Here’s my thought experiment for how we might do political visioning in America, grounded in the aspirations of the entire polity.

The first bit is a good illustration of how I think about the American Dream. I mean this more as an exercise in how to “do” politics differently than just having a platform on 50+ issues that matter to the polity and shouting about it as loud as you can.

My main consternation as a citizen is this: I don’t want a platform unless you’ve shared a vision first! Rather than just griping, I figured I’d actually explain how I think things could work instead.

And, for what it’s worth, this is how I’ve seen great organizations function across sectors. This sort of discipline around strategy and execution is one of the things I most wish the public sector would adopt from private sector organizations.

To start, let’s assume a visionary political leader believes these are the three overarching questions that unify the largest possible amount of our polity:

1. On average, do people have enough optimism about the present and future to want to bring children into this world?
2. On average, once someone is brought into this world, do they flourish from cradle to grave?
3. Overall, the simplest and most comprehensive way to measure the health of a society is Total Fertility Rate vs. replacement rate. Is our long-run population stable, growing, or declining?

A vision statement based on these questions could be:

I imagine a country where our citizens believe it’s worth bringing children into the world and have reasonable confidence that those children will flourish during their lifetimes.

A pithy slogan to capture the essence of this vision statement could be:

“Families will thrive here.”

Let’s assume this is a vision statement that the polity believes in. If so, then the political leader can translate their rhetoric into action by asking two simple questions:

1. Is the vision true today?
2. If not, what would have to be true for the vision to become reality?

From there, a political leader can create an integrated set of mutually reinforcing policy and administrative choices that they believe will allow the polity to make disproportionate progress toward the vision state.

Put another way, by working backwards from the vision, you can place bets on the initiatives that are more likely to succeed rather than wasting resources on those that won’t get us to where we want to go.

The problem with this approach is that you actually have to articulate a vision, understand the root causes that are preventing it from happening without intervention, do the extremely abstract work of forming a strategy, and then communicate it clearly enough so that people get behind it. That’s really hard, and you have to have major guts to go through this exercise of vision -> strategy -> priorities -> outcomes.

This is quite different, I think, than having a pro-con list of policy preferences across a widely distributed set of issue areas that aren’t contemplated in an integrated way. But the thing is, having focus and priorities tends to work much better than “boiling the ocean” or “being all things to all people.”

In a nutshell, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from observing the leadership of private-sector companies is that it’s a big waste to just start doing stuff—as if everything is equally impactful. It works much better when you start with a specific end state in mind and work backwards. It’s an idea that’s useful for political leaders, too.