I recall a session at Capetown University in 2002 when we were doing one of our MBA trips from RSM Rotterdam (the other was a year later to Sao Paulo). We had a lecture on the changes since 1994 (the fall of the Apartheid regime). The question was asked, why didn't the black population — who had been treated horribly ("You? An education? Why? You're going only to become a gardener anyway", or stories bout getting chemistry lessons where everything in an experiment had to be imagined as no materials were available) — did not exact revenge. After all they were extremely angry (and rightly so). The answer we got was instructive. The reason, so this professor said, was the leadership of Mandela c.s. who told the population: we cannot roll back the damage that has been done to you, but we will do everything we can to make sure that your children and grandchildren will not get this hideously unfair damage done to them as well.
The professor explained: "Leaders deal in hope", and this was the powerful hope they were dealing: hope for your children. Thinking about that at the time, I thought: "Yes, and managers deal in results. So, if you want to be a leader instead of just a manager, you should deal in hope.", which turned out to be correct in my observation. Leadership[ requires that you understand not just the anxieties, but above all the flip side of those: the hope.
That hope can be a false hope, though, if it is built on lies and such. Hopes built on tropes, for instance. There are good leaders (Mandela) and bad ones (take your pick). Bad leaders also effectively deal in hope. Donald Trump being a recent example.
And many politicians are just managers, not leaders. We need many of these too, because hope gets you only so far. You will need results.
I like the distinction you've made re leaders and managers. I do think many organisations have gone overboard on the leadership stuff, and lost the craft of managing.
Yes, there definitely has been a strong 'fad' for the last few decennia.
I have observed that often the core idea above hasn't been understood. Take the 8 phases of change in Kotter's 8-Step Change Model. Step number 1 is "Create a sense of urgency". This has generally taken the form of spreading *fear*, not *hope*, something that aligns with Kotter's core idea/assumption that this step is required because people will not change unless they have to, and they need to get out of their comfort zone. Fear is a strong motivator to get out of your comfort zone, your normal behaviour.
'Leaders' employing that 'MBA-wisdom' and lead through fear may go through the motions of leadership without being leaders in that above definition of leadership.
In my observations (and I have read an interesting study about it), many if not most people have no trouble changing if they feel it will be an improvement. And even if it doesn't mean an improvement for themselves, an improvement overall is also a motivator. But they also are critical of simplistic, naive plans that they judge will only make matters worst. That research I read showed that this 'resistance to change' actually was a very important source of information for a change to succeed. By seeing that cheaply as "people just don't want to change", change initiatives were less successful.
The cliche-because-it's-true of union organizers has long been that what you need is anger, hope and a plan.
You've always got lots of 1. I think it's wrong to concentrate on 2 in isolation. Because if people show up to a demonstration they are already evidencing a desire to do something. Give them a plan that makes sense, and win a small victory in an organized fashion, and you give them the pleasure of solidarity. And that's what hope really comes from. It's also the only real antidote to alienation.
I think we can go too far in worrying how to persuade people with words. Collective doing that is not a waste of time is what persuades people. Practical problem solving and solidarity come out of a bias towards action.
Absolutely brilliant observation about the pessimism gap. I've noticed something similar working in local politics, where the most alienated folks aren't just angry but have this bone-deep convicton that nothing can improve. Makes me wonder if policy people systematicaly under-estimate how exhausting mere survival feels to alot of voters.
I worked for four years in an office building across the street from a good restaurant. We'd go there for lunch sometimes, but the street was busy and there was no crosswalk, so we had to wait for a gap in traffic and run across. (Or just give up. The crappy kebab shop next door got a lot of business from that street.) Eventually we got tired of grumbling and started talking to local government, trying to get a crosswalk put in.
This was a tech startup. In the beginning, we had an idea and no crosswalk. After four years, we had a product that people previously thought was impossible... and no crosswalk.
There are reasons for governments to be more procedural, more conservative, etc. than private industry, and some of them are even good – but governments are much slower than the institutions that set people's expectations for speed of delivery.
I appreciate that, as a result of the above logic, policy people will naturally find this incredibly hard to answer, but: what if the problems *aren’t* soluble?
The thing that (metaphorically (mostly)) keeps me up at night on this topic is the possibility that mistaken belief in the possibility of “good solutions” is the primary thing preventing us from achieving the acceptably mediocre solutions that are the best we can actually reasonably achieve. It’s not a fun thought from any angle.
Off topic, but I didn't know who John Kenneth Galbraith was until I looked it up, so seeing the name "J. K. Galbraith" initially threw me for a loop because I assumed you were referring to the author of the Scottish series.
