When you still can’t quite believe it: An evening with Hillary Clinton
I was lucky enough to get one of the tickets to listen to Hillary Clinton in London. Plenty of people would suggest Bladerunner might have been a better choice. Hillary Clinton is now very much the ‘past’ in politics. She came, she saw, she wasn’t elected.
What interested me about seeing her in person was to examine whether there would be anything at all I could take away from her discussion of ‘What Happened’ to help me in my work with business leaders and organisations. To see if there were any last nuggets about why it was so impossible for leaders of her age and experience to see the writing on the wall and respond to it in an agile way.
I’m not talking about the rise of Trump, but more about spotting what laid the foundations for his rise and even more importantly to connect with the potential counterbalance in optimistic young people who are looking for a better way. I’m deeply interested in why anyone who is a highly public leader of my own generation with so much research firepower and communications cash at their disposal, wouldn’t have found the connections. Not from a cognitive perspective but from a sensing perspective.
Like many, I’ve never really warmed to Hillary Clinton. I found Bill a charming politician of the 90s until his fall from grace. I was wary of the be-spectacled activist of her youth, disappointed by her public stand-by-your-man silence after Bill’s poor behaviour, but always admiring of the resolute determination to carry on regardless in the male-dominated bastion that is American politics. Whether or not you like her, if you are fair-minded I think you have to give some respect to what she has represented for women.
So. Did I learn anything new? Probably not. Any valuable insights. You decide.
There’s a difference between knowing intellectually and knowing emotionally
One of the most important things she said all evening. If anyone visibly embodies that statement, it would be Hillary Clinton. Her precise dissection of ‘what happened’ is to the point, probably accurate (I don’t know), clinical and detailed. She’s retrospectively joined the dots between Russian interference, post-truth social media, ecoomic anxiety and the cultural war, and the impact of commercial special interests. It’s very intelligent, credible and believable. And completely unemotional. It’s what we would call in speaker-training, delivered through the head vibration centre; a clearly thought out cognitive message. This was clear from the tone and pitch of her voice. I’ve thought it through; I’ve worked it out. In my head.
There were very few times during the evening when you felt you got a glimpse of the real Hillary. The endless decades of swallowing down and repressing emotion — probably to avoid being labelled an emotional woman — kick in all the time. Hillary operates in the ‘doing’ mode so common in many corporate businesses — control, predict, organise.
Is she a victim of the double bind for women? Absolutely. Do women leaders have to find a way to overcome this? Absolutely we do. Do we need emotionally and spiritually intelligent men to help us — hell yes.
Lesson: head, heart, gut coherence is more important than ever. Otto Scharmer talks a lot about the four levels of listening. Perhaps if Hillary and her advisers had deployed more level 3 and 4 listening skills, things might have been different. But there’s another side to that which I want to think about some more as a communicator. What are the corresponding levels for communicating? How can leaders learn to move from broadcast to empathetic communications and into generative dialogue? When Hillary pointed out that political movements have got to get better at communicating the benefits of pluralistic society across cultural and social diversity, I think she is absolutely right. They’ve also got to get better at acutally delivering them. Much tougher.
When you can’t quite believe it. Arrogance or denial?
When Hillary dissects how the ground was laid for Trump’s victory, I felt no dissonance in what she was saying. The way in which Trump’s campaign leverage complex cultural anxiety, Russian destabilisation, the focus on coal-decline as a metaphor for elites waging war on the disenfranchised, special interest lobbying, — all those narratives ring absolutely true for her.
What also rang true is that her team saw it happening but didn’t believe those strategies would work. I felt in that simple statement a whole world of arrogance of privileged power that just cannot believe or acknowledge how deeply the playing field has changed or to connect and empathise with another view.
Why would something so intellectually inferior as Trump’s communications style work? Something so obviously binary and simplistic. Is there something we can learn here about intellectual superiority in how we try to foster positive change? How do we ensure we respect, understand and communicate effectively with all levels of conscious, cultural, gender and social diversity without the history of a hierarchical — we are ‘better’ — approach which always alienates?
Creating a non-binary, non-divisive society has to be one of the key goals for the future of politics. This is especially difficult in America where there is a very long history of binary politics. You’re wrong. I’m right. You’re a Democrat. I’m a Republican. Confirmation bias thrives in this environment. People only watch, listen and converse with others who confirm their own worldview. We all live in the bubble of our own beliefs. This is perhaps the biggest challenge we face. How do we find a way back to dialogue and non-confrontational conversation across all areas of society?
Lesson: Here I think politics could learn something from business — especially businesses with positive open cultures. Companies like Patagonia, Zappos, Semco which are always experimenting with new structures, communications, positions, products, services, methods for dialogue and sharing and in doing so create more open cultures, could help. Of course it’s true that these companies generally contain a majority of people working hard on their emotional and spiritual intelligence so perhaps they are bubbles too?
Nothing new on offer
One of the most disappointing experiences of the evening was the feeling that there was nothing new on offer. Should I have expected it? Why expend so much effort writing a book and travelling around the world just to bang a tired, worn out drum that hadn’t worked the first time round? Perhaps because she has to. When you’ve dedicated so much of your life to a system and a set of beliefs, perhaps it really is too hard to expect this dedicated follower of the US political system to have been anyone other than who she is.
