TED Talks Daily - Sunday Pick: Unsolicited Advice: Can the Democratic Party move fast and fix things?

Episode Date: November 17, 2024

Each Sunday, TED shares an episode of another podcast we think you'll love, handpicked for you… by us. The Democratic Party lost big in the 2024 election cycle. What are the lessons party leaders should take from what happened? In this special episode of Fixable, another podcast in the TED Audio Collective, Anne and Frances share their thoughts on how the Democratic Party failed to understand what voters needed most. They explore how the party can identify its underlying problems, rebuild trust, and craft a rigorous and optimistic way forward – skills all leaders need in a complex, fast-moving world.  

Hey, TED Talks daily listeners. I'm Elise Hugh. Today we have an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective handpicked by us for you. Anne Morris and Frances Frye are leadership coaches and business experts. On their podcast Fixable, they offer indispensable advice for people up and down the leadership ladder, from entry-level employees to top CEOs

and everyone in between. Fixable also features special unsolicited advice episodes where the duo break down some of the most talked about issues from the business world and offer solutions unasked and unpretentious. To hear more insights from Anne and Francis, you can find Fixable wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com.

Now on to the episode right after a quick break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra

income I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. AI keeping you up at night? Wondering what it means for your business? Don't miss the latest season of Disruptors, the podcast that takes a closer look at the innovations reshaping our economy. Join RBC's John Stackhouse and Sonia Senek from Creative Destruction Lab as they ask bold questions like, why is Canada lagging in AI adoption and how to catch up? Don't get left

behind. Listen to Disruptors, the innovation era, and stay ahead of the game in this fast changing world. Follow Disruptors on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. Hello, everyone. This is Fixable from the TED Audio Collective. I'm your host, Anne Morris. I am a company builder and leadership coach. And I'm your co-host, Frances Frey. I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School. And I'm Anne's wife.

Today we wanted to share a special off-cycle episode of Unsolicited Advice, which for those of you who don't know, this is our occasional segment where we indulge ourselves and tell an organization that hasn't asked for our advice Exactly what we think they should be doing differently You know in previous unsolicited advice episodes we talked to the senior leadership at Boeing Amazon and Starbucks today We're talking to the senior leaders of the National Democratic Party The ones who asked us to vote for their candidates in this election. And we're not talking to candidates per se.

We're talking to this party, which is charged with presenting a vision to American voters that is compelling enough for us to support you. This is a politically divided country in the zero one rules of American politics. Democrats lost big last week. There's no other way to look at it. And this is not a political podcast. But we do think a lot about how to make organizations work better, how to make them more successful,

more responsive to the needs of their stakeholders, how to help them win. And that's how we want to approach today's conversation. I think we're well equipped to talk about this because we often wade into organizations when they're in crisis. And I would say that the Democratic Party is in crisis. After getting thumped in this past election, where does the organization go from here? It regroups, it rebuilds, it gets in touch with what its mission is, and it figures out

a rigorous and an optimistic way forward. And just to speed all the way to the end, it's definitely fixable. I want to ask for your patience. I want to ask for our audience's patience and grace as we do this. I am sitting in this chair with a microphone in front of me because this is a show about leadership. It is a show about fixing things. And it felt like we couldn't not talk about America right now

when the need for good leadership has never been greater. And there's a whole lot of things that need fixing. I have to give myself license to have this conversation with you. And for the record, full disclosure, I'm still working through it. One of the things that we talk about in many of the episodes is that it's important to discuss the undiscussable. And I think you just role modeled that. Well, we'll find out.

We'll find out whether that's a good idea or not in a few minutes. All right. Frances, I want to approach this challenge through our playbook for how to move fast and fix things. So this is a sequence of steps that's come out of our work with organizations in crisis. We playfully call it Monday through Friday. It's a metaphor. It's also a reminder that we can make progress quickly and it is memorable. So can you explain our Monday through Friday framework quickly to our listeners? Sure. Monday, step one, identify the real problem. It's going to take you all day to get to the true source of the problem. Tuesday, solve for the broken trust that is surely at the center of that problem.

Wednesday, make new friends. You've already talked to the usual suspects. Go find the unusual suspects and learn from them. Thursday, tell a good story. Tell a story that is so compelling it lasts into your absence so you don't have to be the constant messenger for it. And then Friday, Friday, Friday, go as fast as you can. All right, Frances, let's see if we can help the Democratic Party move fast and fix things.