It's the end of the End of History, when all the *other* solutions besides the obvious one that we've been told we're not allowed to hope for - something about pigs and animals and Large Brothers??? - are completely running out of steam. The problem is that the hopeless ethnonationalists keep everyone else supplied with false hope: If only we could convert those ignorant fools, then everything would work great, and there'll be no need for the obvious solution!
> The weird people in ethnonationalist politics are the ones who genuinely believe that they’re trying to make things better, and I’d love to find a few of them[1] to try and work out what kind of mental structures they’ve created to remain reconciled with the environment they work in.
It's true that different classes (if we can call them that) tend to cultivate different habits of mind, both by experience and by preselection, which vary on certain axes. Another axis is willingness to radically break with consensus: people in the policy, professional, managerial, etc. worlds tend to believe that the whole of respectable society simply can't have _gotten it wrong_. This belief is difficult to reconcile with the historical evidence of (for example) the USSR. Contemplation of the long-term effects of Yeltsin's famous American grocery store visit may provide a defense of this conservatism – the fall of communism was not a pleasant time – but if things _have_ gone fundamentally wrong, this conservatism amounts to the claim that Wile E. Coyote, having run off a cliff, can forever defer looking down.
The mental structures are not optimistic ones. The hotel protesters show what Peter Thiel would call _indefinite pessimism_: the future is bleak, it's unclear what to do about it, and there are no concrete plans for crawling out of the hole, nor even a clear picture of what the hole is. But it's possible to end up in a similar place with _definite pessimism_: the future is bleak for concrete reasons which can be planned for and hedged against.
One common (and bipartisan) source of pessimism here is precisely the divergence that you're talking about: those with a mindset compatible with policy, management, governance, etc. are a minority of the population, and too small of one to form a winning coalition in a democracy. Outreach to those without this mindset is a messy business, especially given the challenges of retaining an audience that isn't motivated to follow policy, but without competence at messaging, you get the Democrats' repeated failures of communication in the US, the eminently foreseeable Amelia saga in the UK, etc. Failure here can look like being dragged around by the base impulses of the audience, but it can also look like failing to address the people as if they are responsible adults. (Consider the presidential campaign of the author of _The Two-Income Trap_, or the inexplicable failure of the Biden administration to communicate anything they did to the public.) Execution at any level of competence, though, is an irregular verb: I meet the audience where they are, you drive viewership with controversy and oversimplification, he's a lying grifter.
There are writers who have tried to lay out their reasons for supporting politics that could be described as "ethnonationalist", albeit perhaps not in language compatible with the culture of management consultants. One quickly finds oneself descending past the more respectable breaks with liberal consensus, such as Michael Anton's _The Flight 93 Election_ and Tucker Carlson's "right-wing Jon Stewart" populism, as at best the tip of the iceberg, to names like "Bronze Age Pervert" and "Drukpa Kunley" (named after a memorable 15th-century Bhutanese guru), and Substacks like "Fisted by Foucault". Needless to say, there isn't a canonical text laying out the case for definite pessimism about contemporary migration policy: for the sort of person equipped to join a committee to produce and sign off on a position paper, it's a very unappealing career decision. There are many recurring themes: Ruy Teixeira's _Emerging Democratic Majority_ strategy of winning electoral dominance by appealing to growing minority populations, the prospect of minoritization of current majorities, historical analogues ranging from the Wampanoag alliance with the English colonists to the American annexation of Texas to the disintegration of Austria-Hungary and Yugoslavia, personal experiences of navigating a tense multiethnic environment, the significant challenges of integration, etc., etc.
There's a post somewhere from a self-described nationalist with a line from Barack Obama to the effect of "trying to build a stable multiethnic democracy is a very risky thing that's never been done before, but we believe we can do it", asking: why do we think this thing that's never been done is possible, and what if it isn't?
Yes, if technocracy necessarily makes parties unresponsive to voter's needs, don't be surprised when they go elsewhere!
The JKG quote which mentioned the willingness of great leaders to confront the major anxiety of their people, sounded quite Gramschian. Parties must lead, persuade and represent a base *who vote for them come what may*. For the left this was workers. When they stopped representing them – soz we're all about markets now (Clinton, Blair, Shroder onwards) – voter turnout began to fall with apathy, nihilism and depression setting in. At least with Trump, Farage etc. these people felt heard (which is not to say I agree with any of their politics).
"If you’re in the world of policy, pretty much by definition you think it’s possible to change policy, for the better. But having a high level of optimism and a sense of personal agency is by no means universal, it’s quite rare."
Thanks, Dan. Doing my bit to bring optimism and joy to policy-making and implementation.
