about the secret to a long and healthy life. Here are the highlights of what she said:

• Make time for family, faith, and community.

• Stay active; keep your body moving, whether it’s through dancing, walking a dog, or any other physical activity.

• Find a way to express yourself—through music, art, writing, knitting, making movies, having a book club, or any other form—because expression is crucial to mental and emotional health.

That last imperative is so deeply intertwined with introspection. Isn’t expression just a word that means exploring our inner world and then sharing it outside of ourselves? We have to express to be sane and healthy.

I know this post is heady and meta. I’ve been thinking about this concept for months, and I’ve only just synthesized enough to share a muddy morsel of it. A fair question to ask is: Where, in the real world, do we even start?

For inspiration on where to start on our own journeys to become exponential coaches, we can take heed from Nanna. She was onto something.

To become an exponential coach, we have to introspect and express. And to introspect and express, we have to find a medium that works for us and allows us to explore our inner world. And once we find it, we have to just practice with that medium, over and over.

For me, that medium is writing. For others, it might be painting, photography, singing, or making pottery. For others still, it might be talking honestly with a good friend, praying, or starting a podcast.

The medium doesn’t really matter, as long as we just do it. As long as we take that time to introspect and express. That’s the first step we all can take to grow toward becoming exponential coaches. Expression is the first step to becoming an exponential coach.

How to take more responsibility

“I’ll take responsibility for that.”

Hearing this phrase in a team setting is generally a good sign. Choosing to be responsible for something is effectively an act of leadership. And whether it’s in our families, at work, at church, or in community groups, more people choosing to lead is a good thing.

So instead of worrying about abstract concepts like “leadership development”, why not just focus on “taking responsibility”? If more folks - like us and our peers - are taking responsibility for their conduct and the needs of others, isn’t that exactly what we want?

One way to foster responsibility-taking is to make it clearer why taking responsibility is really important. This is fairly intuitive, it’s hard to convince someone to take responsibility for something if they believe it doesn’t matter. In my experience, people on teams don’t take responsibility if the challenge is unimportant, myself included.

Another way to foster more responsibility-taking is to build up competence. This is also intuitive, if someone feels like they’re definitely going to fail or have no idea what they’re doing, they don’t step up to take responsibility. For example, if someone asked me to take responsibility for making sure a car’s design was safe, I would say absolutely not. I do believe having safe automobiles is extremely important, but I am not comfortable taking responsibility for something in which I have no competence.

A third way to foster more responsibility-taking is to make teams non-toxic. I’d put it this way. Let’s say you’re in a meeting about a new problem that’s come up, maybe it’s a product safety recall your company has to do. You’re deciding whether or not to step up and take responsibility for executing the recall effort. 

If you believed everyone would dump every last problem on you and vanish, would it make you more or less likely to step up? If you weren’t sure whether your boss would constantly overrule your decisions or if it seemed like your colleagues would scrutinize your work unfairly, would you volunteer? If you questioned whether or not you’d get the money and staff to solve the problem, or felt like you’d get all the blame for a mistake and no gratitude for a success, wouldn’t you think twice about taking responsibility? 

I would, regardless of how important it was or how competent I felt. If the culture around us is toxic, we shouldn’t expect to see responsibility-taking.

In the American context, we tend to emphasize competence a lot. We like “all-stars” and “high-potentials” to save the day. There is a danger, however, to overindexing on this when assessing leadership. Competence (and also confidence) is easy to fake. It’s also easy to have hubris and think we have more competence than we really do.

I would also hypothesize there are diminishing marginal returns to competence. After a certain point, adding more competence doesn’t lead to more responsibility taking if importance isn’t clear or if a team has a toxic environment. If we want to increase responsibility-taking, competence matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters.

The big realization from this thought experiment came when I put these ideas into the context of our family.

I, like many others, want my kids to take responsibility for their actions and for helping others as they grow older. In fact, I believe that I owe it to them to help them learn how to do take responsibility. But no extra-curricular activity, or online video is going to do that for me. I cannot expect our kids’ school to teach them to take responsibility.

Rather, the responsibility lies with me. I have to explain to them why taking responsibility for something, like befriending a classmate who is struggling with a bully, is important. I have to create a non-toxic environment at home, and let them make decisions for themselves. I have to give them the time and support, and help them clean up a mess when they screw up - even if I knew beforehand that whatever they were doing was going to fail.