The first step, which we call Monday, is to make sure that you're solving the right problem. There are a tsunami of takes out there on what just happened in this election. Many of them are contradictory. I'm sure many more are coming. So the party needs to come up with some reasonable agreement on the problem it's going to solve in order to get to a coherent plan to win. What we see organizations do in this early phase is sometimes spend a lot of time solving the symptoms of problems without tunneling down to the root causes or pushing, you know, Toyota's famous five Y's, pushing back past the first

Y and the second Y to really get in there. When we look at the fact pattern, the parties base did not hold together. The people they thought they were persuading were ultimately not persuaded in the ballot box. And there are very different theories of the case out there. Are we in a propaganda war? Is this a rebellion against the establishment? Is this about sticky beliefs about race and gender

that, as the former president of the United States said on stage, is it that voters weren't just feeling the idea of having a woman as president. Is this anxiety about the future and a world that feels out of control? Do not enough people see a future for themselves in this economy? How the party answers these questions obviously matters for what the plan going forward is. So when we go into organizations where there's a lot of stuff wrong, I can tell you what doesn't work.

And what doesn't work is to blame your customers, blame your partners, blame your, like to just to finger point out what does work, what usually coincides with success is to really take a deep look inside. So I am sure in that tsunami of things, it's all kinds of people are culprits. We're best when we help an organization take as much accountability and responsibility as they dare, because that's when it's fixable. You can't go out and fix other people.

You can only fix yourself. So if I take the Democratic Party and I want to get to what's the real problem, well, it's only sentences that begin with I, like what do I have to do differently. And so much of this tsunami is what others have to do differently. And I think that's an infinite, I think that's an infinite game. The party really needs a clear picture of what actually happened. But I think we have to channel our curiosity in very thoughtful and rigorous ways. And I think it is a reasonable conclusion that a lot of people, more than maybe even told the pollsters didn't trust the Democratic Party.

Okay, now we're moving on to Tuesday. This is when the issue of broken trust really comes into the picture. You have to diagnose it and create a plan to rebuild it. Yeah. So when we talk about trust, we talk about the difference between earning someone's trust and giving someone trust. And the reason that we are so hyper-focused on earning trust is it's too fragile to rely on someone giving you trust.

Through the lens of trust, we can see very systematic things that broke down. And this, I think, will help us come up with what candidates for pilots for trying to fix this problem are. So I think in many ways, this is a classic trust story. LESLIE KENDRICK Say more. KAMI KAUFMAN If I think about logic and empathy, I think there's one thing that affected both of them. And that is that if we look at this from a lens of fairness, and if you're an American, If we look at this from a lens of fairness, and if you're an American, I think you have been born with like a hypersensitivity to fairness. We love fairness and we loathe when things are unfair.

In fact, we get really emotional and really protective. I think every single American would say they want equal access to a meritocracy. Every single American, and I think every single American will say we hate when someone else gets unequal access to a meritocracy. So if I think about fairness, I think that there are a whole bunch of things. Meritocracy is one of them. Now let me tell you another thing that goes into fairness. You'll get the vast majority of Americans to say, this is a country born and built on immigrants. We love immigrants. It's unfair that some people

get to come here illegally. And that like just like it's unfair. Even if I came legally and then I look behind me and somebody came illegally, it just feels unfair. It's like somebody cutting in line. Go anywhere in the world, do a social experiment. Do it at an airport, do it anywhere. Cut in line with somebody and watch rage happen in the United States. We just don't like it. I think fairness is both is an empathy thing and a logic thing. When someone institutes a policy that's not fair, we feel like it's illogical and we feel like you're doing it to us. So you actually get dinged twice. You get dinged on logic and on empathy.

Your premise is that the party stopped being the party of fairness. This party stopped it, yeah. So for example, the party has been so supportive of when underrepresented folks that don't have access to a meritocracy, it's what I love about the party, right? That we cheer for the little guy. It didn't pay attention when those that are in overrepresented felt like it stopped being fair to them. And we're like, oh, well, you're overrepresented, so you shouldn't care. Of course I care. And so it,

the party only was interested in a subset of fairness and was perplexed why other people were reacting, but they were reacting in very traditional ways. Like we cared so much about, like you break up families at the border. It is an inhumane thing to do. And we cared so much about, like you break up families at the border, it is an inhumane thing to do and we focus so much on that. We took our eye off of it is unfair to have people waiting in line for immigration and other people to skip the line or not even bother with the line other ways. So yeah, I think the party used its abundance of compassion and sidestepped fairness. Got it. Got it.

