A Crisis Lesson From the Reluctant Response to the 2024 Elections

Acknowledging What Went Wrong is the First Step to Charting a New Path 

11/14/24 – – Preparing for the College Board exams in high school, I dreaded weekly assignments from a vocabulary textbook titled Word Wealth. I remember being introduced to the word “obdurate,” an adjective meaning “stubbornly refusing to change one’s opinion or course of action” and thinking that I would never see or use that word again.

I was wrong.

It’s being expressed over and over in analysis of the Democratic party leadership’s reaction to last week’s election results.

Effective Crisis Response Requires Reflection

By any measure, the 2024 presidential election qualifies as a “crisis” for Democrats, worthy of intense introspection. While party candidates won their share of state and local races, the outcome at the national level was not what Democrats expected or wanted for themselves and our nation.

The good news is that just like most crises, this one presents an excellent opportunity for course correction and recovery.

Crisis management best practices call for honest assessment, as painful as that may be, after dealing with a crisis situation. What went wrong, why did it happen and what can we do to make sure it never happens again are important questions to ask and answer candidly. Organizations and individuals unwilling to do that – let’s call them obdurate – are unlikely to break the cycle of crises.

Crises Can Point the Way to Recovery

Setbacks, even an Electoral College shellacking, don’t have to be terminal. Consider these definitions from Dictionary.com of “crisis”:  

a) A stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events, especially for better or worse, is determined; turning point.

b) A condition of instability or danger, as in social, economic, political, or international affairs, leading to a decisive change.

Recognizing these fluid definitions, I encourage clients to think about a crisis predicament as the intermission between two acts of a play. We have the opportunity, before the house lights begin to flicker for Act II, to figure out how to make this end well. If we’re clear-eyed about what went wrong in Act I, we’ll come up with the decisive change that flips the script.

This advice holds across industries and undertakings. For example, disciples of Toyota’s approach to continuous manufacturing improvement (known as kaizen) offer the following wisdom to suppliers who are uncomfortable with the auto manufacturer’s postmortems of past performance: “The road to perfection starts with internal reflection.”

So, as you read and listen to the explanations by media, pundits and politicians of what happened on November 5, you don’t need a copy of Word Wealth to guide your observation. Just be on the lookout for obdurate spokespeople “stubbornly refusing to change their opinion or course of action.” They stand in the way of crisis recovery and are unlikely to experience different outcomes in the elections ahead.