Clear Thinking – A Practical Manual for Every Lobbyist

I’ve found that clear thinking for political campaigning and lobbying to be essential.

I’ve found it to be rare.

‘Clear Thinking”  helps you understand why it is hard to think clearly, the many upsides of doing it, and how to do it.

I guess I prefer clear thinking to the alternatives – fuzzy, self-deceptive, and delusional – by accident of birth, political experience, and personal experience.

I was born in Newry, Northern Ireland, although my accent reveals I was brought up in the genteel streets of Suffolk, England. I was 28 when peace came. I never believed social and political progress would come from proclamations of ancient slogans. Hope that our day will come indicated a detachment from clear thinking.

I’ve canvassed and campaigned in enough Labour Party general election defeats to realise that ‘hopes and prayers’ and ‘self-belief’ of victory were never enough to bring about success at the polls. There, I encountered a common Messianic cult curse that ways down in many campaigns today, that even thinking that victory was not yours tomorrow was a mortal sin and betrayal.I picked up the political reality of defeat from canvassing on the doorsteps and opinion polls.

And, in 2015 my embracing of harsh reality was imprinted in my very DNA. I had the choice of a life-saving stem cell transplant or not. I was provided with the odds by my oncologist of going through with a transplant or not. Both options were bleak. I made the right choice.

Ever since I’ve been hardwired for clear thinking, I’m circumspect that political fairies will appear from nowhere and make the problem go away. I don’t believe a fairy godmother will change the decision. I do believe in the appearance of political miracles and have been behind some mysterious events happening. Still, in all cases, more mundane hard work and persuasion were the real forces that led to such ‘miraculous events’, than the intervention of supernatural powers.

I don’t think you need to go through that journey to embrace clear thinking.

Fortunately, Shane Parrish published Clear Thinking. I’ve been following him for a long time via his excellent Farnham Street, and his books on Mental Models. It is clear that his book draws on some of the best who practice clear thinking, including Daniel Kanehemam, Charlie Munger and Peter Kaufman. If you want to learn from some of the best in their field on how they practice clear thinking, you should read the book.

What follows is my take on the many pages of notes and highlights I took from reading the book. They are my take on the many excellent ideas.

They are focused on lobbying. I have a small circle of competence. I put them on paper/screen in case they are helpful to others.

There is nothing original in this post. I’ve extracted/copied it from the book and some memories.

Don’t believe in Fairies and other common delusions. Clear thinking rather than the belief in intervention from the political fairies will improve your campaigning and lobbying. It will free you from emotions, disbelief and groupthink, and help you go on the right course of action.

It would help if you were prepared to ditch what does not work. If you like a line/position, but it does land with anyone, try re-writing it. But, if it continues to flop, drop it. If you continue, you’ll contaminate the whole case and likely lead your campaign to defeat.

Disblief that things could have ever come to this and that decision-makers and politicians don’t agree with you are normal.

If you don’t embrace clear thinking, the fog that clouds you will deliver you to defeat. Common reasons for staying in the fog include:

You don’t want to tell people that what they want is (1) not liked, and (2) not going their way. Too many interests only hear about the need for more buy-in when the voting happens and they are defeated.

Groupthink will get in the way. Groups will refuse to accept that their assumptions at the start were wrong. If you continue on the basis of false assumptions, defeat is more likely.

The people who got there, are not the ones to get you to where you want to be. The people who got you there are usually different from the people who will get you out of the political jam and where you want to be. If you are unable to walk back from or admit to previous mistakes from your side because the people responsible are sitting in the room, they are likely going to block walking back on previous decisions. Your chances of success are diminished.

Surprise to bewilderment is expected. After 25-plus years, I’ve never worked on a file that came out of the blue. There are usually clear indications over the last 10 years that change is coming. The surprise and bewilderment is usually just a symptom of people who should have been told, not being told. In many organisations, both for and not-for-profit, not flagging bad news up in the food chain. By the time bad news is sent up,  there is little that can be done.

The law of holes. If you find yourself in the hole, stop digging. If your actions, decisions and people are not helping you get out of the hole, instead of digging deeper, stop.

Don’t use hole diggers. Some campaigners and lobbyists are great hole diggers. I’ve known of people who will walk into a meeting or give a presentation and guarantee defeat to their cause. When they walk in, officials and politicians who oppose that interest celebrate – victory is all but guaranteed.

A well-known trick practised by the more Machiavellian is to suggest to organisers of events a hole digger speak.  Crazy ideas will look sober and well-reasoned after listening to the hole digger.

The challenge with hole diggers is they have a cult following in their organisation and fringe political interests. That they have yet to deliver political success in 30 years is immaterial. Defeat is the product of sinister forces.

This affliction is common in for and not-for-profit organisations.