Let me try something on trust. I'm interested in your reaction. So in the private sector, one authenticity wobble that we will see is that, you know, sales and marketing are writing checks that the product teams can't cash. When I look at the Democratic Party, one of the things that I get stuck on, and this may be the tough love portion of the episode for me, but this is a party that told women

that you are the ones that are going to protect my bodily autonomy. And on your watch, we saw the biggest rollback in individual rights and freedoms in the country's history. You told us that nothing less than the survival of the republic was on the line. And this is also the party that's telling me that you are going to hold the line on global order, and you are the anti-chaos party, and you cannot seem to protect our allies, and you cannot stop wars from escalating out of control.

And I want to know what the plan is. Why should I trust you that you are the ones who can deliver? Right? That to me is the question that needs to be answered. And we're going to get into this in a few minutes when we talk about storytelling. But as a voter, what I am craving from the party is a scale of ambition and audacity and strength that matches the anxiety and fear that you

created. You asked me to feel this. But that also matches the incredible opportunity of this moment. And respectfully, I do not want to hear about your to-do list. I want to hear about your fucking battle plan, right? As you said, that rigorous, optimistic future that is going to be better tomorrow than it is today, right? As you said, that rigorous, optimistic future that is going to be better tomorrow than it is today, right? So tell me about an economy that's going to work for everyone, that's finally going to

work for everyone, where prosperity is in everyone's reach. A country where we do not have to give up our rights or our values in order to be okay and to feel safe or to invoke the great Toni Morrison. Tell me about a country where we are not so weak, right, that we have to make other people small in order to feel big and tough and strong. I know this party said all of these words, but people didn't feel them. Like, they didn't believe them. But I do think it is about the culture and language and systems of a party that presents as cautious, that presents as conflict-diverse and easily spooked by the other side, and not as a party that is resilient and powerful

and truly deeply capable of meeting the moment that we are living through. It is an authenticity problem. They were saying one thing and thinking another. And when I look at who had success, those great candidates that you just said that had success, every one of them was saying what they think. But it's a blatant saying one thing thinking another because these are the party lines. So part of the prescriptions I want to get to is stop having party lines. Like come up with what's true, discuss it, come up, say what you really believe. Like the number of times where I hear people saying, the economy is doing great. Have you walked into a supermarket and

overheard the conversations that are going on in there? The economy is doing great for who? But the parting line is to say the economy is doing great. Like I'm so craving our discussing what's real as opposed to putting a wrapper on. I want to know what people think so that I can trust them. You know, I will tell you that the lessons, one of the places where I find optimism is I look at who, you know, which Democrats in red states won. And I'm looking at, well, how the heck did they do it? Because lots of Republicans in blue states won. So I, and I like to sample-

That's where I want to look. So I want to, and there's so much learning that has happened in the extremes. What I see about the Democrats that win in red states is that they are really authentic people. What they say matches what they think and matches how they act. And when I look at the center of the Democratic Party where it is losing its ground, I think there is an increasing disconnect between what they think, what they say, and how they behave.

And by the way, as a human species, I think the research says we can pick up on somebody being an authentic in like 12 seconds. Like, so Democrats, please stop trying. You're no good at it. You are like literally say, and if it's complicated, tell me it's complicated. Don't pretend it's simple. Don't pretend you have it. Talk about it in its full complexity in a way that I am at the center of it, in the

way that you are at the center of it. And I think what we know from the research in our work is that the byproduct of that is I'm more willing to trust you, I'm more willing to be guided by you. I think the other signal it sends is that I am strong enough to tell you the truth. Like I can handle the discomfort of telling you the truth, not just telling you what you want to hear. And to me, that is a signal that you are more likely to have it in you to fight for me and my needs and my future if you are willing to get out there and be vulnerable in that

way. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settle down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do,

and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca. In our experience, like we said, it's almost always a trust issue. There's a trust issue somewhere at the heart of the problem. Once you pinpoint the source of the disconnect, you get to move on to Wednesday. That's when we like to push organizations to make new friends and figure out who wasn't

at the decision-making table with them. We also remind them that pulling up a chair is not enough. You have to build systems and cultures that actually listen to those voices. So one question I think this moment begs for the Democratic Party is who do they need to make new friends with? I think we've heard a lot about who felt excluded from the story the party was telling, young men, Latino men, Panera moms, white women who still stubbornly voted Republican in this election. We often talk about in our work that people have core human needs to be seen, valued, and secure.

