010 Erik Fogg –– Wedged

Eric Fogge is a co-author of Wedged: How You Became a Tool of the Partisan Political Establishment, blah blah blah, and How to Start Thinking for Yourself Again. That's a mouthful, isn't it?

Yeah, it's quite a long subtitle.

Whether you're a political leader, a community leader, or a business leader, there are issues that can drive a wedge between the people on your team or between you and the people you serve. And sadly, some of these issues are purposely manufactured and promoted. In this episode, Eric and I will discuss how to recognize wedging issues in your organization and how to resolve them peacefully and productively.

Welcome to Walking the Walk, the program for people who want to become better leaders and leaders who want to become better people. Start Walking the Walk with your host, renowned leadership speaker and author of The Sensei Leader, Jim Bouchard.

As I said, Eric Fogge is one of the authors of Wedged, and this amazing book highlights the extreme divide in American political culture, but it does a lot more than that. Eric and his co-author, Nathaniel Green, really offer a detailed account of how issues can be managed to create and even promote this divide. And today, Eric will help you identify these issues, and as he puts it, extract the wedge. Welcome, Eric. I think we got the tech issues out of the way.

I think so too. Good morning once again. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm really excited.

There you go. And if anybody listened a couple times and lost us, our apologies, but here we are and let's get right into it. Now—

We're back and ready to rock.

Back and ready to rock. Now I know you started this as a political examination of wedging issues, but as you talked about before the show, both of you guys are heavily into the business community as well. So you had this in mind, but you got it started as politics. Why don't you give us a little bit of the background, how that got, how that all got off the ground.

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, Nat and I both have worked in consulting, uh, which means we've seen a lot of corporate politics as we've sort of toured North America and Europe, uh, working with various businesses, um, some of which were even really great performers, um, despite all the politics I dealt with. But from the political side, we've been, we've been sort of cursed with a, a deep interest in politics sort of all of our lives. And my own background was that I came from a red— well, a red part of Pennsylvania, so rural Pennsylvania, very conservative, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, probably one of the bluest parts of the country, to go to school.

That's a culture shock, isn't it?

Oh my gosh, big time. Yeah, I was not ready for the big city. But I adapted. Yeah, and I studied political science there, which kind of honed my senses as I was looking around me. And, you know, one thing that I think Americans all know about politics is that if the blue team takes one side, the red team takes the absolute opposite side, and vice versa. So they're always saying the complete opposite thing, except in one case, and it's when they're talking about the other one. So no matter where you go, no matter what color you see, the other color is borish, stupid, uneducated, but most importantly, the other side is malicious. They are actively trying to destroy the country, and nobody really has anything good to say about the other side. They become a bit of a boogeyman. And having, you know, family and friends back in red Pennsylvania and having new friends up in blue Cambridge, I realize that while not everyone everywhere is a good person. I realized that there are good people in both the red team and the blue team. And all of them actually want the, you know, to do the right thing for the country. And so this notion that the other side is actively out to wreck politics or do bad things to people, you know, I knew from firsthand that this was false. And so that sort of launched my investigation into understanding why both sides have such antipathy.

Do you really think it's that people are looking out for the best interests of the country, or— and this is where obviously the imprint would go to any organizational structure, not just a nation— but are people generally just kind of self-interested and they're just picking the team that best reflects their interests, and unfortunately that can run away with you just as it does —people that are radically fanatic about a sports team. Yeah, certainly.

What's interesting about the sports team analogy, of course, is that picking your sports team doesn't actually—it's not an inherently selfish move, right? You move to, say, Boston and you become a Patriots fan. One would hope. Well, yeah, exactly. Or one lives a very lonely existence here. There you go. But the thing is the Patriots winning doesn't actually make your life better or worse. No. Uh, in any more—

well, uh, except in the sense that depends how deep a fan you are. It could— it can ruin things around here, let me tell you. Yeah, exactly.

And so, and so it's only because you've chosen to associate yourself with the tribe, right, that is that team, that you care. And so it's such a great analogy because it can help us take a little bit of distance from our political affiliations. Um, and I do think a lot of people A lot of people at least believe that what they want is what's best for the country, even if it is mixed in their own self-interest. But, you know, I know poor people that don't want to raise taxes on the rich, and I know rich people that do want to raise taxes on the rich. And I know, you know, often people will act against their own self-interest. But whether or not what they're doing is noble or selfish— and the selfish part is not necessarily inherently anything wrong with it, because a democracy is supposed to be about balancing people's interests and they're supposed to speak them through the representatives. But once they get caught up in the affiliation with their party and with their team, it actually starts to look a lot like a particularly ugly sporting event in which the fans of the two teams sort of turn into hooligans and start— Right, right.

