Eric Knight, author of Reframe: How To Solve The World's Trickiest Problems, on how the way we frame political issues can make them impossible to resolve
Mitt Romney must be kicking himself after his recent trip to Britain. He visited to spruik his foreign policy credentials and, to be fair, made the headlines, but for all the wrong reasons. ‘Mitt the Twit’ ran The Sun. Shortly after landing, Romney told London it may not be ready to host the Olympics. He then revealed he had observed the Olympics spectacle ‘from the backside of 10 Downing Street’ and had met with the head of M16. Not a great start, but he was starting from a low base. In his book No Apology he reveals his thoughts on Britain:
‘England [sic] is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn't make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy.’
We love a great gaffe! Tabloids thrive on them. Comedians build their careers around them. But when is a gaffe more than just a gaffe? It's not just politicians who trip up on words. We all do. But it's when we trip up on ideas that it really matters. So, what's the difference?
The difference, I want to suggest, comes down to how we frame problems. Politicians and the media are always busy framing political choices for us. Climate change – are you a believer or a sceptic? Europe – are you for or against? Immigration – is it the problem or the solution to growing our economies?
Sometimes these choices work. Other times, political problems have been framed as false choices. We cannot resolve an issue at an election because the options we have been given do not go to the essence of why we argue. The result: a political issue gets stuck in the mud and becomes impossible to resolve.
Take climate change, for example. For years this issue was framed as a choice between believers versus sceptics – that is, an issue of science. But how many of us really have the scientific credentials to make a call either way from first principles? This has always been a question of authority – how much faith do you put in experts in a vibrant, fully functioning democracy? That's not an easy question but it's certainly the right one.
Then there's the question of immigration. Gordon Brown famously called Gillian Duffy, a lifelong Labour supporter, a ‘bigoted woman’ when she raised the issue of Eastern Europeans coming to Britain. He then spent days apologising. But what was the real issue here? Was it one of bigotry – either racial or ethnic? Or was it really a concern about economics and the prospects of her grandchildren to receive an education, enter the workforce, and lead the lives they had reason to value? That's not to say Duffy drew the right conclusions. But frame the issue as one of race, and it heads in an inevitable direction. Reframe it and it moves closer to the essence of why we struggle.
So how does a politician know when they have framed political problems in the right way? Invariably, our most successful politicians are those who intuitively understand our worries and concerns and can develop a concrete path of action to lead us out of uncertainty. That requires experience, empathy, and sometimes making mistakes before getting things right. I'm sure Romney's foreign policy advisers will be reflecting on his recent gaffes.
Many years after the war in Iraq I interviewed retired Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl on his contribution to the counterinsurgency doctrine inside the US military. Counterinsurgency operations sought to quell insurgents by taking into account the political dimensions of the conflict rather than just the military ones. I asked him how he knew that the shift in tactics was right – that it would lead to a de-escalation of violence. His answer surprised me. ‘We didn't,’ he said. But if we were wrong we would have reacted quickly and changed our approach. ‘The side that learns fastest is the side that wins’.