So I think a question is who felt underseen and undervalued by the party, and who's not convinced that their security needs are being met. So that's where I would start on this one. And I can make this simple. With few exceptions, everyone felt less seen and less served by the Democratic Party this time around. So in our attempts to reach everyone, we reached far fewer people. And it will be tempting to go blame them.

Like, why didn't such and such a constituent vote for us? They're bad. We know that doesn't work. What are their needs that we weren't meeting? That's what Wednesday is about. Go put the people who we weren't meeting? That's what Wednesday is about. Go put the people who we didn't reach, don't demonize them, understand them and figure out are there lessons for us to learn?

Most of us were taught it growing up and it sounds like it's a really good idea. Except it's only a good idea when everyone else is just like you. When everyone else is just like you, you should treat them as you want to be treated because it's how you would treat yourself. But the more different people are than you, the worse that advice is. If you're different than me and I treat you as I want to be treated, the only part of you that's going to light up is the small amount that's similar to me. So instead, we say use the platinum rule, which treat others the way they want to be

treated, which means you've way they want to be treated, which means you've got to be deeply curious about who they are and figure out what they need. And that's fundamentally what inclusion is. When people are different than us, we want to focus on what's uncommon in order to achieve greatness, not what's in common. And then we decide whether or not we're going to take action on it.

But Wednesday, we've got to learn all of that gorgeousness. Let's jump to Thursday because Thursday is actually the big one. Thursday for us is storytelling. Here's the story that I feel like I absorbed. And now I'm just now a stakeholder. I'm just speaking as a voter. America is a country. Here we are in late stage capitalism.

America is a country, here we are in late stage capitalism. America is a country that has peaked. Frankly, the human race has probably peaked. Our job now is to try to slow down our collective decline and maybe best case scenario, we can make some tweaks around the edges and see how it goes. This is the story you've been absorbing. This is the story I feel like I have been absorbing. That the ship's sinking, we're all gonna die, but let's make sure the lifeboats are in good working order.

You know, it's been a good run, team human. Maybe we can delay our collective destruction and make the decline a little less painful. No turnaround has ever had that at its center. Are we really just throwing in the towel on this whole thing? And listen, the Republican Party said a lot of things. And on that list was that we are not going down without a fight as a country. That we have a chance not just at good, but at

great. But I heard the Democratic Party telling me to be very afraid over the last four years. And there is a presumption of my weakness and fragility at the core of the message that maybe I can't handle what's coming. And yes, fear is a powerful motivator in the short term, but I think it backfires in the long run. I want to respond to that. The, you know, the early things I'm listening to leaders in the Democratic Party, and they're again telling me to be afraid of a Trump presidency, to be afraid for all of these things. In that regard, it's fear competing against fearlessness. And I think we know that fearlessness has a really good

track record against fear, a really good track record. And I'm not saying that people should not be afraid necessarily. If you are telling me to be afraid or if I am looking at the fact pattern and deciding to be afraid, then the antidote has to be that you are going to persuasively come and protect me. You're going to protect my rights. You're going to fight for my future. You're going to do everything in your power to create a context where I have a chance in hell of thriving.

That's the simple exchange. And I find that this is a party that is often acting as if it is afraid. Worrying about saying the wrong things, avoiding confrontation, like punishing people, you know, when they make mistakes because it's too risky. Like, to me, those are not signals of strength. Those are not signals you've got this in a complicated world. So when you are so worried about screwing things up, when you are paralyzed, playing defense, not taking action, then you are not focused on me and my problems. You're worried about you. So what's the Democratic Party story going to be?

It is a show, not just tell story because a lot of beautiful words have been said. But what the American people want to feel is energy, ambition, strength, vitality, some can-do lesbian spirit. Show us your fucking tool belt. Convince us that you're the ones who can fix things around here and that we can be a part of it. And if I was going to get to the advice-giving part, Democrats, you don't have to agree with each other on everything. Please don't. It is okay for one part of the party to say one thing and another part of the party to say another.