—fighting it out. No, I hear you. And I have no problem with self-interest. In fact, I'm an active promoter of self-interest, providing that you're not hurting other people. But it does seem, you know, and I know we're going to turn this into business as well because we see that in leadership and business as well. I'm sure you have many, many times the idea that the party takes the dominant position, right? That party is more important than the greater organization, which in this case we're talking about as a nation, right? Yes. How does that happen? And do people really choose that? Or, you know, and this is kind of weird too because in the spirit of full disclosure, I mean, I've been through almost all the different flavors, if you will, of politics. When I was a young guy, I started off as a pretty radical liberal. You might not believe that, knowing me a little bit. Ah. And then I moved over to a much more conservative perspective, and when I became libertarian, I actually, when I gave a speech, in fact, I ran for Congress as a libertarian, and when I gave my first speech, I said, I didn't choose to be a libertarian as much as I recognized that I was one. And what's interesting about having been through all these, like I said, these different perspectives is that As you said, I believe as you do that most people have the best intentions at heart. How we get to the discussion where we can agree on what to work on together, agree on what to table, right, and agree what not to discuss at all— that becomes part of the problem, right? But do people choose these affiliations so much? Am I just a weirdo, or are people just kind of born or damned into it sometimes? Well, that's not an or.

Uh, you, you are, you are a bit of a delightful weirdo. And also, uh, people, people often find themselves sort of shuffled into one affiliation or another. In particular, what we find is that, um, when you poll people in a way that doesn't, um, light up their sort of hot cognition, that doesn't, uh, use you know, particular vocabulary that makes them angry or activate their psychology about tribal affiliation, they often have opinions that are at odds with their party. Um, and so here's the weird dichotomy people have. If you were to separate them from their politics entirely, which is hard, but you can do it sometimes, you can find that most people have a nuanced and often seemingly internally contradictory, however however, across the political spectrum, set of opinions. And they may lean more one way or they may lean more the other way. But what the part where we're no longer in control is that instead of saying, you know, to fit my set of opinions on this day, the best person for me to vote for is X, or even the best party that I want in office is Y. That's not the cognition that's going on. Right. What ends up happening is—

because that would be reasonable. Yeah, exactly. That would be reasonable. Yeah.

What happens is these things that we call wedge issues, which are, as you mentioned before, used deliberately. What they do is they activate a different part of the brain, that tribal affiliation part of the brain that we see during sports games, which is highly emotional rather than rational, right? Exactly. And so those emotions cause us to make our identity tied up in how we vote. Um, that people that vote our way are better people. We're the good guys and the other guys are the bad guys. They're the visiting team and we have to boo them every time they show up. Um, and that's the part that we're not in control of. So there is this part, you know, the positions we want when we step away from the table a little bit and think about, that we are in control of, but then we give up that control and become fanatics of our party when it comes time for the political sports game, as it were.

Now, how does— before we get into it, because what I really want to ask is, again, how does that translate into business life as well? How do parties form in a business organization? Because they do. I mean, teams form. Oh, yeah. Silos form and it can be extremely dangerous sometimes. But hit some of the key political wedge issues. Just list a few of them really briefly so that that way we can draw a parallel between those and the emotional content that's associated with some of the issues that we'll run into in the business organization. Yeah, absolutely.

The ones we cover in the book, which are sort of the bread and butter ones for the United States for the past 20 years or so, are abortion, everyone's favorite topic, guns, gay marriage, which is an interesting case study because it's largely been settled, and therefore it's losing some of its power to get people excited, as well as wealth inequality. And so these things are issues that are not only emotional for us, but they're issues that we're not even able to discuss. That is, when we talk about it, we're either fanatically agreeing with our tribe and talking about how evil the other tribe is, or if we hear someone who even asks a probing question or asks us to reconsider something or think about some new evidence, we get very angry and we start to shout them down because we cannot allow them to sort of enter this space and say, "Hey, maybe there's a middle ground here," or maybe there's a more nuanced position. So these, um, and these issues have been used by the political parties and political media, um, in order to keep you angry, because when you're angry—

manufactured at times, right?

