U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell reminds us of an essential point about effective leadership. That is, never disregard the importance of communicating the meaning of your decisions over and over again. Don’t take for granted or make assumptions about what people actually decide to hear, understand, and accept in your leadership messaging and word choices.
Secretary Campbell is an old friend and a China hand who earned his way to the very top of U.S. foreign policy leadership. He told us at a Council on Foreign Relations workshop on China this week that the rollout of President Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” was mishandled. He’s communicated this view before, which is interesting since he was a key architect of the “pivot” as President Obama’s and Secretary Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
I’ve not studied this issue in detail. This much is clear, however. When you tell people you are “pivoting” they will generally interpret that you are moving from one thing to another. As such, many people interpreted U.S. policy at the time as moving toward Asia at the expense of Europe, the Middle East, and the rest of the world. That was not the intention. The U.S. sent a signal to Europe and the world that Asia was, well, more important. Even if Asia is more important, having European leaders feel that way is not especially desirable statecraft. The "Pivot to Asia" also suggested that the U.S. had not been doing enough in and with Asia in the first place. This was arguably not true. The U.S. focus on and presence in Asia since the Second World War was and remains massive.
Leaders sometimes blame a flawed decision on what they claim was the poor communication of that decision. This is sometimes true but just as often false. This note does not consider the problems and opportunities created by the "Pivot to Asia" that some dubbed the "Obama Doctrine." Instead, the brief focus here is on how a major decision such as this policy shift can be negatively shaped by its own positioning and the word choices made to articulate that positioning. The shorthand but buzzy, action-oriented term “pivot” was too sloppy a word choice, no doubt. It's tantalizing to reporters, headline writers, pundits, and many others, signaling as it does a major change or departure, but it's far too high octane to reflect the subtleties the Obama Administration was trying to convey. People too often think in binary, zero-sum terms, meaning in this case that Asia's gain must somehow be Europe's loss. The Obama Administration quickly rebranded the "pivot" to the softer, less dynamic, more boring but more accurate word "rebalancing."
It can be very useful to position a new decision such as a major policy change in animated, metaphoric terms that convey action, decisiveness, or momentum. "Pivot" does that well, but failed in this case to accurately portray what was happening. It raised more questions - along with furrowed brows - than it answered and forced the Administration into damage control.
Yes, the media often pin inaccurate names on decisions, fueled by think tankers, opinion columnists, supporters, opponents, and laziness. In those cases, leaders need to push back hard and illustrate what's wrong with the shorthand rubrics that too often fly around and crash. In this case, however, the Obama Administration chose the "pivot" positioning and wording.
Among the lessons learned here is to undertake what Daniel Kahneman called a "pre-mortem." Ask rigorously what could go wrong with the positioning and the name. Put yourself in the shoes of, say, European and NATO leaders, for example, and assess your announcement from their perspectives. Be constructively critical. In doing so, the U.S. might have avoided the "pivot" problem in the first place. Of course, this is easy to say but extremely difficult to do in the political reality of the White House and State Department. Raising these concerns and questioning the growing locomotion of groupthink will identify somebody as "not part of the team" or "not getting it" with all the attendant risks of that reputation and likely outcome that they will pivot their way right out of a job.
