Ideas vs. Power: The Lesson that Changed JFK

Imagine yourself in the Oval Office. Eighteen months before, you suffered a debacle that will come to mark the low point of your presidency. Your poor decision-making then changed the game, and not in your favor. Castro got stronger. The Soviets were emboldened to challenge you. Your reputation as a statesman on the international stage was damaged. 

Now, the young JFK was at the center of deliberations surrounding the most pressing threat. Soviet ships were shuttling nuclear weapons across the Atlantic towards Cuba. They threatened establish nuclear capabilities within lethal range of 80 million Americans. The fate of the world was on JFK’s shoulders. His track record so far was poor. 

Today's CEOs and leaders, like JFK, must similarly navigate a constant barrage of decisions which will affect the future of their organizations, their people, and their legacy. The fundamental question in these moments is how to get the decisions right when it will matter the most? 

JFK’s most profound lesson in his young presidency rooted in his ability to fundamentally re-architect his decision-making processes. He did so in the short span of 18 months. As a result, he moved from the low point of his presidency – the decision-making failures associated with the Bay of Pigs fiasco – to its high point: the blockade of Cuba. 

Building on the lessons learned in critical moments by leaders like JFK, in this episode learn how you can similarly: 

• Architect Your Decision-Making Processes: Enhance your decision-making process by incorporating diverse perspectives and fostering open debate;
• Unleash the Power of Your Team: Unleash the potential of your team members by focusing on the quality of ideas they create rather than the allocation of power amongst them.
• Build a Resilient Organization: Cultivate an environment where ideas flourish, innovation thrives, and teams come to trust the process.

JFK had to learn several tough lessons quickly. He rearchitected his own decision-making patterns. He challenged the ‘smart guys’ on his team to compete in new ways. He architected a process that yielded more options, superior risk analysis, and higher probabilities of success for those moments when they matter the most. These are the lessons CEOs and executive leaders can similarly learn well in advance of their own most critical decisions. 

Transcript

Today's lesson is about a decision that did nothing less than change the world. 

As a refresher, this podcast is about creating a-ha’s in your own decision-making. It's about provoking ways of thinking about your processes, your people, and your leadership in ways that shift so that you get the decision right when it matters the most. This is one of those decisions. 

We'll walk through the technique that I want to use today. It is a particularly powerful story. It is laden with all kinds of backstory and geopolitical intrigue, and it's at the height of the Cold War. There's military strategy and intelligence strategy involved as well as domestic politics. I'm going to strip all of that away and create a sprint to get our heart rate up, to connect the dots faster, because sometimes that provokes a shift, and focuses us just on the decision-making aspects of one particular moment (or two particular moments) in history. 

Here's the setup. It's 1960. John F. Kennedy is running for the presidency. The young senator from Massachusetts has staked out a position on the slate of candidates that is particularly hawkish. He is tough on communism. He is tough on the Soviets, and he is tough on Castro, who has just risen to power in Cuba. He has even made through innuendo or direct threat that there would be action taken against Castro, and he would protect the Western Hemisphere.

We have a couple of dynamics that are going on. As soon as he wins the office, the CIA within several weeks is briefing him in the Oval Office about a plan that was already created by the Eisenhower administration to invade Cuba on the south side and foment an uprising. Kennedy takes that plan and makes it his own. There are adjustments that are made in sweating about the details and last-minute modifications. But you have a dynamic here where there's a couple of conditions present, one of which is that you have a president who has staked out a viewpoint or a position already and brings that with him. He is presented with one option which he adopts. He is surrounded by smart people. Some forty of the most important commentators in military strategy and foreign policy are around him. So he's got all the smart guys there. 

