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.

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.

The Power of Thinking in Flywheels

There are two types of growth, generally speaking - linear growth and exponential growth. And I’m not just talking about for a corporation, but for teams, culture, families, and ourselves as individuals.

The problem with linear growth is diminishing marginal returns - once your market is saturated you have to spend more and more to get less and less. The problem with exponential growth is that it’s hard and also doesn’t last indefinitely. (Sustaining exponential growth is a topic for a different day.)

Jim Collins developed an interesting concept to make exponential growth less hard, which I find brilliant - the flywheel effect. Flywheels are basically a way of thinking about a feedback loop, deliberately. He explains it well in this podcast interview with Shane Parrish on the Knowledge Project. Some of the key takeaways for me were:

• The goal of a leader is to remove friction from the flywheel, because once you get it turning, it builds momentum and starts moving faster and faster.

• Each step of the flywheel has to be inevitable outcome of the previous step. Think: “If Step 1 happens, then Step 2 will naturally occur”

• The key to harnessing flywheels aren’t a silver bullet or Big Bang initiative, it’s a deliberate process of understanding what creates value and building momentum - slowly at first, but then accelerating. To the outside it’s an overnight breakthrough, but to the inside it was a disciplined, iterative process to understand the flywheel, and reducing friction to get it cranking

I was introduced to this concept when I read Good to Great years ago, and was reintroduced to it before the Covid pandemic. Only recently has it started to click.

I’ve found flywheels to be a transformative way of thinking, both at work and in my real life. Here are a few examples of flywheels I’ve experienced and experimented with.

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Most business types will be familiar with strategies of differentiation or cost leadership. Both are powerful, value-creating flywheels:

Flywheels are even helpful at the business-unit level. This is an example of how a Chief Data Officer might think about how to create a data-centric culture within their organization.

When experimenting with flywheel thinking, it turns out Robyn and I have been operating a flywheel of sorts within our marriage, and temperature check has been a big part of that.

This is also a good example of how flywheels need to be specific to the stakeholders involved in them. This flywheel doesn’t work for every marriage. Among just our friends, I’ve seen flywheels that are organized around faith or civic engagement.

Gun violence is an interesting example of flywheel thinking because it helps illustrate how particularly complex domains can have multiple flywheels intertwined within them. These are just two dynamics I observed when working on violence prevention initiatives.

Each flywheel has different stakeholders and explain different categories of violence: at the left it’s more about influencing perpetrators making a “business decision” to shoot, at right it’s more about influencing members of trauma-afflicted communities that tend to have simple arguments end with gunfire, usually unintentionally and without pretense.

How we manage and coach is also a classic example of a feedback loop that operates like a flywheel. It’s simplicity doesn’t make it any less powerful, or easy to do in practice.

We also have flywheels that explain our behavior as individuals. For me, this is how I specifically respond well to improve my physical fitness.

My flywheel really took off when I understood and started measuring my BMI, Body Fat%, Sleep, Blood Pressure etc. I happen to love the products from Withings because they made the flywheel much more transparent to me as it was occurring, which led to rapid and permanent changes in my behavior.

Social movements utilizing nonviolence techniques (i.e., think US Civil Rights Movement, India Independence) also seem to fit the concept, showing the breadth of flywheel thinking’s explanatory power.

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Going through this exercise of identifying flywheels in a number of domains I’m familiar with, I’d offer this practical advice for articulating flywheels in your world:

Think about what is valuable to each involved party. At its core, flywheel thinking is rooted in an understanding of what drives value for everyone. What are the things that if increased or decreased would create win-wins for everyone involved? If the flywheel doesn’t encompass value creation for everyone involved, it’s probably not quite right. Zero-sum flywheels, which create winners and losers between the flywheel’s stakeholders aren’t sustainable because someone will end up trying to sabotage it.

Mind magical thinking. The beauty of the flywheel is that each step in the process is a naturally occurring inevitability of the previous step. Which means as a flywheel detectives we have to be honest about how the world really works; the flywheel has to reflect what the parties involved will actually do in real life and what they’re actually motivated by.

Identify agglomeration. In every flywheel there’s a step where some sort of resource accumulates, and that resource is one where it’s value and impact increases exponentially the more you have of it. That resource could even be things that aren’t technologies or infrastructure (cost leadership example), like data (chief data officer example), knowledge (managing / coaching example), or moral standing (social movement example).

I didn’t use an example with a network effect, but the same idea applies. These agglomerations are all critical resources to the exponential growth unlocked by the flywheel, so if you’re not seeing evidence of that sort of resource agglomeration, the flywheel is probably not quite right.

Identify interactive feedback points. Additionally, there seems to be a step in each flywheel where there is feedback or a learning interaction between the stakeholders participating in the flywheel. Maybe it’s learning about the customer (differentiation strategy example), or maybe it’s response to a measurement (physical fitness example). If there’s not interactive feedback happening, the flywheel is probably not quite right.

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I wanted to share this post because applying flywheel thinking is a huge unlock for value creation. It helps, me at least, to get beyond linear thinking and operate at a higher level of effectiveness and purpose.

I get especially excited by how this thinking can apply across disciplines. Jim Collins, who pioneered the concept, is a business guru. But the concept applies broadly, and far beyond what I even suggested - I can imagine it being used to inform feedback loops influencing decarbonization, community development, or regional talent clustering and entrepreneurship.

But flywheel thinking can also be used for nefarious purposes. Rent-seeking and political corruption feedback loops are good examples of this. Specifically, a flywheel like this quickly comes to mind:

My bet is that the sort of people who know me and read my writing are disproportionally good people. By sharing this learning I’ve had, I suppose it’s me trying to do my part create a feedback loop for a community of practice that uses flywheel thinking to make the world a better place.