Absolutely. Yeah, actually abortion is a great example of an issue that was not a big deal after Roe v. Wade until about 1994, when it was specifically manufactured during the '94 election, um, probably started by the Republicans, but then taken up to just as great an effect by the Democrats in order to make sure that people felt fear, in order to make sure that they felt anger, and that they activated their in-group/out-group thinking. Because people who feel that way, there's substantial evidence that shows that they not only vote more, but they donate a lot more money, they volunteer a lot more. And therefore, the politicians that do this win, and the ones that don't activate that emotion in us with these wedge issues, they just end up losing. So there's a natural sorting mechanism to bring more politicians who are good at wedging into office.

And that's why I wanted you to make that list too, because they are highly emotionally charged issues. And now I would imagine, I'm thinking about Wedge 2, the sequel, and probably climate change would be a big one there, right? Absolutely. So what's at the core of this? And now let's take that, step into the business world because again, there are— and it's funny even to say it this way, but I actually see it as a more acute danger in the business world. In politics, okay, there's such a large mechanism at work that even though it might not feel this way any given day, part of what keeps me waking up in the morning and getting up and out of bed is the fact that it is a big process. And generally over time, it kind of sorts itself forward. It may not always go my way, but it still sorts itself kind of forward, and somehow we agree to move together most of the time, most of the time, you know. But in business, it can destroy a business rapidly, right? Yeah, people start to— it can with a country too. We have to fight that tendency. I don't want to diminish it, but in a business, right, day-to-day survival, that it, you know, we depend on our organizations. Let's not put it any other way. We're making a living there, or if you're an owner, you're, you're a, you're CEO, you know, that's your baby, that's your child, and these issues can get in there and really mess things up badly. So what is the heart of this emotional content? Where have you seen that in issues in business?

Absolutely, and to touch on your point of the danger to businesses, I mean, I think you're absolutely right that, you know, especially the United States government has checks and balances, it has a large bureaucracy, there's only so much screwing up you can do on any given day. And you're right that a business is specifically designed not to have checks and balances. It's not designed to have competing ambitions scrapping out. It's supposed to be united in one direction. That means it can run off the rails pretty fast. The core of this that helps us understand that this applies outside of just politics, as in government, is that it's based in a natural human psychological feature called in-group/out-group theory. And you can look that up. It probably comes from our evolutionary days when we had literal tribes competing over scarce resources like food. Right, right. But it's this idea that when you identify someone else as the other and you identify a certain group as you, you develop an emotional bond with the you. You identify them as the good guys and the other are bad. So we can see this obviously in stuff like racism or religion. Religious war, but it also happens, of course, in business. It's so fundamental that there was a study that one teacher did that was actually— it was in, I believe, Nature, where she divided her class between blue eyes, I think maybe blue and green, and then brown. They immediately hated each other. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Just because they had been assigned these groups. So in-group/out-group theory set in right away. So where do we see this in business? Well, obviously between different silos. And so you can imagine, I mean, think of your business right now, right? Oh, the guys over in finance, they screwed up this, or the IT department, right? Um, I worked in an IT department. We had a very strong in-group where we're the good guys, we're the smart ones, and everyone else is an idiot. They all screw things up. If they weren't such idiots, everything would be fine. We have to go bail them out all the time.

Only in the best spirit of trying to move forward and improve, right? I have to say that a lot of the IT groups that I've worked with, yes, tend to be very insular and very self-protective.

Yes, and we see it. I worked a lot in manufacturing as well, and so what's interesting about manufacturing is you tend to have— it's not always a completely linear process, but you have, you know, you take in raw materials, you put it through a certain number of steps, and then you have a product. And so what happens is when something goes wrong at a certain step, immediately the upstream steps are blamed, right? Those, those, you know, yahoos over in the raw materials processing department, they screwed it up. Or if you're in the raw materials processing unit, by God, the problem is definitely the raw material supplier. And so these people become, you know, this immediate thing sets in that because we're good, because we're the smart ones, you know, this is my in-group, We're not making mistakes. There's no improvement potential for us, right? There's nothing we can fix in our own backyard. And in fact, we can't even, you know, if, if somehow our guests that it's the upstream problem or it's the finance department or it's the IT guys, you know, if, if somehow those guys are actually having trouble, we're not going to help them because we don't see them as good guys, as friends. We see them as these idiots or they don't care, or they're even malicious. So what it does is it causes this massive operational cross-functional dysfunction that creates a lot of new problems and really hijacks our ability to solve the problems that could tank your business. Amen.