Sure, maybe at the margins, some sort of class, extra-curricular, or book is going to help them build up fundamental competence in some way, like say in how to run a meeting or how to manage the budget of their lemonade stand. But even then, I’ll still have to coach them - they won’t learn everything from a class, video, or book.

In a family setting, it seems to me that learning to take responsibility has much more to do with how we interact with our kids and shape our family’s culture than it does with sending them away to camp for a few weeks and assuming the “training” they receive there will be enough.

So why do we think “leadership training” at work would have different results? It seems to me that if we really want to create teams where more and more people take responsibility, having “leadership development” retreats or “high-potential talent pipelines” are a bit of a sideshow. 

What we should be doing is telling stories about why the work we do is important. What we should be doing is finding really specific training courses to build up contextually-specific competence. What we should be doing is treating our colleagues with more compassion so they can count on a reasonable level of support and respect when they step up and take responsibility for a challenge.

I’m skeptical of the concept of “leadership” and have been for a long time. It seems to me that if I want other around me to take on more responsibility - whether it’s my family, my neighbors, or my colleagues - the biggest obstacle to that is not them and their “leadership abilities” or creating more “leadership development” opportunities. The biggest obstacle is probably me, and the way I treat them.

The mindset which underlies enduring marriages

If our lives can be explained by the treasurers we adventure to find, one of my few holy grails is understanding how to be a soulmate. I search, everywhere I can, for little bits of the wisdom that can help Robyn have a marriage that endures for our whole life and for anything that exists after.

My perspective on marriage and soulmates has evolved, to something like this:

We start our lives with a paintbrush in our hands, and a blank canvas. And we start to wonder - what’s the most beautiful picture I can put on this canvas? What is the life I want to live? As we grow up we experiment a bit as we learn to paint.

Eventually, we get a pretty good idea of the most beautiful life we can paint on the canvas, and we go after it. We start to paint more feverishly as we hit our teens and twenties.

If we’re lucky, along the way we fall in love with someone. If we’re really lucky, we take a leap and marry them. And then the dynamic at the canvas changes.

A wedding, I think, is the moment two people start to paint onto one canvas.  But here’s the the trick: the moment we say I do, we suddenly have to figure out how to paint while both holding the same brush.

And suddenly, were not only painting, we’re both trying to prevent the brush we’re both holding - our marriage - from breaking. It seems like there are three ways to survive this.

First, we could strengthen our brush and make it more resilient. In a marriage, there are times when each person is pulling in a different direction, and the brush has to be strong and resilient so it does not break. This strategy represents the body of advice people give about integrity, being faithful, committing to better/worse/richer/poorer/sickness/health, having a thick skin, continuing to date, rekindling love and romance, etc.

Second, we could learn to compromise. Maybe sometimes we paint the way I want to paint. Other times, we paint the way you want to paint. We never pull in different directions at the same time. By compromising, we put less tension on the brush. By putting less tension on the brush, it does not break as readily. This strategy represents the body of advice people give about conflict resolution and compromise.

Third, we could both imagine the painting we want to put on the canvas the same way in our heads. What do we want our lives to be like? What’s the beautiful picture we want to paint together? By having a shared vision for what we want our marriage and life to be, we don’t put stress on the brush because both our hands are moving in the same direction. This strategy represents the body of advice people give about shared values, shared vision, and growing together instead of apart.

Truthfully, every married couple needs to be good at all three of these approaches. Moreover, the first strategy of having a strong and resilient brush seems like a given. I don’t know how any marriage survives without that.

What struck me is that compromising seems to be the least optimal strategy here. Sure, every married couple has to compromise at some point and compromise a lot. Robyn and I compromise, too.

But how terrible would it be to have a lifetime full only of compromise? Either you are settling for the average your whole lives, and the painting you produce is the average, path of least resistance. Or, one person dominates, and one person gets the painting they think is beautiful and the other has lived someone else’s dream. 

Compromise is necessary, but it seems best as a last resort. What seems much better is to just be on the same page about life together - and wanting to paint the same painting, constantly evolving with each brushstroke as life unfolds.

This metaphor reminds me of a fundamental tension within management. Teams - whether it’s at work, in sports, in government, or in community - fall apart if people care more about themselves than what the team is trying to accomplish together. So to in marriage. 

If I care more about what I want life to look like than I care about painting our shared vision for the canvas, and painting it together our marriage will suffer. This is no different than any team - a team only endures if its members sacrifice to advance the aspirations of the team and evolve as the team evolves.