What happens, however, is a debacle. This is the Bay of Pigs. There was an invasion. A group of expats and refugees, Cuban, were shuttled into the south side of Cuba and within three days they were either killed or imprisoned. It was a debacle. Several things happened. One of which is tensions with Cuba rose. Tensions with Castro rose. Castro was now validated and his power increased. The Soviet power increased, and they saw this as an opportunity to take a weakened young president, take advantage of him. Kennedy was also pointed out as being a liar internationally and domestically because he had denied that the US would ever attempt to do something like this and when, in fact, all along that was the game plan and it was clear that the United States was behind this failed invasion attempt. 

There is a lot to learn from this moment in time from a decision-making perspective. First of all, we have a leader who has an opinion that is strongly set forth at the outset. What I want you to do is think about your own decision-making processes and how you come into the meetings, how you come into these big decisions, the process that has led up to that, whether it's taken days, weeks, or months to get to that particular place. Think about the CEO who walks into a decision-making process and says, ‘here's my viewpoint’ or ‘here's my opinion’. What happens then? 

Second of all, we're surrounded by a team of very smart people. But what happens when the leader provides the trophy or the arc on the horizon that we're going to go for is that they tend to then conform. They get into that slip screen behind it. Why? Because they want to be part of that decision-making apparatus. The closer to power results in benefits for them, which is that you are closer to influence. You have access. You're closer to investment capital and budgets. Your career has the potential to rise versus those who tend to be dissenters or outliers or even outcasts, then become a second-class citizen, whose careers are more difficult, their voices shunted. They do not have access to the capital. They do not have access to the president or in the company situation, to the CEO. You create a class of insiders and outsiders within the hierarchy of the decision-making process.

There is something else going on here too, which is particularly treacherous: If you are inside that process, which is flawed by its design, it goes unnoticed by those participants, by the very people who are committing it. They are inside the whale. They can see only what's around them from inside the whale. They can't see or describe what the whale looks like on the outside. The process gets distorted, and consequently, 40 advisors to the President of the United States made a very reckless decision that ended very poorly. 

We see this pattern emerge time and time again. There is public reporting that says that Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan suffered from some of the same flaws. He had a viewpoint, he had an opinion, he had a directive, everyone got in behind it, and it was poorly executed. Also from public reporting, Biden apparently doesn't like 'palace intrigue' stories by the media, which means, for example, that he doesn't want to see stories in the newspaper about the sausage-making that can go on behind the scenes on critical decisions like this. What happens then is that you have a ‘mind guard’ that emerges on the staff, either in the White House or in companies, and they become either self-appointed or by appointment, the arbitrator of who is part of the decision process and to purposely clamp down access to the President and those dissenting voices. It has a distorting effect on the process.

Here's the thing. It happened with John F. Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs. It happened to Biden reportedly in the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The same dynamics were present with the Challenger and the Columbia Space Shuttle disasters. It was true with Iran-Contra. It was true with Worldcom, then Lehman Brothers, the 2008 financial crisis, and it was true with Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year.  These are the headline cases. These are the big disasters that are publicly reported upon. But within companies or organizations, enterprises that are between 10 employees and 10,000 employees, public or private, this same dynamic is negatively impacting the quality of the decision-making and the probability of a successful outcome.

Lesson #1: Focus on the quality of ideas over the power in the process.What's going on in the flawed process is that the decision-making is really an exercise in power amongst the participants. It's an exercise in power by the President in JFK’s case, or the CEO where they want to control the decision path. They set forth the mark to hit, and then everybody gets into line to make that happen. So you have people that will agree with the strategy, maybe tinker along the edges so that they seem like value-add contributors, but then you create outliers. The dissenters, the different thinkers, the creatives, all of whom do not have a voice and do not get included in the process. You also then have that competition for power amongst the participants and the creation of insider and outsider classes. 

Whereas, when you focus the decision-making process on ideas and the quality of the ideas, what you end up doing is getting substantially greater numbers of options put onto the table. You get more creative voices and a diversity of ideas. You get argumentation that is vetted. You get iterative improvements in the exercises.

So what do you do in order to create that sort of environment? Here's three techniques. There's a myriad of things that you can do, but these are three that I like a lot. 

