Hollow Words Will Get You Nowhere
Leadership, a Novel Crisis, and the Stockdale Paradox
If Donald Trump believed in war heroes that were prisoners of war, it is possible he would have learned a very simple but critically important leadership lesson for these times.
When presented with challenge, whether economic, environmental, meteorological, or geo-political, we are inclined to look into the mirror for comfort. Comments like, “don’t worry, we will get through this,” are framed against previous experiences in similar situations. For example, consider the economic perspective: one can find comfort going into a recession knowing that the last time we went into a recession, a record-setting bull market immediately followed.
But what happens when we have no experience with a particular time of uncertainty, pressure, and stress? This is the challenge with a novel crisis – a crisis that our society has never faced before.
Covid-19 is a novel crisis. This pandemic has created the largest public health crisis that our generation has ever faced. I say, “our generation,” because this is by no means the first pandemic that our society has been through. But our world is completely different today. Economies are linked. International air travel is easily accessible. Globalization is the reality. Supply chains are more than connected, they are interdependent.
This is a novel crisis and we have no frame of reference through which to build confidence to get through it, or to measure our chances of success or failure. Perhaps more simply put: we are scared.
This stresses us out. Worries us. Terrifies us.
To offset this, we need to look to someone that will give us confidence that we will get through this. But here is the thing…hollow words that sound helpful will get you nowhere. Hopeful sentiments that are not based on science end up being disappointing. And we all know the saying about opinions.
I hope you have kept the mirror handy, because we need to look into it, but back to the late 1960s.
Vice Admiral James Stockdale (1923 – 2005) was an American naval aviator when his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down in Vietnam in 1965. He was – and remained – the most senior American officer captured and imprisoned as a POW during the Vietnam war. Among other things, he (along with a group of other senior officers) led POW resistance in Hỏa Lò Prison (aka the Hanoi Hilton), helped create a secret code that allowed other POWs to communicate with each other, and was tortured a lot. He was beaten beyond belief more than 20 times, including having his leg broken by his torturers. Twice.
His stoic response to this relentless torture resulted in extreme harassment and torture being essentially stopped for all American POWs, his jailers having concluded that these tactics were useless. This gave hope to thousands of POWs, saving countless lives.
Stockdale made it out of Vietnam, and went on to serve as President of the Naval War College and was a Vice Presidential candidate in the 1992 US election, the running mate to independent candidate Ross Perrot.
Business and management writer Jim Collins interviewed Stockdale when he was writing his seminal book, Good to Great. When Collins asked Stockdale how he coped as a POW, here was his response:
I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.
Collins pressed further, asking about those that didn’t make it out of the prisons. His reply:
Oh, that's easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.
He capped those points with these closing comments:
This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
In Good to Great, Collins pointed out this duality, coining it the Stockdale Paradox: How can it be possible to accept the extreme nature of the situation, yet still be possible to see a way through it? On top of that, Stockdale refers to this as the defining event of his life, something that he would never trade. In the vernacular of Bill George's True North, this was his key crucible moment.
This is where leaders of today – politicians, managers, clergy, whatever – can make a difference. They can find inspiration in the Stockdale Paradox to communicate to us in a way that will help.
The Stockdale Paradox is made up of two key components, and it is key for leaders of today to use both components when communicating.
Firstly, there needs to be an explicit – if not brutal – acceptance of the reality that is currently being faced. For Covid-19, this means acknowledging that we are dealing with a lethal and incurable virus that can not only shut down whole economies, it can overwhelm health care systems – taking away the last barrier of protection that many of us would hope to have.
Secondly, there needs to be a belief that this reality can be overcome, and this belief needs to be rooted in rational thought. This means explaining that despite the nature of the virus, we will as a population be able to overcome it because of our capability, know-how, and resolve.
The brutal acceptance of our reality is the hard part. It is difficult to acknowledge that millions will get very sick as tens of thousands of people die, the reality that we need to know and understand. Now is not the time to diminish the expected impact. Knowing the depth of the metaphoric hole that we need to climb out of will drive our capability to do exactly that.
So my advice to the leaders of today: Speak directly and truthfully. Do not sugar coat this. Be real. And then inspire.
It is our way out.