When I first began to think about soulmates, I thought it was a question of predestination. There was a soul out there, and through God’s will I was linked to that soul. All I had to do was find her. We’d fall in love. We’d work through problems. We’d put in the work for a great marriage, and after we departed this world we’d be committed to anything that came after.

And I did, thank God, find her. But my perspective on soulmates and marriage is different now. I don’t think that it’s only about this compromise, loving each other, keeping on dating, and putting in the work stuff anymore. 

To be clear, I do still believe all those things - love, compromise, romance, and commitment - are required to be married and probably to be soulmates.

But because of my own experience being married and learning vicariously from hundreds of other couples, I now believe that there’s a key prerequisite to marriage and even being soulmates. It’s a mindset and orientation toward life that believes together is better.

We can’t just keep painting the canvas we started with prior to being married. We also can’t just find someone compatible, that we love and try to stitch our separate canvases together. We can’t even create a fully detailed blueprint for the canvas of our life and marriage, agree to it prior to a wedding, and never evolve it - life’s unpredictability certainly doesn’t permit that.

Instead, deep down, we have to fundamentally believe that the enterprise of painting a shared canvas, with a shared vision, using the same brush is what a beautiful life is. The critical prerequisite for marriage is that our mindset shifts from believing that the best way to live is being a solo artist, versus being part of a creative team.

No amount of love, destiny, resources, compatibility, or compromise can make up for not having this pre-requisite shift in mindset. For our marriages to survive and thrive - whether to our soulmate or not - we have to believe it’s better together.

Khan Academy, but for learning leadership

Leading teams is hard, but it’s not complicated.

Leadership has all this mystique around it, and it drives me crazy. It’s like you have to be one of the chosen ones, have some purported “natural” aptitude, or go to a fancy graduate school to be a veritable leader.

I think all these stories we tell ourselves about leadership are dogma. And hogwash.

The way I see it, leadership is a choice. If you choose to lead, take the responsibilities that come with leading, and work hard to get better at it, you’re a “leader”. Full stop.

The way I see it, the demand for people who choose to lead outstrips supply. For a peaceful, prosperous, vibrant, sustainable world we need SO many capable leaders.

We need leaders on every block in every neighborhood. We need leaders on every team in every company, large or small. We need leaders for every book club, sewing group, community service organization, and every non-profit organization. We need leaders in every family and circle of friends, probably more than one each. We need leaders in every civic group, every bible study in every church, and every youth sports team, every library, and school classroom.

I don’t have empirical data to back this up, but here are some illustrative numbers, to size up the prize here.

Let’s say…9 out of every 10 people above the age of 14 are capable enough leaders. That may be generous, but roll with me on this.

Let’s also say that after you count every neighborhood block and every church, every team and company, and every group - large or small - that needs capable leadership, the numbers say that requires 93% of people above the age of 14 to be capable enough leaders.

Let’s say that 93% figure assumes people who are capable of leading will lead in more than one area of their life.

If the demand for leaders is 93% of people over age 14 and the supply is 90% of people over age 14 - that means we’re 7.9 million leaders short. And that was (hopefully) being generous that 90% of people are capable leaders. (Here’s the link to population estimates used).

Even if those numbers are not precise, and are merely direction, the conclusion stings. Unless we’re incredibly close to the pin, we could have a leader deficit in the millions.

In my experience, being trained or designated as leader is some ridiculous, exclusive club you have to be anointed into, which is the exact opposite of what we need. We don’t need to be thinking about developing capable leaders by the dozens, thousands, or even the hundred thousands. We need to be developing leaders by the millions.

Leadership is hard, but it’s not complicated.

It can be explained. I personally feel like it’s made to feel like a secret club, because it benefits the people who are in on the joke, so to speak. If there’s a shortage in the supply of leaders, those who figured it out can raise their prices - whether that’s charged in money or status.

I’ve started an experiment to try chipping away at this problem.

Why not try to explain some of the basics of management and leadership that apply to every team in any domain, just like Khan Academdy does for so many other subjects? Why not try to make leadership simple enough for anyone who wants to learn?

You can check the first video I’ve posted on a new YouTube channel called “Leadership in 10 minutes”. It takes a simple, universal, concept of leadership and explains it in 10 minutes or less.

The first video is on “strategic planning”, which is a super complicated way of saying, “figure out what to do.”