One is ‘red teaming’. Red teaming is the process of creating a subgroup, a team that is charged with developing out an options analysis, and the pros and cons of each. The lines of argumentation, the risk, and the rewards all focus on that. Then you hand it to another team who plays the role of tearing it apart, developing the pros and cons, iterating upon it and looking for flaws and faults within the line of argumentation, that can go back and forth. What you're doing in part is improving the quality and number of options. You're vetting risks. You're going down into some darker corners. You are improving the quality of the idea, but you're doing something else which is also really important with your teams:  You are improving the quality of the team, you're improving the quality of their argumentation and their analysis. You're determining who has the ability to vet those options better. 

Secondly, craft the CEO’s role, or in the case of John F. Kennedy, the president's role. Become a steward of creating ideas through the process, not the steward of power. It's extraordinarily influential to be the manager, the arbiter of the process, protect the process, create a space for different voices, for creatives, for dissenters, make sure that they're not treated as outcasts. Eliminate the hierarchy in the discussions. Step out of the process from time to time to let the participants compete with each other and allow that to improve the quality of ideas without your influence. 
 
Thirdly, communicate this revised process to all. As little as I experience 'red teaming' as a proven methodology to be used within companies, I experience the adverse impact of not doing so all the time:  If you don't communicate what this process is about and you're working with people that are very much conditioned to falling into line, getting in that slipstream of how a decision is going to break so that they can stay in that fold, then when you are provocative, when you challenge the argumentation, when you force people to go deeper or find the edge or get very uncomfortable with who they are and their beliefs and values and levels of argumentation and their skill to participate in the process, you will have adverse reactions. That is, unless you communicate that this is exactly what we want to do. You are playing the role of wearing lots of hats, taking different seats on different positions around the table so that you are a provocateur. Provocateurs increase the quality of the process. Provocateurs in the old closed process are challenging and people would like to make them an outcast and get them out of the process. In this revised process, which is called open leadership, you are the integral agent to facilitate that, and you want to make sure everybody understands it and that those feelings of discomfort or antagonism will be natural and we will be better together because of it. Those are three things that you can do to prevent them. 

However, the most powerful lesson is this: When President Kennedy started out his leadership as the president in 1961, he embraced a style of leadership which was ‘closed leadership’. His voice was first. He had to back up the commitments and the threats that he had made before. He drove the process. He allowed insiders and outsiders to be created. He allowed very similar voices to reinforce each other. He changed that within the span of 18 months, he completely redesigned the decision-making apparatus around national security-related issues, which is also where the White House Situation Room came from, but did other things as well to create that environment of significant debate that focuses on creating more options and iterating on the arguments and looking for risks and understanding the rewards of the outcome and much less so about the power of the presidency or the power of the participants.

The subtlety here is that true power is in creating the highest quality ideas you possibly can, and we see that in those organizations which turn out beautiful ideas that are really the core of their value and contribution is that they have focused on those processes which foster development of and competition around the quality of the ideas, and less about the competition for power amongst the participants. 

Your assignment is to think about this in the way that John F. Kennedy thought about his decision-making and completely turned it on its head over the span of 18 months to go from the low point in his presidency, which is the Bay of Pigs, to the high point, which was the Cuban Missile Crisis and an options analysis that initially, when it was put on his table, said go attack the Soviets as they bring nuclear weapons across the Atlantic and do it now. That was the singular option that was presented to him and it changed to become a blockade of Cuba and is generally regarded as the high point of his foreign policy experience and the high point of his presidency. He did that, he went from the low to the high, not through force, not through the military strategies, but instead by changing the decision-making style and patterns and processes within his national security apparatus. You can too. 

So the assignment is this, which is how do you change your decision-making apparatus, your processes, how you think about it within your organizations, within your company, within your teams, to go from a closed leadership style to an open leadership style?

That’s all for now. I’ll talk with you soon.