I'm going to go a place that I've been avoiding: I'm going to talk SIEF and intensives and expansives and elections and politics.

Mentioned in this episode:

Ignorance Was Bliss

Check out the Ignorance Was Bliss podcast: http://iwbpodcast.com

Hey, everyone, thanks for tuning in. So, I'm

going to, I'm going to go one of the two places that I've been

avoiding; the other one, you'll have to wait and find out what

that is. But I've been avoiding politics, I've been avoiding

talking about SIEF and intensives, and expansives, and

politics. And this is now coming up on the third election cycle.

The third, we're, I can't believe we're starting a

national election cycle in the midterms, but we are, because

that's where our country is. And I have to say this, I have to

bring this to the fore, because this is so important, and we

aren't talking about it. Nobody else is analyzing politics

through this lens. And so even though political analysis is not

my... not my original area of expertise, I, we got to talk

about this. So I developed this framework between 2014 and 2016.

The book came out in 2016... in July of 2016, and of course, we

all know how the election went in fall of 2016. And what

happened after that. And now we've been through the 2020

election, and we're coming up on 2024, it doesn't feel like it's

that close. But I know it's much closer than it feels in terms of

analysis, in terms of who we're running, in terms of how we're

setting ourselves up to succeed or fail in this next election.

And so I've got to talk about this, we need to start looking

at political candidates through the intensive expensive

framework, we have got to do this. Institutions, entire

institutions can be intensive or expansive, and entire

institutions can need an intensive leader at some moments

in their evolution, and other times in their evolution they

need an expansive leader. So the need of an institution can

change over its lifetime, it won't necessarily, but often it

will. When do we need intensive leaders? We need intensive

leaders, when we're kind of stuck in the mud. We need

intensive leaders when we're in a really deep slump. We need

intensive leaders when we need imaginative, unbelievably

creative solutions to problems that feel insurmountable. We

need intensive leaders when we need inspiration. Those are all

great times to have intensive leaders. When do we need

expansive leaders? We need expansive leaders when we need

comfort, when we need steadiness, when we've been

through a crisis. And we're coming out of that crisis and

we're just looking for some smooth sailing for a while. We

don't really want to rock the boat. We don't really want to do

anything controversial. We just need to recombobulate, we just

need to get our our sense of balance back. So what are we

going to do? How are we going to do in this election cycle? I

think it's a really fascinating moment, because whereas during

the 2016 election, it was really clear that the country needed

and wanted an intensive of some kind. There was this craving for

radical change, there was this craving for kind of loud,

intense responses to things. And there is a whole analysis I can

do of the 2016 election, but I'dprefer to focus forward.

Going forward, we have an interesting situation, because

we have, I believe, Joe Biden is an expansive. He's an expansive

leader. I don't actually know what he is personally. But he

leads like an expansive. He leads as close to the center of

the road as he can get. He tries not to make controversial

decisions, he tries to soothe and smooth as much as possible.

He doesn't like to get out there and make really extreme

statements about things. He makes statements as, as

moderately as he possibly can. And as a result, he's really

irritated the progressives who voted for him, because they

really wanted more intensive responses to things. But that's

not who he is, as a leader. That's not how he functions as a

leader.

And when he was vice president with Obama, he provided some

balance. Obama, even though Obama is more moderate than a

lot of intensives, as a leader, I think that's partially due to

him having to deal with racism as a constant factor in his life

and in his leadership, and what Obama and Biden were able to do

together is Obama was able to be a mild intensive, and Biden

provided that mild, expansive balance point in the public eye

and sometimes they would trade. They're both playing very close

to the center, whether that's true of them or not. So what's

happening now we're coming- we are not at the end of the

pandemic, it's still happening- hopefully, hopefully, we'll end

up with some better medical responses that will help us

resolve it in a more complete way. But people are mentally

coming out of the pandemic, it's been, it will have been three

years solid, of being under this incredible amount of stress. And

we had an expansive leader during that stress, which has

worked out, okay. Because mostly, he's been very steady

state very, let's keep everything else from breaking.

Let's see what we can do to keep things on the... on the... this

just kind of like let's just get this boat moving and keep this

boat moving at a nice steady pace. Right. And that has

worked. Mostly. It's irritated a lot of people at the extremes,

but it has kept us from, from floundering, profoundly.

Unfortunately, the agitation at the extremes is for an intensive

leader is for intensiveness in one direction or the other.