Good, bad, or ugly, I’d love your feedback on how to make it better or your guidance to abandon the experiment if what I’ve tried to do is just not helpful at all.

Diversity: An Innovation and Leadership Imperative

The US workforce is more diverse and educated than previous decades. And it’s getting more diverse and educated. This is a fact.

This transformation toward diversity is a big challenge. Because as any parent knows, a diversity of opinions leads to deliberation and friction. Managing diverse organizations is really, really hard - whether it’s a family, a volunteer organization, or a team within a large enterprise.

I’ve seen leaders respond to diversity in one of four ways:

Tyranny is fairly common. If you don’t want to deal with diversity, a leader can just suppress it - either by making their teams more homogenous or shutting down divergent ideas. The problem here is that coercive teams can rarely sustain high performance for extended periods of time, especially when the operating environment changes. Tyrannical leaders exterminate novel ideas, so when creative ideas are needed to solve a previously unseen problem, they struggle. Tyranny is also terrible.

Conflict avoidance is also fairly common. These are the teams that have diversity but don’t utilize it. On these sorts of teams, nobody communicates with candor and so diverse perspectives are never shared and mediated - they’re ignored. As a result, decisions are made slowly or never at all because real issues are never discussed. By avoiding the friction that comes with diverse perspectives, gridlock occurs.

Another response is polarization. Environments of polarization are unmediated, just like instances of conflict avoidance. But instead of being passive situations, they are street fights. In polarized environments, everyone is a ideologue fighting for the supremacy of their perspective, and nobody is there to meditate the friction and make it productive. Similar to conflict avoidance, polarization also leads to gridlock. I don’t often see this response to diversity in companies. But it seems a common phenomenon, at present, in America’s political institutions.

What I wish was more common was productive mediation of diversity. Something magical happens when a diverse-thinking group of people gets together, focuses on a novel problem, candidly shares their perspectives, and then tries to solve it. Novel insights emerge. Divergent ideas are born. New problems are solved. A more common word for this phenomenon is “innovation”.

It seems to me a central question in leadership of organizations today, maybe THE central question of leadership today is “how to do you respond to diversity?” Because, as I mentioned and linked to above - the workforce has become more diverse and more educated. Which means the pump is primed for lots of new, weird ideas and lots of conflict within enterprises.

Leaders have to respond to this newfound diversity. And whether they respond with tyranny, conflict avoidance, polarization, or productive mediation matters a great deal.

I wanted to share this thought because I think this link is often missed. Leadership is rarely cast as a diversity and innovation-management challenge, and diversity is usually cast as an inclusion and equity issue rather than as an innovation and leadership imperative.

The types of questions asked an interviews are a good bellwether for whether enterprises have understood the nuance here:

A traditional way to assess leadership: “Tell me about a time you set a goal and led a team to accomplish it.”

A diversity and innovation-focused way to assess leadership: “Tell me about a time you brought a team with diverse perspectives together and attempted to achieve a breakthrough result.”

The person who has a good answer to question one is not necessarily someone who has a good answer to question two, or vice versa. The difference matters.

Rotation of Powers

Separation of powers is a brilliant idea.

Managing power in organizations and institutions is a huge problem. Because when power is concentrated and left unchecked, tyranny happens. Separation of powers (and checks and balances) solves this problem brilliantly in the US constitution. By turning power against itself, it keeps any one part of government from dominating the others. The US Constitution is a gold standard case study in the management of power to prevent tyranny.

To me, preventing tyranny is among the most important organizational problems there are. Because under tyranny, people waste their talents and do not flourish. Because under tyranny, people suffer and have their basic human rights violated. Because under tyranny, culture decays rather than grows. Preventing tyranny is a huge deal.

In this essay, I offer Rotation of Powers - an alternative approach to managing power in organizations. I offer this idea in addition to separation of powers, not as a replacement to it, for two reasons. One, the challenge of preventing tyranny is so important we ought to be working on many solutions to this difficult problem - diversity and redundancy create long-term resilience. Two, because of information technology and advances in our understanding of management, the alternative of rotation of powers is possible in ways that were not even conceivable 10-15 years ago.

What is Rotation of Powers?

In hierarchical organizations, leadership and power is role-based. Power lies in the principal and senior executives of an organization. The idea of rotation of powers is that the people in power go into their reign expecting that they will rotate in and out of their role as “leader”. I take a turn, then you take a turn, then our colleague takes a turn being the “boss”. And then eventually, I know I’ll have to take a turn again. And we rotate, on and on, and let others join and leave the rotation as we go.