Be Realistic and Step in On Time. Choose an option that is realistically going to be adopted and is already on the table.

Don’t send a letter to a Commissioner on a Tuesday afternoon for a file due to be adopted at a College meeting on Wednesday asking for the proposal to be withdrawn. It is more common than you’d think. This is especially the case if the proposal is being adopted by written procedure. The Heads of the Cabinet agreed to it on Monday. And, the chances that the Commissioner will spend their Tuesday evening reading your email are slim. As will all, it is not impossible; it is just unlikely.

Don’t Fly Too High. If you set your expectations too high at the start, ones that clear thinking would identify as unlikely, you will more likely be disappointed.

Hibernation is not an option. If you wake up and find out that you have been impacted by a proposal, it is only likely because you have been hibernating, or your people have not wanted to tell you what’s about to happen for the last months. During the elapsed time, you could have done something about it.

Talk about what interests them. If you want someone to back your interest, first highlight the issues that interest them in a style and format that appeals to them. On a fisheries subsidies file, I mimicked the style of the Commission’s briefings for inter-service consultation, highlighting the parts of the Annex that were against several Commissioners’ public positions, and reading them back to them on paper. I learned later that several Cabinets intervened in the meeting to object to aspects of the draft proposal. Those offending provisions were removed.

Raise the points that land with your audience rather than you. There was a Commissioner with an unknown interest in animal welfare. It surprised many as it seemed at odds with their public persona. But, when an issue appeared in the press and the political evening TV news back home, that dealt with that Commissioner’s interests, we were able to bypass his Cabinet. The next day his Cabinet lead called us in and informed us, with obvious annoyance, that his Commissioner had instructed him to tell us that he was backing our position.

Do the most important thing.  You can’t do everything, so do the most important. I’ve seen this too often. If you try and get too many changes in a proposal, the chances are that you will get too few. Instead, have one key thing you want, and focus on that. Anything else is a bonus. If you claim everything is important to you, officials and politicians will take your inability to prioritise as confusion and chaos. They won’t know what’s essential and will likely concede it for one of your unstated 3rd order asks.

Think first, act second.   You need to create a deliberate gap between thinking and action.

Avoid a focus on action. Think first and be clear that you are going for the right result. It is common to set doing anything as a sign you are moving forward. Doing any action often leads you backwards.

It helps to know that what you are working towards stands a chance of delivering the outcome you want. Early on, I realised that many policy and legislative changes I worked on would not obtain  the desired goals. Dealing with the root causes was taboo. So, instead, we went through the motions, passed laws, and did not see the intended benefits.

It is better to think harder at the start about what the real outcome is and how to get there before moving to act.

The many enemies of clear thinking.  Don’t let these enemies of clear thinking – emotions, group think, ego, inertia -get in the way of rational and clear thinking.

If you give in to these animal impulses you’ll harm your interests. As a lobbyist, you or your clients are going to be criticised. Instinctively, you stop listening and go on the attack. You stop thinking and tap into your animal instincts and shout down those who criticise you or your position.

The most dangerous is inertia. Most people don’t like change. In lobbying, you often face the call for a change. If your default response to anything new is no you are placed in a tougher place.

Put in Place Safeguards Against your response. You need to put in safeguards in place to block your impulses. Safeguards are helpful. They save you a lot of pain.

Emotion Default. People take it as a personal affront that a proposal or amendment is against their interests. And react accordingly. Shock, surprise, amazement, and anger. These are never good mindsets to make decisions or meet with people to lobby for your case.

When people are emotional, they often do things they can walk back from. I’ve seen too many emotional outbursts in meetings with officials and politicians that have doomed their interests. If you are goaded in a forum, resist the bait and return to balance. It is a simple device to get you emotional, drop the veneer of reason, and lead you to embrace defeat.

Ego Default. There is plenty of big egos in lobbying.

The most accomplished campaigners and lobbyists  I’ve met have gotten rid of their egos and embraced humility. Their confidence is earned based on a long and deep understanding of the issue. They tend to understand the complexity of the issue. They are also clear.

Alternatively, many let their ego get in the way. Ego gives unearned confidence. Shallow knowledge based on reading a synthesis of the original research. They tend to be unable to explain the issue beyond a superficial level and are not clear. They want to appear successful, rather than being successful, and doing what it takes to get there.

You’ll often see this when people talk about Feeling Right over Being Right. Many people think they are right, and anyone who does not see things in the same way as just wrong. When this happens, the ego has taken over. This is a challenge in lobbying.

If we mistake how we want the world to be with how it actually is, our ego has taken over. I recall a conversation with an interest in a Directive.  They disagreed with the proposal. The provision they disliked got into the law. They disagreed that the provisions said what they said. The matter finally got to the European Court. The European Court disagreed with them. They disagreed with the Court’s judgement. Their ego got in the way. If reality had stepped in early, they could have directed their energies to get the law changed.

