Abundance

The room was absolutely packed and buzzing: quite impressive for a book tour. As Klein and Thompson explained to moderator Patrick Collision it’s maybe not the book per se but that the Democratic party is at a nadir having lost to Donald Trump twice in recent history and having little to show for their efforts. The implication being that many in the party are looking for new direction. And by new direction it was pretty clear they wanted a very new direction: Gavin Newsome was brought up and while he was not quite booed it was abundantly clear he was not being applauded ¹.

The main problem they diagnosed the issue with the Democratic party as having untethered their time horizons from the electoral cycle. Headlines of “The true effect of (Obamacare, Biden, etc) will be in decades” litter left-leaning think pieces but elections happen in four years. Without listening to the discipline of the electoral cycle the Democractic party failed to evolve.

We had originally planned on attending their talk later in the week cohosted by the Long Now Foundation. This particular discussion would be interested as it sounds like a call to focus on the short-term. However I think there is a synthesis between the two: and two types of focus. And in particular it seems incongruous with their new book on how wonderful the future could be.

As became more clear as the talk went on: Klein and Thompson are not faulting anyone for their long-term visions. However the issue is that those visions are not paired with effective short-term steering. John Boyd’s concept of the OODA loop is an apt metaphor. This argues that effective action is the result of observing, orienting, deciding, and acting. But crucially this is embedded in a competitive landscape: while you’re OODAing your opponents are also. Boyd then argues that moving through the loop faster is a strong advantage: in dogfights it lets you outmaneuver your opponents, in politics you win elections nobody thinks you could win.

Thus you need the long-term vision to guide your actions but remain tethered to the short-term to actually effectuate it. The natural place to incorporate this long-term thinking is in the observing and decidision phases. If you’re too focused on the short-term you won’t notice the relevant long-term trends and will make decisions which are optimal in the short-term but fail in the long-term.