I recall a session at Capetown University in 2002 when we were doing one of our MBA trips from RSM Rotterdam (the other was a year later to Sao Paulo). We had a lecture on the changes since 1994 (the fall of the Apartheid regime). The question was asked, why didn't the black population — who had been treated horribly ("You? An education? Why? You're going only to become a gardener anyway", or stories bout getting chemistry lessons where everything in an experiment had to be imagined as no materials were available) — did not exact revenge. After all they were extremely angry (and rightly so). The answer we got was instructive. The reason, so this professor said, was the leadership of Mandela c.s. who told the population: we cannot roll back the damage that has been done to you, but we will do everything we can to make sure that your children and grandchildren will not get this hideously unfair damage done to them as well.
The professor explained: "Leaders deal in hope", and this was the powerful hope they were dealing: hope for your children. Thinking about that at the time, I thought: "Yes, and managers deal in results. So, if you want to be a leader instead of just a manager, you should deal in hope.", which turned out to be correct in my observation. Leadership[ requires that you understand not just the anxieties, but above all the flip side of those: the hope.
That hope can be a false hope, though, if it is built on lies and such. Hopes built on tropes, for instance. There are good leaders (Mandela) and bad ones (take your pick). Bad leaders also effectively deal in hope. Donald Trump being a recent example.
And many politicians are just managers, not leaders. We need many of these too, because hope gets you only so far. You will need results.
I like the distinction you've made re leaders and managers. I do think many organisations have gone overboard on the leadership stuff, and lost the craft of managing.
Yes, there definitely has been a strong 'fad' for the last few decennia.
I have observed that often the core idea above hasn't been understood. Take the 8 phases of change in Kotter's 8-Step Change Model. Step number 1 is "Create a sense of urgency". This has generally taken the form of spreading *fear*, not *hope*, something that aligns with Kotter's core idea/assumption that this step is required because people will not change unless they have to, and they need to get out of their comfort zone. Fear is a strong motivator to get out of your comfort zone, your normal behaviour.
'Leaders' employing that 'MBA-wisdom' and lead through fear may go through the motions of leadership without being leaders in that above definition of leadership.
In my observations (and I have read an interesting study about it), many if not most people have no trouble changing if they feel it will be an improvement. And even if it doesn't mean an improvement for themselves, an improvement overall is also a motivator. But they also are critical of simplistic, naive plans that they judge will only make matters worst. That research I read showed that this 'resistance to change' actually was a very important source of information for a change to succeed. By seeing that cheaply as "people just don't want to change", change initiatives were less successful.
The cliche-because-it's-true of union organizers has long been that what you need is anger, hope and a plan.
You've always got lots of 1. I think it's wrong to concentrate on 2 in isolation. Because if people show up to a demonstration they are already evidencing a desire to do something. Give them a plan that makes sense, and win a small victory in an organized fashion, and you give them the pleasure of solidarity. And that's what hope really comes from. It's also the only real antidote to alienation.
I think we can go too far in worrying how to persuade people with words. Collective doing that is not a waste of time is what persuades people. Practical problem solving and solidarity come out of a bias towards action.
Absolutely brilliant observation about the pessimism gap. I've noticed something similar working in local politics, where the most alienated folks aren't just angry but have this bone-deep convicton that nothing can improve. Makes me wonder if policy people systematicaly under-estimate how exhausting mere survival feels to alot of voters.
I worked for four years in an office building across the street from a good restaurant. We'd go there for lunch sometimes, but the street was busy and there was no crosswalk, so we had to wait for a gap in traffic and run across. (Or just give up. The crappy kebab shop next door got a lot of business from that street.) Eventually we got tired of grumbling and started talking to local government, trying to get a crosswalk put in.
This was a tech startup. In the beginning, we had an idea and no crosswalk. After four years, we had a product that people previously thought was impossible... and no crosswalk.
There are reasons for governments to be more procedural, more conservative, etc. than private industry, and some of them are even good – but governments are much slower than the institutions that set people's expectations for speed of delivery.
I appreciate that, as a result of the above logic, policy people will naturally find this incredibly hard to answer, but: what if the problems *aren’t* soluble?
The thing that (metaphorically (mostly)) keeps me up at night on this topic is the possibility that mistaken belief in the possibility of “good solutions” is the primary thing preventing us from achieving the acceptably mediocre solutions that are the best we can actually reasonably achieve. It’s not a fun thought from any angle.
Off topic, but I didn't know who John Kenneth Galbraith was until I looked it up, so seeing the name "J. K. Galbraith" initially threw me for a loop because I assumed you were referring to the author of the Scottish series.