So unlike separation of powers, where the idea is to split up the power into different branches that can check each other, the idea of rotation of powers is to not let anyone stay in power long enough to become entrenched, and, to make them them feel the externalities of their decisions - both because they’ll be under the power of someone else soon, and, if they leave someone else a mess it’ll come back around. Instead of checks and balances, the operating principle of Rotation of Powers is “incentivize positive reciprocity”.

Here’s an example of how this might actually work.

I’m on team at work. Let’s call them the Knights. And without going to to too many details, the Knights try to improve our processes so that our customers are happier. It’s a team that formed from the “bottom-up”, so to speak, and operate using the principles of agile software development, more or less.

At the beginning, there were about 3 people who operated as Scrum-Masters for the team, which we call “Lance-a-lots”. The role of the Lance-a-lot is to facilitate our sprint planning sessions, and elicit input from the Knights to determine which projects folks think are important. Knights then self-select onto project teams for the 6-week sprint and the Lance-a-lot leading that particular rotation checks-in on teams to make sure progress is happening.

The group of Lance-a-lots meets weekly and consults with each other on how things are going, and how to manage the team more effectively. Anyone who wants to be a Lance-a-lot is free to join the rotation, and the Lance-a-lot group has grown from 3 to 5 in the 6 months this team has been around.

Right from the beginning, we rotated the role of the person serving as Lance-a-lot. Which means, in practice, that the person running the meeting and responsible for ensuring forward motion changed every 6 weeks.

The success of the Knights remains to be seen. It’s a nascent team, and kind of like a startup we’re trying to lock-in to a value proposition that works. But that said, it’s an incredibly uncommon organizational form and the culture of the team feels different than the traditional, corporate, hum-drum, hierarchical working group. It feels less top-down and tyrannical, more equal and democratic. Relatively speaking, at least.

Why might Rotation of Powers work?

What you’ll notice about the Knights example I gave above, is that rotation happens in two ways. One, the “Lance-a-lot” rotates every 6 weeks. Second, people move in and out of being part of the Lance-a-lot rotation. That creates an interesting dynamic that prevents power concentration.

First, no one person has the title of “leader” of the team. Nobody can lay claim to it. Nobody is burdened with an ongoing responsibility or could even lay claim to holding power if they tried. And, the role of Lance-a-lot is wide open because anyone who wants to can opt-in to the rotation. So, in practice, it feels like an organization that has leadership, but doesn’t have an absolute leader. And a sort of selection effect occurs as a result of this, anyone who is driven by the prestige of being an exclusive, role-based leader and having power wouldn’t want to opt into the rotation, because they’d never be the absolute leader of the team.

Second, at meetings of Lance-a-lots you really have a positive pressure to make good, collaborative decisions. Because Lance-a-lots have opted-in, their reputations amongst the team are especially on the line for doing a good job. And, because you know you’ll be the Lance-a-lot in a few rotations it pushes you to make a contribution and get your ideas out now - you don’t ever want the team to be in bad shape, so when it’s your turn you can make progress.

The dynamic of Rotation of Powers makes two things very clear: one, that power will, by definition, take turns so there’s no reason to be an ego-maniacal jerk about it. And two, that if you do right by the team and others you’re going to reap the benefits, and that if you leave a mess you’re shitting where you eat, so to speak.

What are the operational implications of Rotation of Powers?

Of course, this approach has trade-offs and operational challenges. Here are a few “must-haves” that I would assume have to be in place for a scheme of Rotation of Powers to work.

• A compelling, clear mission - Rotation of Powers doesn’t have the benefit of glory and spotlight. So for anyone to opt-in to the leadership rotation, they have to really care about the mission. Defining a clear and compelling mission is not easy, and would have to explicit and well understood, I think, for Rotation of Powers to work. Otherwise, nobody would opt-in to the rotation.

• Knowledge Management - For Rotation of Powers to work, the rotation has to happen quickly enough so that any one person cannot entrench themselves in power and seek rents. Transition is not easy. And in a scheme of Rotation of Powers, there would have to be good systems of knowledge and decision management to ensure transitions happened smoothly. If not, the organization would always be in a cycle of onboarding, and never have forward momentum.

• Trust and Collaboration - Similarly, if rotation is happening there has to be strong trust and collaboration among the rotating leadership team so that the direction of the team is one that has enrollment. A team would fail if with each rotation the particular leader during that rotation took the team in a whole new direction. The people in the rotation have to be on the same page for Rotation of Powers to work.

