Preventing Obama’s Bay of Pigs – Part 1 - From Resistant to Doing to Listening
JFK: What did we do wrong? How did we screw up?
Eisenhower: What you wanted to do wasn’t wrong, but you didn’t have a process.
A CEO friend of mine related to me how JFK turned to Eisenhower after the Bay of Pigs debacle and asked him a question similar to the above and Eisenhower answered with a response similar to the above (I would greatly appreciate if any of you can verify this and provide an accurate reporting of the episode).
My friend then told me that JFK developed a better process for making decisions in the face of a huge crisis and supposedly used it to manage his way through the Cuban Missile Crisis and by doing so may have prevented a nuclear war.
I don’t care whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican or Independent. If you are an American I am hoping that you will join me in agreeing that for the richest and most powerful country in the world to take such poor care of its people’s health is shameful and a travesty.
A number of people from Gandhi to Churchill to Samuel Johnson to others have essentially said that the measure of a civilization is how it treats those who have hurt it and are hurting in it. Would you agree?
And the time has come for both political parties to stop being so "pig headed" and keep their focus on correcting this incivility. Would you also agree to this?
What the President needs is a “process” to bring opposing sides together in pursuit of the common goal of providing all people that reside in America, not just Americans, affordable and basic healthcare.
Given the current resistance and opposition, the President would do well to follow the sequence below, referred to as the Persuasion Cycle™*:
He must move the country and especially his opponents and critics:
• From resistant to doing to listening
• From listening to considering
• From considering to willing to do
• From willing to do to doing
• From doing to glad they did
• From glad they did to continuing to do
Currently President Obama appears to be facing a Republican party and Obamacare opponents that are not merely Resistant to Doing (i.e. supporting his plan and its implementation), they often appear even Resistant to Listening.
In this Part of this multipart series, we will describe how President Obama might turn the opponents of his affordable care plan from Resistant to Doing and Resistant to Listening to Listening.
To begin, it’s important to understand what is going on in the mind of someone who is resistant or opposed to doing something or even to listening.
To that end I would like you to imagine the body posture in the mind’s eye of someone who is resistant to doing and resistant to listening to you or me. Wouldn’t you agree that it would be a person who has his arms crossed and who is looking up at the ceiling dismissively not willing to give you or me the time of day or to even make eye contact?
You might remember the children’s song that had the verse, “the hipbone’s connected to the thighbone.” In an analogous and fascinating way, our outside body posture is connected to the body posture we are simultaneously having in our mind’s eye when we are resistant to doing and resistant to listening. If you get someone to uncross their real arms and make eye contact with you in reality, they will do the same within their mind and open it up to you.
So here’s a strategy for moving someone who is resistant to doing and resistant to listening to listening to you. Get them to make eye contact with you and use their hands and arms to express themselves as they talk to you. While doing that, they won’t be able to make eye contact with you and use their hands and arms to get their point across to you and be closed to you at the same moment. That is because at that moment they are trying to drill their agenda and opinion into you, they can’t be drilling into you and closed to you at the same time.
Therefore what President Obama needs to do is to call a private (or maybe public) meeting with his biggest healthcare opponents and critics especially John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Grover Norquist and select Tea Party members, along with some of his own supporters. However, instead of relying on his supporters to speak, the President needs to be the Communicator in Chief during this meeting.
Then when he meets with Boehner et al he needs to say, “Before we enter into this discussion, I need to clarify something for myself. In principle, do you or do you not agree that our country along with all its shortcomings is still the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world?”
Hopefully, they will agree, and to make that agreement more emphatic, the President should ask, “For my own clarity about that matter, was that a, ‘Yes’ or an ‘Uh-huh?’” Hopefully they will say more clearly, “Yes.” If they don’t he should ask them to clarify their answer.
Following that the President should ask, “Do you or don’t you then agree that our country has an ethical and moral responsibility to provide adequate or at least basic healthcare to all of its residents including its least wealthy and most powerless? And furthermore, do you or don't you agree that even if we do not rise to the top of the nations of the world that provide such benefits to their people, do you agree that we have an ethical and moral responsibility to at least be at the median level of such a list? If you don’t agree, please explain to me your answer so that I might better understand it, and please explain to me your answer in the context of your and my role and responsibilities regarding those whom we represent rather than mainly those who donated to our campaigns or even those who voted for us.”
Regardless of what the President’s opponents say, instead of countering any points that they make, he should utilize what I refer to as conversations deepeners. What that means is that when any of his opponents use words like “never,” “always,” “awful,” “ludicrous,” “preposterous,” "unrealistic," "fiction," "misleading" or when the inflection of their voice intensifies around certain phrases, the President should respond with, “Say more about ‘never…” (or ‘always…’ or ‘awful…’ or ‘misleading…’ etc.). Other conversations deepeners are responses such as: “Really!....” (said as a positive exclamation and invitation for them to talk more) or “Hmmm…” (the word that is the therapist’s best friend is getting their patients to talk more).
What the President is achieving with such an exchange is to have his opponents use their hands and arms to convey their words that have an emotional charge on them, when words alone don’t emphatically enough convey their positions. Also by doing this the President is causing them to make solid eye contact with him.
All the time the President is doing this, he should stay focused on their left eyes, which is connected to their right and emotional brains. Staying focused in such a way will make their knashing of teeth, grimacing and sternness blur and the President can keep focused on the eye of their hurricane (usually expressed as a dismissive or derisive comment) coming at him.
Now comes the moment where the President will need to show the greatest restraint and respect for his opponents and critics. It's when and where he needs to be less negotiator, less lawyer and more presidentially present. This is when he needs to say to his opponents and critics, "Given the stalemate and sometimes checkmate that our prior conversations have led to, it is too important at this point for me to have not heard precisely, as in word by word, what you have said and have not understood from your point of view your reasoning and rationale behind it. So if you will excuse me and not to bait you, I am going to repeat back word by word what you said and then my understanding of your reasoning and rationale behind it. At that point, I want and need you to correct anything I say back to you. Would that be okay with you?"
The reason for this most critical step is that it communicates to your opponents/critics that what they said was important enough to be heard accurately and understood fully. More than that it causes your opponents to have to slow down enough to listen to see if you heard and understood them correctly. This will then result in cutting down their reactivity and transactional fervor.
And finally, after they have listened to you and either correcting what you said or saying, "Yes," that you heard and understood accurately, that will orient their brain towards being more cooperative and collaborative. That is because it's difficult for them to switch from listening attentively to you, saying "Yes" to you and then automatically switching back to a "zero sum/duke it out" position with you.
After being listened to and heard out completly by the President who then repeats back what he heard and understood his opponents to say, this sets the stage for their listening to him and if he communicates effectively, considering what he says.
In Making Affordable Care Doable - Part 2 – From Listening to Considering – we will go into detail about what the President will need to do next to have his opponents and critics both listen and consider what he is proposing. In other words what he will need to do to gain “buy in” from them.
* Source: "Just Listen" Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone (Amacom, $24.95)