There's a lot of desire for an intensive leader right now. So

that's not what ordinarily I would expect. Ordinarily, I

would expect, coming out of a crisis, or at least

psychologically moving out of a crisis moment, in an

institutional history, I would expect us to be looking for an

expansive right now. But because so much feels unresolved. And

because there are so many new crises coming up on an almost

daily basis-we've had to adjust to a very different kind of news

cycle from, say, the news cycle I grew up with in terms of how

many crises are present in any given day, how many headlines

are bad in any given day- because that's the cycle we're

in, people are looking for change, people are looking for

that intensive leadership for something they can really get

their hearts and minds and souls behind. And that's

intensiveness. That's that charismatic leadership that an

intensive brings. So I think, even though we're coming out of

a crisis, and ordinarily, we would want an expansive, to help

us kind of come smoothly into the next phase of our existence

as an institution, what we're looking at is a lot of people

who are desperate for some kind of change, we're looking at a

lot of ongoing crisis. And we're looking at a bunch of people who

don't feel like this expansive leadership is really doing what

it needs to do. And as a result, we're looking at people who are

looking for an intensive leader. So I think that in this next

election cycle, we're going to see a lot of favor for intensive

leaders. And indeed, we can see as people are starting to kind

of bubble to the top as candidates, that the people who

are bubbling to the top are, in fact, intensives. And they are

intensives, who are maybe willing to do even more radical

things than their intensive predecessors. So you know, we

have Beto O'Rourke on one side, we have DeSantis on the other

side, and in both cases, and of course, we have Trump, and in in

all three cases, we have people who are willing to do things

that previous people would have said, "Oh, no, we can't possibly

do that. That's not allowable." And what we're facing as a

country, as an electing population, as a voting

population, what we're facing is unallowable crisis. And so we're

willing to consider unallowable responses. And unfortunately,

some of those unallowable responses, especially,

especially on the more conservative political side,

are, are dangerous or damaging. And so as we look at the

candidates who are emerging, I think what we're seeing is this

real hunger for that intensive response for something that is

not stabilizing, but disrupting. Now, how is that going to play

out over the next a-little-over two years? That really depends

on the news cycle, we really don't know it's become very

unpredictable.

We're seeing the conversation get polarized around specific

issues like abortion and immigration in Texas. And that's

one way of kind of focusing an electorate, focusing the voter's

attention on something that feels like it's a thing that

mobilizes through intensiveness. This particular issue thing is,

is a very intensive-season tactic. It wouldn't work in an

expansive season. In an expensive season we'd be looking

for, like, what are their you know, what's the temperament

like? What's what's their long term record like? How do we

think that they will be able to carry us forward through this

uneven future? And that's not what we're hearing. What we're

hearing instead is this incredibly polarizing, very

specific, issue oriented-campaigning. And to me

that points to the ways in which the people who control the

conversations or who are trying to control the conversations

around the elections, around politics in this country are

really focusing on this desire for an intensive leader. They

don't know they're doing it because they don't have this

language. But that's what's happening. We have intensives

and expansives. And right now, we are, even though we are

coming out of a particularly rough period, and ordinarily,

we'd be looking for an expansive, we have so much

ongoing crisis, that what we're really looking for is an

intensive, someone who can inspire us, someone who can come

up with solutions we haven't thought of, because we're all

feeling stuck. We're all feeling stumped. We want someone that we

can take comfort in following, which means they have to be

charismatic and clear, and visionary, but in a way that

feels relatable. And that's a really tall order. But I think

ignoring that, as we move forward through this election

cycle, is going to be extremely foolish, so we shouldn't be

doing it. Speaking in the shorter term, of course, what we

do and who we run and how we elect people, this fall is going

to affect how we elect people next fall. And again, I think we

have to be really aware of how our local communities, whoever

whoever we're voting for, if it's, you know, if it's if it's

Congress members, if it's mayors, if it's school board

members, like all those people, we have to be aware of how much

in crisis our local community feels, and whether or not that's

driving the community toward an intensive leader or an expansive

leader. And take a look at who's available to run. If somebody

isn't in the right slot, right. If you don't have any intensives

running, and what you think people are going to be craving

is an intensive. Start looking for somebody. If it's too late

to get them on the ballot this time, start looking at at how

you can get intensiveness into the process, into the

environment anyway, because people will gravitate toward it

if that's what they're craving. Same with expensiveness. If

people are looking for slow, steady, comforting, reliable,

and you want to be in that space, figure out how to

incorporate that into if you're running for office, incorporate

it into your campaign. If you're running somebody else, if you're

supporting somebody else's campaign, figure out how that

person can can meet those needs. Because ultimately, what

intensiveness and expansiveness describe are behavioral

patterns, and the needs that emerge from those behavioral

patterns. And so what we're looking for now is: what is the

need of the people? How can the people be best served? What is

their perceived need? What is their actual need? And what are

we going to do about it? That's what elections are about. How

are we going to serve the needs of the people? And using this

framework will give us another lens, another way of

understanding what is needed, what people believe or feel like

they need, and how to meet those needs. Thanks for listening. I'm