• Transparency and openness - A big challenge would preventing the people in the rotation from becoming insular and eventually self-aggrandizing. So, the leadership rotation would have to have transparency and openness to ensure what they were doing was appropriate. And, the people in the rotation would have to change over time so that the same old people don’t end up losing touch with what’s happening on the front line.

And so this approach maybe doesn’t work well in all contexts. Maybe it’s especially suited for mission-driven organizations (I happen to believe that all organizations should be mission-driven, but that’s a different blog post). And maybe it doesn’t work well in an environment where there’s a lot of specialized knowledge that’s accumulated over time, or ones where compliance to rules and protocol is really important.

But I could see something like this working for cooperatives, B-Corps, and maybe even larger public or social sector organizations. Additionally, it’s an approach that could be used within large corporations, in functions where innovation and dynamism is needed and more democratic styles of management which allow for experimentation are a strategic advantage.

Why now?

Like I said before, having more tools in our toolbox for managing power to prevent tyranny seems like a good idea because the stakes are so high. But this idea of Rotation of Power seems much more feasible than it did even 10 years ago. 50 years ago, this approach to organization design probably wasn’t even possible. Here are a few reasons why:

• Information Technology - the sort of transparency and knowledge management needed for Rotation of Powers simply was not possible before advances in information technology. Doing things like recording decisions, meetings, and real-time, cross-location, communication simply wasn’t possible because it would be administratively overwhelming. Now we have all these tools to collaborate and manage knowledge decisions, and expertise, which mitigates one of the most difficult operational implications I listed above.

• Understanding of Bureaucracy - The bureaucratic form of organization and management of large enterprises is a relatively discipline. We now know much more about how to manage organizations and establish missions and purpose, it’s actually something we can start to teach. So, now we actually know better how to create purpose-driven organizations, which again, mitigates a key operational challenge I mentioned earlier.

• Upskilling of Talent - Lots more people have higher levels of education and leadership experience. And if you have to rotate, the talent level of the team has to be sufficiently high and skills need to be sufficiently developed. A lot more people probably have those skills than they did 50 years ago. And honestly, rotating power probably accelerates that upskilling because more people get more reps leading teams.

• Emerging Technology - I’m intrigued by the use of blockchain technology and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Using software-based rules could automate some of the management of new forms of organizations (including Rotations of Power) that reduce administrative burden, and ensure that rotations are fair and that the tracking and tracing of decision rights can be effectively managed. I’m not a blockchain expert, but these sorts of ideas make the idea of experimenting with Rotations of Power seem more realistic.

Conclusions

Overall, I acknowledge that this is really a thought experiment. But I think it’s an interesting one that’s worth doing - as the world changes we need more ways to manage power and prevent tyranny, because separation of powers might not work forever. Our freedom and welfare is too important to depend on what will eventually become an old idea.

And, yes, the criticism of “that’s a cool idea, but it would never work in real life” is a valid criticism because I don’t know that it would work, especially at scale. But I would argue that we probably didn’t realize if separation of powers would work at the beginning, and we evolved it as we went. The same has been and would be true of any organizational form.

At a minimum, I hope this thought experiment validated that there are alternatives to separation of powers, to solve the problem of unchecked power and tyranny. It’s a big problem that’s worth thinking about and experimenting with.

High Standards Matter

I’ve been part of many types of organizations in my life and I’ve seen a common thread throughout: high standards matter. 

Organizations of people, - whether we’re talking about  families, companies, police departments, churches, cities, fraternities, neighborhoods, or sports teams - devolve into chaos or irrelevance when they don’t hold themselves to a high standard of conduct. This is true in every organization I’ve ever seen. 

If an organization’s equilibrium state is one of high standards (both in terms of the integrity of how people act and achieving measurable results that matter to customers) it grows and thrives. If its equilibrium is low standards (or no standards) it fails.

If you had to estimate, what percent of people hold themselves to a high standard of integrity and results? Absent any empirical data, I’ll guess less than 25%. Assuming my estimate is roughly accurate, this is why leaders matter in organizations. If individuals don’t hold themselves to high standards, someone else has to - or as I said before, the organization fails.

Standard setting happens on three levels: self, team, and community.

The first level is holding myself to a high standard. This is basically a pre-requisite to anything else because if I don’t hold myself to a high standard, I have no credibility to hold others to a high standard.