The Social Default. The social default inspires conformity. One measure of a person is the degree to which they’ll do the right thing when it goes against popular belief. If a whole group of people adopt a lemming political approach, they are following a natural and fatal instinct.

The force is so strong that most people would prefer political defeat than risk not agreeing with their colleagues.

 Thinking independently, and looking like a fool by rejecting group- think is uncomfortable.  If the evidence and reasoning support a position that is fine, but if the evidence does not support that, it is better to be ridiculed and right.

Keep a journal of your advice. You may learn why your right advice was taken up. And, as people will develop amnesia when things go wrong and try and blame someone, likely you, it is good to remember what happened.

The Inertia Default. This is something I realised this year. Most people don’t like change. Inertia is hardwired into us. It means most people like the status quo.

And this is a problem. Most legislative and policy proposals are about bringing change. There are not many legislative proposals that say “Hi, we have done a lot of work to prepare this proposal, and we are just updating two things, and more or less preserving status quo”. It does happen, but it is rare.

So, law and policymaking makes a lot of people, the people who don’t want any change or little change, in a tough spot. They like the idea.

I am one of the small % of the population who like change.

It leads to a desire to halt proposals coming out the door. I’m good at doing this. My advice is usually not to because when the proposal finally comes out it will be more challenging.

Parrish notes that inertia leads to people tending to value consistency over effectiveness, and reward people for maintaining the status quo. As growth can’t happen by stasis, this creates problems. It builds in a preference for doing things in the established ways, even if they have a track record of not delivering. It likely explains why so many long and technical gibberish position papers are being published in Brussels. It’s because organisations have always done it that way, and why would you change? Inertia keeps us doing things that don’t get us what we want.

Default to Clarity. This is the idea that “We receive some type of input from the world and then execute an algorithm that processes that input and automatically produces an output.. ….Some of these algorithms help move you closer to what you want; others move you further away.”

I have set up automatic responses that make my work easier. I filter out most political noise and listen to only a few voices. These are the voices who have an established track record of being on the winning side. I listen to some who are consistently on the losing side. It cuts my workload a lot.

Setting up some safeguards.  Rituals: You are not always going to be at the top of your game. Your clear thinking requires more than willpower.

It helps to follow some rituals to make sure you don’t fall.

Here are some I try:

These, and other rituals, force me to do things that I’m not naturally inclined to do but are good for me to do.

It’s all your fault. “Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be.”—JEFF BEZOS

Your job is to deliver an outcome. It is your responsibility to finish it. It is your fault if it does not get done. It is your fault if the political fairies did not turn up as you had envisaged to save the day.

Don’t complain that things are unfair, nor that political reality, manifested by votes in the Council and the EP, doesn’t mirror your distorted reality.

Don’t wallow in self-pity and blame conspiracies, real and imagined, for your political fate. If you can’t move on, you are likely in the wrong profession.

If you got it wrong you need to focus on the next move, the one that gets you closer or further from where you want to go. You have to do be responsible for your actions no matter the situation. If the fault comes from a colleague, that is still your fault.

Don’t Bargain with Reality. Many people think they bargain with how the world should work instead of accepting how it does work. When you find yourself or your colleagues complaining, “that’s not right,” or “That’s not fair,” or “It shouldn’t be that way,” you’re bargaining, not accepting. You want the world to work in a way that it doesn’t. You need to deal with reality. If you don’t, you are going to embrace certain defeats,

As soon as you accept political reality, solutions appear. When you unblock your brain from the denial of reality, you can move on. A lot of people can’t do this. They get lost in self-pity that the world that thought existed does not. If you go down this rabbit hole, you will unlikely find your back to reality and embrace defeat. Instead, accept the reality of your situation. This is important. You’ll need to control your responses to circumstances that you can’t control. Your responses can makes things better or worse.

You can’t turn back time. A lot of energy is spent responding to events that have happened. Letters to officials, politicians, and the press saying, at great length, they are wrong and need to recant their views in public. These responses are often driven by emotion or ego. It hardly ever leads to much good.

If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging. You’re refusing to accept something that has already happened. And that’s crazy. It has happened, and you can’t argue with it.

A good rule recommended by Parrish is to ask this question: “Will this action make the future easier or harder?”

I’ve seen my fair share of very expensive consultant/lawyer letters sent to the Commission calling for the remedying of sins, real and imagined. After 25-plus years, I’ve seen less than 5% having the desired impact.

Don’t complain. Too often, we fight against the feedback the world gives us to protect our beliefs. Complaining isn’t productive. It only misleads you into thinking that the world should function in a way that it doesn’t.

When you stop complaining, you start finding what you need to do to get where you want to be.