Trump is Full of Narrative Surprise, and You Should Be Too
Leaders Should Harness Their History-Making Potential
Between the stimulus barrage of modern life and the psychic assault on our conventional cognitive patterns, the daily hard break from The Rules We Used to Play By, comes this nagging sensation of weightlessness. We are floating with radical uncertainty. Our ‘theory of control’ has collapsed.
An entire context of mattering is in question. Without a strong sense of self or direction, we seem unable to find ourselves in the big picture, much less paint a new one from which to lead the next iteration. We are being conditioned to accept the laws of the new system.
In the first seven months of his second term, Donald Trump has made unprecedented changes to the way the American government operates, what “government” really even means. Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum in Foreign Affairs last week (Ungoverning America: The Logic Behind Trump’s Assault on the Administrative State):
[Trump] has launched an extraordinary and erratic tariff scheme, eliminated U.S. foreign aid programs, upended U.S. alliances, and waged war on the administrative state. He has detained and deported scores of foreign students and scholars for their political views; strong-armed universities, law firms, corporations, and media outlets into doing his bidding; and emasculated the government’s regulatory agencies. He has deployed the U.S. National Guard to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., purportedly to fight disorder and crime, and threatened to send the military to Chicago, New York City, and beyond.
All of this has led some observers to conclude that Trump is seeking a new way of governing in pursuit of a radical and disruptive agenda. In foreign relations, trade, energy, and immigration, a variety of news outlets and think tanks have declared that Trump aims to enact a policy revolution. One Brookings article, for example, declared that the president “has thought big” and staked his administration “on large-scale policy shifts.”
New episodes of the Trump show drop at a dizzying pace.
The speed at which the Trump administration has pursued ungoverning is astonishing. It gives the impression that a lot is happening and that Trump will let nothing stand in his way. The chaos is real, as is the destruction. Trump’s director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was fired after less than a month, for instance, and four other top CDC leaders promptly resigned. But in the end, it is likely to also leave the leader ineffective and breed discontent.
Maybe.
But Trump’s point is that “government” is already over, or that its meaning, at least, has been irreversibly transformed. He has effectively rearranged the four dimensions of physics and philosophy. The frontier we face is no longer logical and linear, but systemic and simultaneous.
It will take a new kind of effort to imagine — let alone deal with — the grosser synergies that are now in full view. Strategic fit to the world according to Trump starts from a bigger and weirder frame. It starts with rewiring our word and speech-making circuitry. It starts by telling different stories.
“I like the fact that he’s different,” Trump said after Kennedy was blasted by Republicans and Democrats alike over his recent firing of Susan Monarez, his effective limiting of access to the Covid-19 vaccine, and concerns over possible changes to routine childhood vaccinations.
Trump, during a dinner with some of the nation’s leading tech CEOs, said Kennedy “means very well” and that his anti-vaccine views are merely a different perspective on healthcare.
Kennedy’s “got a different take, and we want to listen to all of those takes,” Trump said. “But it’s not your standard talk, I would say. And that has to do with medical and vaccines. But if you look at what’s going on in the world with health, and look at this country also with regard to health, I like the fact that he’s different.”
Standard Talk
Alice Walton is the richest woman in the world.
A former investment banker with an estimated wealth exceeding $100 billion, the 75-year-old daughter of Sam Walton has set her sights on “fixing” the disconnect between the country’s outsized spending on healthcare and its struggles to stem the tide of chronic disease and preventable deaths, something that has consumed policymakers, business leaders, and patients for generations.
“Health care is going to break and bankrupt American companies, and America itself, if we don’t change it,” she says in an interview last week with Semafor (Alice Walton’s prescription for a ‘broken’ US health system).
There are several remedies in Walton’s prescription, including the Heartland Whole Health Institute, which she launched in 2019 to manage the research and policy side of her campaign. The latest opened in July, when Walton welcomed the first 48 students to the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, or AWSOM, a gleaming building on a plant-filled campus from which she intends to reimagine medical education.
AWSOM is aiming to train a new generation of doctors in preventive, patient-focused “whole health” principles. This is defined as looking not only at a person’s illness, but at their broader needs and circumstances — and at the health outcomes they want from treatment.
“The key thing has to be to change the financial incentives in health care,” she tells Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson. “Everybody follows the money, and systems behave according to where the incentives are.” Right now, she sees the system encouraging doctors, hospitals, and insurers to think, “Let people get as sick as you can, encourage them to have all sorts of tests that they don’t need and surgeries that they don’t need, and we’ll make money.” Medical schools, she adds, “do not focus on prevention at all, because they’re not paid to prevent anything.”
Walton includes the broken industry she hopes to disrupt in her appeal. Her message to healthcare CEOs is: “Let’s get together and try to fix this thing. You know it’s got to be fixed. Somebody’s going to change it. It’s probably a lot smarter if you participate in that process.”
The first rule of systems thinking: No one ever gets credit for fixing problems that don’t occur. The second rule of systems thinking: You can’t “fix” an embedded economic system. (he third rule of systems thinking: make a customer a co-creator of the new economic system in which it is a part.
The American Way of Healthcare will never be able to “fix” its “crisis” because it is a $4 trillion market running on a treadmill of happy-to-glad edits in the PowerPoints. An entire economic system, the foundation to about 25 percent of global GDP, is being managed operationally, not strategically, forced to fit the math and the software already in place. It is working with a storyline of “cost” as the defining and dominating theory of "value" shaping go-to-market visions.
Most objectives are small bore and rotate in an orbit of cliché.
The end result is a narrative layer — The Standard Talk — that’s positioned at the extreme end of monotonous repetition, bouncing from banality to banality at a massive scale, perpetuating feedback loops and a pattern of energy that hasn’t changed in more than 50 years. (To dig deeper, see Amazon: The Strategy That Didn't Fix Healthcare)
Breaking Point
American politics was once utterly predictable.
Every four years, the country had an election. Each time, either a Democrat or a Republican won. And although Democrats and Republicans had different priorities, American citizens could expect some continuity of governance. Trump has ended that tradition.
“In his desire to weaken the state and rebuild it around him, he has made chaos the new standard,” write Muirhead and Rosenblum. “The range of future possibilities for Washington is thus wide.”
Leaders should take note: there are no more remnant contexts to take refuge in. It’s time to go full bore against the grain. It’s time to get comfortable making history.
In related news of wide possibility enabled by narrative surprise, Eli Lilly this morning announced the launch of TuneLab, a new platform that gives biotech startups free access to AI-enabled drug discovery models in exchange for their data. TuneLab aims to create an entirely new industry ecosystem.
It also has the potential to make history.
/ jgs
John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. Blue Spoon specializes in constructing new industry narratives.