"You're really lucky to have another election coming up," P. said on the phone, and I didn't quite know whether she meant "Congratulations!" or "Awww!". What she definitely meant, however, was that as soon as there is a whiff of an election, the political actors start asking themselves "What's the best way to get our story across?!", and many of them ask not only themselves, but also me. Thanksgiving, so to speak.
I can't help most of them.
I also couldn't help a bookseller who puts books in the window but only offers the covers of the books in the shop and asks me: "How do I get people to read more?"
TOO LAZY TO READ ON? THEN LISTEN TO ME:
In the blogcast, I read this recent blog article to you. With emphasis, of course!
Seen in this light, the upcoming national election campaign in Austria and the current tectonic shifting of party plates in Germany, including the Bundestag election campaign that is already cunningly peeking around the corner, are a true observation and research paradise for us story insiders. In this paradise, a dense forest of trees of knowledge grows, and when we eat from their fruit, we naturally recognise ourselves. Perhaps we also recognise each other - if need be, even in the biblical sense - but certainly we recognise who else is running around naked. Fortunately it is summer ...
So here are a few insights that we can put to good use in our work in all areas. After all, the saying goes: "Politics is show business for ugly people. So it's about show and business, both of which need to be learned and skilful.
In the beginning there was the product.
There is no company, service, party, service, organisation or invention that was not founded in response to some problem, as a solution to some need. Ultimately, we all have the same needs and desires, no matter who or where we are. We want to live in health, peace and prosperity while being seen and heard, thus being relevant and thus experiencing meaning.
What that means concretely for the individual looks different for each of us, and so does the way to get there. There are even different paths that lead to one and the same concrete goal. This is where our values come into play, which we want to see realised.
In the meantime, there are different products for every need that are similar in price and performance. The only distinction that is possible is their story, their values, their meaning and the relationship they build on this with their audience in a tangible way.
So it is not the product that stands at the beginning, but it stood. If it is not supported by a concrete world of meaning, it is meaningless and valueless. But if only the world of meaning is offered, without a real solution, the customer is left empty-handed. At some point, he is sure to notice. Chewing gum only looks like eating, but does not nourish.
In politics there are two, actually three schools of thought that are always competing.
School 1: We need concrete solutions to the problems and the right answers to the questions of our time.
School 2: Nobody reads election programmes anyway. We need succinct emotional messages that flow.
School 3: Fuck the dog on the wall, we have to win elections, that's what parties are for.
All three schools are wrong. All three schools are correct.
- You need concrete solutions, but everyone has solutions. Solutions are also not the corporate purpose of politics, but its result. Politics is not management, but entrepreneurship. I've heard that we have civil servants for management, supposedly quite a lot of them. IKEA does not sell furniture, but the design of the home. The New York Times doesn't sell news, it sells truth, Coca-Cola doesn't sell drinks, it sells Happiness in a Bottle . What do parties actually sell?
- We make our decisions emotionally, mercilessly. But what we absolutely need in addition are the logical, verifiable facts as justification and confirmation of our emotional decisions. The question behind this is always: Does the decision improve my status in one - or more - of the following four fields?
- If I improve my profitability - if something is cheaper, taxes go down; if the thing lasts longer than others, I get a subsidy ...?
- Does it make my life easier - is something practical, do I no longer have to go to the office; do I have to carry less, do bureaucratic rules disappear ...?
- Does it increase my possibilities - I only need one device for phone, email, music and web; I can do more jobs with an education; I can fold down the seats and open the roof on this car; I can now export to more countries...?
- Does it bring me prestige - am I admired as a conscious consumer; do I choose the most environmentally friendly group, am I a modern maven because I am the first to have the trendy new item; am I in line to be the victorious hope for the future ...?
- Companies have to earn money, parties have to win elections, otherwise they will eventually cease to exist. Companies that think their sole task is to make money will eventually cease to exist; neither will parties that are only out to win votes. Why not? Because they do not fulfil their purpose.
The focus on winning may work for a while, but it carries the seeds of failure. Companies and organisations that speak to their audience but mean themselves will eventually no longer be heard because everyone only wants to hear their own story. Only when the story of the teller is found in that of the listener does relationship emerge in shared meaning. The majority in an election is important, but no more a guarantee of existence than turnover and profit in a company, because neither is relevant in fact and in truth. Anyone who wants to observe what loss of relevance looks like and what it means should stand at the precipice with an alert eye and watch the goings-on of social democracy in Europe; and many other traditional people's parties can be seen there as well. They look ahead with narrowed eyes and realise their relevance deep down in the gorge ...
The holy storytelling trinity: People - Purpose - Mission.
