3 Higher Ed Lessons from ‘Shattered'

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

Published in April of 2017.

Shattered is the first high quality post-mortem of the 2016 presidential campaign.  Of course we are all looking forward to the next Game Change installment in the Halperin and Heilemann presidential campaign trilogy (early 2018), but Shattered should be welcome by political junkies of all ideological orientations.

The reason that Allen and Parnes were able to get out gate so quickly with their insider campaign account is focus.  The reporters were embedded with the Clinton campaign.  They conducted over 100 interviews on background, and were trusted by campaign staffers due to an earlier book (sympathetic) book on Clinton’s years as Secretary of State.

Whatever one thinks of Clinton or Trump, and however we might try to make sense of the election, Shattered is an illuminating read.  For Hillary supporters, the inside story of how badly the campaign went off the rails is incredibly depressing to absorb.

Shattered is not a book about the policies, beliefs, or even the character of the candidates.  Rather, it is a story of organizational ineptitude.  Of good people - smart people - who are unable to find a way to rise above an ultimately dysfunctional campaign organization.

Read through the lens of organizational effectiveness (or failure), Shattered can be understood as a cautionary tale for leaders of every organization.  Including, and perhaps especially, higher education organizations.

There are 3 lessons that I took from Shattered that I’ve been thinking about as they apply to higher ed:

Lesson 1 - The Danger of Overestimating the Value of Analytics:

We learn in Shattered that Clinton’s campaign manger, Robby Mook, built the campaign’s strategy around data analytics.  Decisions about where to spend money, where to send staff, and even how to craft the campaign messages were data-driven.

An important distinction here is the difference, as Allen and Parnes describe, between traditional polling and data analytics.  Where polling relies on sampling to discover information about a particular population, campaign analytics relies on geographically localized demographic, economic, opinion, and other data derived from secondary sources.

Analysis of existing data sources is cheaper than conducting statistically valid polls.  The new guard of the Democratic establishment was convinced of the validity and reliability of drawing conclusions from analytics.  They thought that polling should only be reserved for special cases, as the return on investment (ROI) of polling did not justify its costs.

In higher ed, we have developed a similar obsession with analytics.  Any leader who mouths the words “In God I trust, all others must bring data” will be widely heralded as a forward looking genius.  We tell each other constantly that what can’t be measured can’t be changed - and we push and push for measurable outcomes and quantifiable policies.

The Clinton campaign would have been better off to find more a balance between the art and science of politics.  They should have been as equally skeptical of the analytics as they were of the gut feelings of more seasoned politicians.  (Bill Clinton saw that the campaign was disconnected from non-college educated white men, and the cost for that disconnection, in a visceral way that caused him much alarm - but very little ability to change the strategy).

How many higher ed people are brave enough today to call for moderation in our headlong quest to measure everything, and to make all strategic (and teaching and learning) decisions based on what the analytics tell us?

Lesson 2 - The Necessity of Open Communication:

Perhaps the most frustrating element of reading Shattered is learning just how poorly the people in the Clinton campaign communicated with one another.

These were dedicated, talented, and committed professionals.  The poor communication was not primary the result of outsize egos or personal agendas.  Somehow, and in some way, the flow of honest information within and across the Clinton campaign became impeded.

If academic culture is of risk of anything, it is at risk of communication failure.  Communications, both internal and external, has to be amongst the hardest things that postsecondary organizations must do.  We all think that we are good at communicating - after all we make a living in developing and sharing our ideas - but it is this very belief that puts us most at danger.

We in higher ed would be wise to understand that if we want to have effective internal and external communications that we will need to listen to experts in this area.  When it comes to open internal information sharing - the failure of the Clinton campaign - what may be necessary is for higher leaders to simply make this a priority.  Real resources, thought, and a growth mindset must be brought to the work of internal communications.

We can’t assume that we will do it any better than the good people of the Clinton campaign attempted.  Everyone starts with good intentions - and everybody thinks that they are acting in the best intentions of the organization (or the candidate).  The necessity of an open, transparent, and vigorous sharing of ideas and opinions is too important to be left to chance.

Lesson 3 - The Imperative to Prepare for Black Swans:

It is perhaps easy to read the Clinton campaign as dysfunctional given the results of the election.  If Hillary had won, then the campaign organization may just as easily been interpreted as quirky, productively contentious, and creative.  In reading Shattered, I kept thinking that Allen and Parnes were engaging in some post-hoc narrative building.  That the story would have been more convincing if written before as opposed to after 11/8/16.

That worry aside, what can’t be denied is that the Clinton campaign was up against a Black Swan in Trump.  The smart money was always on a Jeb Bush candidacy.  Or barring a Bush, at least a “normal” candidate.  The Clinton campaign proved to be fragile in the face of a competitor for which the normal rules of politics never seemed to apply.

The lesson for our colleges and universities may be that we never really know where the true threats will emerge.  We need to focus on resiliency in the face of any eventuality, rather than responses to threats that we think that we understand.

What a strategy based on anti-fragility looks like I’m not sure.  The answer is probably different for every college and every university.  My sense is that such a strategy would focus on core strengths rather than perceived current market conditions.

What books have you recently read that have nothing to do with higher ed, yet are perhaps amenable to reading with a higher ed lens?

What are your favorite books about political campaigns?

What are you reading?