Be the Congressman

Some years ago, there was a story going around — a true story, as it turns out — about me and a lunch I had with a candidate for Congress. He had run two years before but lost really badly and he was seeking my advice as he prepared to run again.

First, let me describe him. He was handsome, charismatic, well-educated, wealthy, and fairly well-known. He was the kind of candidate you’d love if you agreed with his politics, and I did.

After we were seated and made a little small talk, I asked him to tell me about the incumbent — the one who had trounced him two years ago and was awaiting him again. The candidate described the incumbent as a good guy, but remarked that he was terrible at constituent service. He said the incumbent’s staff was unresponsive and people in the district felt ignored.

I thought about it for a minute and then said, “Stop campaigning and just start doing the job. Open an office in the district, hold town halls, help people cut through red tape. Use your campaign funds to serve the community. Become a known commodity, someone voters appreciate before you ask for their votes.”

Did he take my advice? Nope. And, maybe coincidentally, he lost even worse this second time.

Here’s the point: If you can do it, stop selling your vision and just start living it. Instead of waiting for millions of dollars or thousands of believers to materialize, just start doing what you imagined. Build a fan base. Let donors and the community experience the magic.

Just start being the Congressman.

Follow the Plot

The movie director Jason Reitman tells a story about his dad, the more famous director Ivan Reitman. His dad calls him one day all excited about the show 24 — the one with Keifer Sutherland as Jack Bauer — and invites him over to watch it. After watching three episodes together, the younger Reitman asks his father what makes 24 so good when there are so many other shows about terrorism.

“This isn’t a show about terrorism. Terrorism is a location. This is a show about a man trying to keep his family together,” his father said. “Never mistake your location for your plot.”

This rule applies to our work too. Let me explain: All organizations have their own versions of location and plot. 

Their location is the space they work in. It’s their industry or field. For example, Doctors without Borders works in healthcare. So does Johnson & Johnson and the hospital in your neighborhood. Habitat for Humanity works in housing. So does the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and whoever built the house or apartment you live in.

And all organizations have a plot. This is how they succeed — how they make an impact or how they make money. For Doctors without Borders, it’s about raising funds, recruiting doctors, and getting them into places without access to healthcare. For Habitat for Humanity, it’s about raising funds, recruiting volunteers, and deploying them to build houses for people who can’t afford them.

You see the pattern? Doctors without Borders and Habitat for Humanity work in very different spaces, but have generally the same path to success. Raise funds, recruit volunteers, and get the volunteers to where they’re needed.

Here’s why this matters: Organizations who work in different spaces rarely learn from each other. Healthcare organizations hang out with other healthcare organizations. Housing organizations spend most of their time with housing organizations. And that’s a shame because they have so much to learn about how to succeed from organizations in different spaces.

For example, how did the Sunrise Movement — with just 12 organizers — change the climate conversation in America? How did Housing First — which helped just 50 chronically homeless people — create the national model? How did St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital — with only 78 beds — develop a national profile?

There’s so much to learn from organizations who work in other spaces if we’re just willing to ask.

Hack the Scoreboard

We treat metrics like they’re sacred, as if they’ve been handed down from on high like the Ten Commandments or the laws of physics. But they weren’t. Somebody like you or me invented them — probably because the metrics served their interests at the time. And now, years later, the metrics have gained so much traction that they’ve become incontrovertible.

There’s nothing magical about ROI or EBITDA. There’s nothing inherently true about GPA or box office receipts on opening weekend. Sure, in sports, there are measurements like points or runs scored so we can figure out who wins. But in the rest of our lives, we just inherit performance indicators and somehow come to believe they’re right.

Consider the nation of Bhutan. Nestled in the Himalayas, this small country decided to buck the trend. Instead of chasing the all-important Gross Domestic Product like everyone else, the king there declared that Bhutan’s measure of success would be Gross Domestic Happiness. He just made it up. And frankly, it was brilliant. Of course, Bhutan and its population of just 700,000 can’t compete with other countries — much less its neighbors China and India — on economic output. But it can absolutely compete on how happy its citizens are.