There is an iron law in the communication of social concerns, and as I see it, nothing will change. It is: "No topic without a person, no person without a topic". This law applies, mutatis mutandis, to everything about leadership culture. Leaders without a strong theme are hollow - themes that are not associated with faces are faceless. No one likes faceless hollows. This often leads to the confusion of theme & people with people is theme, because charismatic people in particular sometimes overshadow the theme and the impression is created that it is all about the people and likeable faces anyway.
This also leads to leaders becoming projection screens for their audience. It's good that leaders can also serve as role models for how one would like to be, because that draws others along: Steve Jobs, Sebastian Kurz, Greta Thunberg. But if that's all there is to it, the mission will starve at some point, at the latest when the leader is gone.
If it's all about that, then the real need for leaders to be projectors is truncated and poisoned. Projectors who throw pictures of the future on the wall and then enlist their community to fill this picture with colour together with them and bring it to life.
You are a leader from the moment when at least one other person is at your side and you want to achieve a common goal with this person.
People - Purpose - Mission - Leaders bring movement into people and people into movement. This is leadership of teams, companies, organisations, NGOs, parties, societies, religions, governments, states.
And never think that a single person cannot change anything, but rather remember forever the sentence of the American anthropologist Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
One stands up and others join in. Or one stays seated, like Rosa Parks, and thereby changes her world ...
People - Purpose - Mission - this trinity works as an algorithm in the operating system of politics and of leadership in general. Surprisingly often, exactly this simple rule is disregarded, and when things go wrong somewhere, it is often precisely this mechanism that does not work. This also applies to change management in companies, and if you understand the substantial changes that the next few years will demand in our economic system, then you know that change management is not a special discipline that can be bought in as needed, but one of the basic skills that every person who leads urgently needs to develop and cultivate. Here I have written down some thoughts and three good tricks on the subject of change.
Ever since humanity developed consciousness, story has been the best method for this, especially for a quite profane reason: there are no facts about the future, and we can only speak in dreams, longings, desires, hopes and goals if we imagine the picture of a future that we are convinced can be (even) better than the present. We have to reach the hearts, because that is where hope arises, the only engine for movement. Hope moves everything, drives companies and organisations, starts and sustains revolutions. "We have hope. Rebellions are built on hope," says Jyn Erso in Star Wars: Rogue One.
Take a look at this video, it shows the last speech Ronald Reagan gave as President of the USA.
Think about it: When did you last hear someone on a political stage talk about a - better - world, a world as it could be? But how often are discussions about "evidence-based policy" and everything that therefore must not be and must be exactly the same?
That's how you recognise the difference between management and entrepreneurship. This is how you recognise what is so bitterly lacking in politics today: people who convey hope through the purpose that drives them.
Yes, yes - the good old facts. We love them, and we love the deceptive security they promise us even more. But as they say: planning is just replacing chance with error ...
The dilemma with the dilemma.
Politicians are leaders into the future and at the same time there to make many, many big and small decisions every day. The clever thing about it is that it is practically never a matter of deciding between objectively and unambiguously right and wrong or good and bad, because that would be easy and could be done by any halfway functioning moron. - However, even when it comes to the question of whether to save drowning people, there are now two possible decisions, and for it to have come to this point at all, it didn't need halfway functioning morons, but high-functioning cynics ...
However, the real and daily challenging task in the political business is to decide between two good and two bad solutions - a dilemma, in other words. This dilemma often looks like a choice between the right way and the easy way, between the right decision and the one that is easier to explain, or between the right one and the one that benefits oneself, or for the right one that harms oneself, between short-term effect and long-term solution.
Here, too, it helps to know your story, i.e. not just to use the narrative and sales tool, but to activate the core of it, the purpose, the concern, the values. Because if you know your values, every decision is easy, even if it is not necessarily easy.
Welcome to the quandary!
When we look at fictional stories, it is the dilemma that makes the story relevant and exciting for us. The character is in a dilemma, has to make a decision and usually has to jump over his shadow. In doing so, he develops himself, grows, learns and gains something greater than the bird in the hand. Thus, the main character of a story is our proxy in the quandary. We subconsciously ask ourselves the question, "What would I do in this situation?" In the comfortable position at the sofa with the book in our hand, in the cinema or theatre chair, we thereby learn something about ourselves and about life without having to crawl through the pain hole of the dilemma ourselves. Virtual reality on analogue, so to speak.
This agonising, purifying and empoweringly transforming process of catharsis finally leads to the so-called thorny path back to the old world. On this path, the main character learns that learned and understood are two different states. Only when what has been learned becomes an applied, lived reality and the heroine is able to convey this to those around her, does the circle come full circle to the appropriate end.
High time for a smooth catharsis, baby!
Wouldn't that be a great necessity if political leaders, all of politics and thus our society were transformed in this same arc? If politicians did the right thing because it is right, told people the truth and told it so well that they went along the painful path of catharsis because they not only have the certainty of waking up tomorrow to a better world, but also the justified hope that it will happen?