And it is okay for other parts of the party to say, what on earth are you talking about? And you can say it in public, because here's what we know. It's okay to disagree. Do it in front of us. Then we're going to trust you more and we're going to think that you are intelligent human beings and that you can hold multiple thoughts in your mind at the same time. You know, we see this all the time in organizations.

Teams that have greater conflict perform better. And this surprises a lot of people when they hear it at first because we think conflict is bad. Conflict is a sign of excellence. You will never find a high performing team with low conflict. But what's different is the high performing teams discuss the conflict. Low performing teams sublimate the conflict and they falsely, they pretend they agree. And I feel like the Democratic Party

has been pretending they agree on a bunch of controversial topics, and instead we would do better if you stopped having this false sense of consensus and let us see our parents fighting. Agree. All right, Frances, let's do Friday, which is the day where we get to go as fast as you can.

Yes. So the biggest danger of Friday is doing it too early, is taking action before identifying the real problem and involving all of those people. And so my biggest fear in organizations is that they just get up and go. They jump to Friday. They jump to Friday. And we know that, call that, move fast and break things. Yes.

Yes. I think material here is also, I think political time is particularly fast. The inauguration is around the corner. The midterms are coming quickly. I think that the temptation to just start sprinting is going to be overwhelming. And so I think one of our main messages here is to slow down and do the work of Monday through Thursday so that you are confident when you're sprinting. That you're sprinting in the right direction.

The beginning of this presidential campaign was amazing. I think so many people, so much energy was released. So many people left so much on the court in this race that I think there is a lot to build on. And then to make some real choices, one of the big lessons of our work is to not try to be great at everything. So where is this going forward? Where is this party going to excel? And if you have to use your time and energy and resources strategically, where are you going to overperform? And what are you willing to give up?

Where are you willing to underperform in order to excel in those places? I don't have a point of view on that, but I can't imagine that this rule does not apply here. And one of the things to come to terms with is why did you all of a sudden get it for these hundred days? Why weren't you doing, why didn't these hundred days occur two years ago?

And that's that introspection of what- That's the introspection. That's the introspection. So please don't go fast until you've come to terms with that. And it's gonna be so tempting to not come to terms with that. And here's what we can tell you. You will never be done. You will be playing, you will be in perpetual motion

and be playing an infinite game unless you come to terms with why did we not do those 100 days two years ago? Yep, I love that framing. I want to end with the reasons to be optimistic. Listen, this experiment that we're running in America has just gotten started. And that our best days are in front of us. So I think the optimism is what our true ideals are. They are beautiful ideals. In the execution of them and in our attempt to win, we lost sight of them and

we compromised way too much. Yeah, I like that. And I think I want to say this because even if your interpretation of what just happened in America is the darkest interpretation available to you, people's hearts and minds can be changed. They can evolve. Like we can find our way through progress, even in the darkest moments of this nation's history. We gotta get in touch with that. The strongest, most resilient part of the party has to step forward in this moment.

And there is no reason to think that that is not possible. And I can see the problems, and I think all of them are fixable. So the part that I want to get in touch with, the reason that I'm so optimistic, is that the Democratic Party need only change itself, and we can actually deliver on these things. We don't have a 300 million person problem. We have a 300 person problem, or whatever the size of the Democratic Party is. It's not a 300 million person problem. We have a 300 person problem, or whatever the size of the Democratic Party is. It's not a 300 million person problem.

It's a 300 person. Please do the work. Please don't go out there and start running in all directions. Don't be overconfident in your diagnoses. Please go through and make sure you're solving for the real problem. Build trust. Stop being inauthentic. Like, build accountability through trust.

Talk, be curious about people that you haven't been curious about before, and then describe a rigorous and optimistic way forward. And then do your 100-day sprint. And we know you have a 100-day sprint in you. ["The Last Supper"] All right, Frances, let's end it there. I think we're gonna come back to this conversation in some way in the months ahead.

And yeah, I remain convinced that everything is fixable. Everything is fixable, even this. This episode was produced by Rahima Nassar from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Izzy Carter, Ban Ban Chang, and Roxanne Heilash. This episode was mixed by Louis at StoryYard. PRX.