Many colleges and universities did the same thing. What do you do if you can’t compete with the fancy schools on reputation, research funding, or high-profile faculty? You invent something called student-teacher ratio to appeal to students and parents who value individual attention and what the schools call a “personalized learning experience.” Candidly, I’m not even sure what that is.

My colleagues and I are doing something like that now. We want people to understand that the family’s struggle with pediatric cancer extends well beyond the clinic or the hospital. We want them to see that it’s a strain on virtually every part of the families’ lives: finances, jobs, marriages, friendships, and the other children. So we made up a metric to better tell our story: whole family impact.

You can do the same thing.

Yes Means Yes

Stop the War! End Racism! Solid sentiments and memorable slogans. But there’s a big problem with ideas and messages like this.

Let me explain it this way. If you’ve ever been a parent or the babysitter for a toddler, you know there are many days the kid won’t stop talking. They’ve just discovered the gift of speech and they’re getting their money’s worth. So how do you get them to take a break so you can get a moment of peace?

You could straight up tell them or ask them to stop talking. And it might work. But as parents can attest, it won’t work for long. Within a minute, the kid is back to using all their words all the time. That’s when most parents employ the “quiet game.” You challenge the kid to see if they can be silent for five minutes. And as kids love games, it works a lot of the time — certainly more often than telling or asking them to stop talking.

Here’s why: Human beings, even young human beings, are better at action than inaction. In psychologist-speak, framing goals in terms of positive action leads to greater motivation and persistence. We respond better and for longer when we’re asked to do things than when we’re asked to stop.

This is an important lesson for all sorts of organizations. One is genocide memorials — you know, like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. They’re designed on a central idea: If we show and tell people how horrible these atrocities are, it’s less likely these atrocities will happen again. In fact, if we make the memorial or museum compelling enough, people will join the movement to stop future genocides. And that makes lots of sense.

Except it doesn’t work. These memorials and museums get millions of visitors each year and many of the institutions are amazing, with great storytelling and the latest technologies. And yet, very few visitors emerge ready to join the movement.

This is what my colleagues and I discovered when we did some work with the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. Walking through that place, built atop a mass grave for 250,000 victims, is an indescribably moving experience. But it’s not the right experience. And that’s because the central message — there and at all other institutions like it — is “Stop genocide.” That’s the equivalent of telling your toddler to stop talking.

We discovered that a better approach was to give visitors to the museum something new to do instead. We incorporated stories about Rwandan heroes, people who risked their lives to save their neighbors. We gave visitors a glimpse of positive action, which you’ll recall leads to greater motivation and persistence. Now people had someone to emulate and something to do. This is the equivalent of the quiet game.

If you’re a climate change activist, you really need to learn this lesson. You’re bombarding us with messages about what we’re supposed to stop doing — driving gas guzzlers, using plastic straws, eating meat, etc. But where’s the image of the beautiful, sustainable world we’ll be building when we do?

Dig Somewhere Different

You can't reason your way to a breakthrough. You might imagine you can systematically think your way there. Scan the environment, identify gaps, and voila! A big disruptive idea. A to B to C to breakthrough. Except it almost never works that way.

Consider the stories you know about breakthroughs. Archimedes in the bathtub. Newton under an apple tree. Alexander Fleming and his moldy bread. Or even the Pfizer scientists and Viagra. Brilliant people who changed the world accidentally. Sure, they thought a lot about the problems they were trying to solve, but it took serendipity to help them get there.

I've learned this over and over the hard way. I've been ultra-disciplined and tried to factor my way to big, disruptive ideas for weeks or even months — particularly when I'm working with fancy organizations or people with lots of credentials. But time and again, I can't get there until I stop trying so hard and instead go deep on something completely unrelated. For the future of Jewish life in America, it was punk rock. For the efficacy of the United Nations, it was family dynamics.

Artists get this. Writers, painters, and composers call it inspiration, and they’re not nearly as finicky about where their breakthroughs come from. The lesson is this: Big ideas are unpredictable, so think accordingly. Dig into something unrelated. It really doesn't matter what. Trying to make sense of anything new will help you make novel connections and see more possibilities.