Is that possible?
Let us recall Winston Churchill's speech on 13 May 1940 in the House of Commons: "We are in the preliminary stage of one of the greatest battles in history ... That we are in action at many points - in Norway and in Holland - that we have to be prepared in the Mediterranean. That the air battle is continuous, and that many preparations have to be made here at home.
I would say to the House as I said to those who have joined this government: 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat'. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.
You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs -Victory in spite of all terror - Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival."
Winston Churchill, by the way, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.
Let us remember the Christmas speech of the Austrian Chancellor Leopold Figl in 1945: "In a few days we will celebrate Christmas. For us, Christmas is a celebration of the family. Unfortunately, this year it will not be a Christmas as we would like it to be. On the Christmas trees, if we have any, there will be a nice parcel full of worries.
I can't give you anything for Christmas, I can't give you any candles for the Christmas tree, if you have one at all, no piece of bread, no coal for heating, no glass for cutting. We have nothing. I can only ask you to believe in this Austria!
Wouldn't that be something that a society, in which being against each other, vulgar, loud, malicious, perfidious is becoming increasingly successful, in which snappy sayings seem to count more than what is said, could grow and mature on, even if it will probably take a generation? Wouldn't it be high time, in a time when the back door is the main entrance and the ulterior motive is the only one still being grasped, when tact replaces not only strategy but also tact, when intrigue weighs more than integrity, when campaigning is more in demand than competence, when reflexes flash instead of reflection; in a time when it's all about the bang for the buck, about the impact on the Instagram feed and no longer about the impact for generations to come, wouldn't this catharsis be a story worth sharing in itself?
I think so. I am even firmly convinced of it and I am not alone in this.
Are entrepreneurs the new shapers of the world?
Politicians search for market niches with opinion polls so that they can sell a cheap voter advantage into them as expensively as possible and thus make a quick profit, because they have told themselves "election day is payday" so many times that they still believe it, while they only listen to themselves keep quiet. They look for stories and mean framings, they skip their jobs and withhold their right to their top from society.
This vacuum sucks in the power of inspiring companies that intend to do more than make coal. There are more and more of them.
I think it is fundamentally necessary, important and sensible for companies and brands to care about social issues, just as each and every one of us should, because Erich Kästner already knew: "There is nothing good unless you do it. For those with the reflexive "I alone can't..." excuse: see above.
Companies and brands claim to be important, supporting pillars of society, prosperity and culture in the broadest sense, which I subscribe to with hot ink from a thick pen. However, this requires that they behave in exactly the same way. After all, almost every company has somewhere in its mission statement: "Responsibility, sustainability, harmony with nature and the environment". And you don't have to search around for a long time in mission statements and vision-mission statements until at some point man is standing around in the rather densely populated centre, do you?
The truth is: people not only trust them to be leaders in renewal, they actually demand it.
Let's take a look at the latest representative international Edelman Report :
53% of respondents agree that brands can do more to address social ills than governments; almost half say brands also have better ideas to do so.
64% say CEOs should initiate positive change, not wait for governments to mandate it.
54% believe it is easier to get brands rather than governments to tackle social improvements.
Or as a study by the Julius Raab Foundation in Austria shows: from media use to the labour market, education and training to sustainability, environmental protection, medical care and the financial market, people trust companies with more problem-solving competence than politicians or NGOs.
As developers of new social systems, companies are seen as very or somewhat important by 89%.
It has been proven for more than ten years that companies and brands with significance are also economically more successful than others and has long since convinced even money gorillas like Laurence D. Fink and BlackRock . Even Milton Friedman would probably no longer believe in disdainful shareholder value, while this kind of thinking has finally arrived in politics.
Those who can see will recognise where the future of a society is born today. Where the hearts of Yvon Chouinard and Patagonia beat, or those of Hermann & Thomas Neuburger and Hermann, of Richard Branson, of Philipp Siefer & Waldemar Zeiler and Einhorn, of Elon Musk, of Ben Cohen & Jerry Greenfield ...
All of them together and each of them individually have something that politics would like to have and urgently needs: an inspiring story that gets people moving.
Because regardless of whether it is a global corporation or an SME - every person, every company, every party and every NGO has and needs meaning, a mission, a purpose, i.e. at least one archaic value and the story activated by it, around which everything revolves. This is how resonance is created. This is how you win like-minded comrades-in-arms.
If you can't convey a purpose in your story, there's only one topic left: the small prize, or the electoral sugar. And that is a proven gift that sells yourself and everyone else for suckers.
So to all those who say, "It doesn't apply to me and my brand and my party!", take heart in the words my grandmother, old Story Dudette, wrote on the first page of "The Little Politician's Primer" from the ever-popular Pearl Series: "No Story. No Glory."