The second level is holding my team to a high standard. Team could mean my team at work, my family, my fraternity brothers, my company, my friends, etc. The key is, they’re people I have strong, direct ties to and we have an affiliation that is recognized by others.

To be sure, level one and level two are both incredibly difficult. Holding myself to any standard, let alone a high standard, takes a lot of intention, hard work, and humility. And then, assuming I’ve done that, holding others to a high standard is even more difficult because it’s really uncomfortable. Other people might push back on me. They might call me names. And, it’s a ton of work to motivate and convince people to operate at a high standard of integrity and results, if they aren’t already motivated to do so. Again, this is why (good) leadership matters.

The third level, holding the broader community to a high standard, is even harder. Because now, I have to push even further and hold people that I may not have any right to make demands of to a high standard. (And yes, MBA-type people who are reading this, when I say hold “the broader community” to a high standard, it could just as easily mean hold our customers to a high standard.)

It takes so much courage, trust, effort, and skill to convince an entire community, in all it’s diversity and complexity, to hold a high standard. It’s tremendously difficult to operate at this level because you have to influence lots of people who don’t already agree with you, and might even loathe you, to make sacrifices.

And I’d guess that an unbelievably small percentage of people can even attempt level three. Because you have to have a tremendous amount of credibility to even try holding a community to a high standard, even if the community you’re operating in is relatively small. Like, even trying to get everyone on my block to rake their leaves in the fall or not leave their trash bins out all week would be hard. Can you imagine trying to influence a community that’s even moderately larger?

But operating at level three is so important. Because this is the leadership that moves our society and culture forward. This is the type of leadership that brings the franchise to women and racial minorities. This is the type of leadership that ends genocide. This is the type of leadership that turns violent neighborhoods into thriving, peaceful places to live. This is the type of leadership that ends carbon emissions. This is the type of leadership, broadly speaking, that changes people’s lives in fundamental ways.

I share this mental model of standards-based leadership because there are lots of domains in America where we need to get to level three and hold our broader community to a high standard. I alluded to decarbonization above, but it’s so much more than that. We need to hold our broader community to a high standards in issue areas like: political polarization, homelessness, government spending and taxation, gun violence, health and fitness, and diversity/inclusion just to name a few.

And that means we have to dig deep. And before I say “we”, let me own what I need to do first before applying it more broadly. I have to hold myself to a high standard of integrity and results. And then when I do that, I have to hold my team, whatever that “team” is, to a high standard of integrity and results. And then, maybe just maybe, if the world needs me to step up and hold a community to a high standard of integrity and results, I’ll even have the credibility to try.

High standards matter. And we need as many people as possible to hold themselves and then others to a high standard, so that when the situation demands there are enough people with the credibility to even try moving our culture forward. And that starts with holding ourselves, myself included, to a high standard of integrity and results. Only then can we influence others.

Who is low-potential, exactly?

There are lots of organizations that have programs for “high-potentials”, cohorts of “emerging leaders”, or who’s who lists for “rising stars”.

But lately, I’ve wondered: if we have programs for “high-potential” talent, who is “low-potential”, exactly? It’s audacious to me that we consider anyone low-potential. 

With the right role, coach, opportunities, and expectations, my experience suggests that just about anyone can grow and thrive and make a tremendous contribution to whatever organization they are part of. Moreover, in my experience the most important ingredient needed for someone to be “high-potential” is that they want and are motivated to grow and be better.

It seems to me that a better approach than creating high-potential programs or leadership development cohorts that are exclusive is to design them in such a way that anyone who wants to opt-in and put in the work can participate.

And wouldn’t that be better anyway? Aren’t our customers, colleagues, shareholders, and culture all better off if everyone who wanted to had a structure where they could grow to their fullest potential? Even if not everyone ends up being a positional leader, don’t we want every single person in our companies to be better at the behavior of leading?

I don’t buy the excuse that it would take too many resources to design structures for developing potential that’s inclusive rather than exclusive. Software makes interaction much cheaper and scalable. People are really good at developing themselves and learning from their peers, given the right environment. And, in my experience most people are willing to coach and mentor someone coming up if that person is eager to learn and grow.

I definitely would want to be persuaded in a different direction,.however. Because to me, employing the best ways to prevent human talent from being wasted is worth doing, even if it’s not my idea that wins.

But again, if someone is truly motivated to grow and make a greater contribution, who of those folks are low-potential, exactly?