It's the end of the End of History, when all the *other* solutions besides the obvious one that we've been told we're not allowed to hope for - something about pigs and animals and Large Brothers??? - are completely running out of steam. The problem is that the hopeless ethnonationalists keep everyone else supplied with false hope: If only we could convert those ignorant fools, then everything would work great, and there'll be no need for the obvious solution!
> The weird people in ethnonationalist politics are the ones who genuinely believe that they’re trying to make things better, and I’d love to find a few of them[1] to try and work out what kind of mental structures they’ve created to remain reconciled with the environment they work in.
It's true that different classes (if we can call them that) tend to cultivate different habits of mind, both by experience and by preselection, which vary on certain axes. Another axis is willingness to radically break with consensus: people in the policy, professional, managerial, etc. worlds tend to believe that the whole of respectable society simply can't have _gotten it wrong_. This belief is difficult to reconcile with the historical evidence of (for example) the USSR. Contemplation of the long-term effects of Yeltsin's famous American grocery store visit may provide a defense of this conservatism – the fall of communism was not a pleasant time – but if things _have_ gone fundamentally wrong, this conservatism amounts to the claim that Wile E. Coyote, having run off a cliff, can forever defer looking down.
The mental structures are not optimistic ones. The hotel protesters show what Peter Thiel would call _indefinite pessimism_: the future is bleak, it's unclear what to do about it, and there are no concrete plans for crawling out of the hole, nor even a clear picture of what the hole is. But it's possible to end up in a similar place with _definite pessimism_: the future is bleak for concrete reasons which can be planned for and hedged against.
One common (and bipartisan) source of pessimism here is precisely the divergence that you're talking about: those with a mindset compatible with policy, management, governance, etc. are a minority of the population, and too small of one to form a winning coalition in a democracy. Outreach to those without this mindset is a messy business, especially given the challenges of retaining an audience that isn't motivated to follow policy, but without competence at messaging, you get the Democrats' repeated failures of communication in the US, the eminently foreseeable Amelia saga in the UK, etc. Failure here can look like being dragged around by the base impulses of the audience, but it can also look like failing to address the people as if they are responsible adults. (Consider the presidential campaign of the author of _The Two-Income Trap_, or the inexplicable failure of the Biden administration to communicate anything they did to the public.) Execution at any level of competence, though, is an irregular verb: I meet the audience where they are, you drive viewership with controversy and oversimplification, he's a lying grifter.
There are writers who have tried to lay out their reasons for supporting politics that could be described as "ethnonationalist", albeit perhaps not in language compatible with the culture of management consultants. One quickly finds oneself descending past the more respectable breaks with liberal consensus, such as Michael Anton's _The Flight 93 Election_ and Tucker Carlson's "right-wing Jon Stewart" populism, as at best the tip of the iceberg, to names like "Bronze Age Pervert" and "Drukpa Kunley" (named after a memorable 15th-century Bhutanese guru), and Substacks like "Fisted by Foucault". Needless to say, there isn't a canonical text laying out the case for definite pessimism about contemporary migration policy: for the sort of person equipped to join a committee to produce and sign off on a position paper, it's a very unappealing career decision. There are many recurring themes: Ruy Teixeira's _Emerging Democratic Majority_ strategy of winning electoral dominance by appealing to growing minority populations, the prospect of minoritization of current majorities, historical analogues ranging from the Wampanoag alliance with the English colonists to the American annexation of Texas to the disintegration of Austria-Hungary and Yugoslavia, personal experiences of navigating a tense multiethnic environment, the significant challenges of integration, etc., etc.
There's a post somewhere from a self-described nationalist with a line from Barack Obama to the effect of "trying to build a stable multiethnic democracy is a very risky thing that's never been done before, but we believe we can do it", asking: why do we think this thing that's never been done is possible, and what if it isn't?
Beware when the label 'arrogance' gains a fit.
Yes, if technocracy necessarily makes parties unresponsive to voter's needs, don't be surprised when they go elsewhere!
The JKG quote which mentioned the willingness of great leaders to confront the major anxiety of their people, sounded quite Gramschian. Parties must lead, persuade and represent a base *who vote for them come what may*. For the left this was workers. When they stopped representing them – soz we're all about markets now (Clinton, Blair, Shroder onwards) – voter turnout began to fall with apathy, nihilism and depression setting in. At least with Trump, Farage etc. these people felt heard (which is not to say I agree with any of their politics).
"If you’re in the world of policy, pretty much by definition you think it’s possible to change policy, for the better. But having a high level of optimism and a sense of personal agency is by no means universal, it’s quite rare."
Thanks, Dan. Doing my bit to bring optimism and joy to policy-making and implementation.