That's the most important point right there. But what you're talking about is really strong biology too. I mean, that's what science is showing us. We are wired to— be attracted to the people that are similar to us in a group setting, which is ironic because it's the complete opposite of sexual attraction. But yeah, it's, yeah, it's fascinating. And I haven't read anybody that's really got a handle on that yet. We just know that it operates that way. Um, but what we need to do, right, the problem is that it creates such a divide that people do not communicate. And communication is one of the biggest issues always that comes up in our workshops, right? How do you get people— and it's all for the reasons you just highlighted, right? So I'd argue that a leader in particular, we all have to do that, but a leader has to be extremely disciplined to overcome this strong biological pull, right? How do they do it?

That's a great question. If we had a universal answer, I might be getting paid a lot of money by a lot of very smart people to help save the country. There are some known ways of doing it. If we think of World War II, for example, the United States had a ton of disagreements internally, especially about domestic policy. And there was even a lot of criticism about how FDR was handling the war. Anytime someone's in charge, people are going to throw rocks. However, the fact that we had an existential threat meant that to a large extent, the United States united. I remember my great-grandfather, yeah, great-grandfather saying that the only time I ever voted for a Democrat was voting for FDR during the war because, you know, by God, we've got this external threat. And in this case, it happened to be other people. They became the outgroup. They were the Huns. I mean, they were Nazis. It's a pretty easy, pretty easy bad guy, right?

Justifiable, but it's still a good case study, right?

Yeah. And there were dark sides of it, right? Obviously, we interned Japanese Americans because we were afraid of this other. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But what that external threat to our group did was it caused us to shift our in-group and out-group thinking such that the entire country and in fact all of Europe, the free world, the West was all our in-group, right? It didn't matter if you were French. It didn't matter if you were Spanish or American or Republican or Democrat, right? We were all united in this threat. And so one thing great leaders do is, you know, don't use other humans to do this, but if you're able to identify a threat to the collective of your business, and they're out there, right? These competitive forces exist. But if you can make it salient and say, look, this threat is existential to all of us, and if we are not united, we will fall, people's attitudes start to shift because they start to see the business as a whole as more like running, for example, a ship where everyone is just kind of a part of the machine and doing their whole thing. But on a sailing vessel, you have less of this politics because it kills you. Right, oh, necessarily.

The next minute. Yeah, exactly. It's immediate. I love that you used World War II as an example too because think about, and it's interesting that you mention that 'cause I've been reading a lot about Eisenhower lately and how he had to bring all these forces together, right? And particularly his struggle with bringing the Italians and the Russians into the fight, right? You had people with what would be considered at that time especially diametrically opposed political philosophies on the same team, united by the common threat that they identified. Is that a reasonable way to look at it?

Absolutely. And yeah, and that, you know, if we think of during World War II, we were buddies with the Bolsheviks. Despite this diametric opposition. And so it's very possible for people to disagree substantially. So we can take this back to politics. Just want to put it on somebody else, right?

Yeah, exactly. Or something else, something else as you're saying in business.

Yeah. Right. I remember reading— what's a good example of a non-human external threat that a leader can make salient? Well, some of it can just be bankruptcy, for example. If the business is losing a lot of money, You've heard about the burning platform. People talk about the burning platform as important to agitate people out of complacency and into action, but it's also a really powerful tool, um, you know, it's a really powerful tool to creating unity in your business and removing the wedges from between your silos.

Yeah, that's good. How about on a positive side that, you know, especially with the speed of innovation these days, that you can identify a need for an innovation so you won't be left behind, right? And I know that's happening with a lot of different industries, especially in tech, but not limited to tech. I mean, we see it a lot in finance. We see it a lot with credit unions and community banking trying to respond to this accelerated market pressure, right? Absolutely. And that could be a very nice bonding tool, I believe, you know. But you know what, there's something I want to cover too. You know, we're going to have you back, Eric, as many times as you want to, but I think we've got a lot of material to cover. Definitely. This is part 1. This is part 1 of probably 80.

It'll become the Eric Foggen-Jim Bouchard Show.

Yeah, no, we can do that. That's not a problem. The leader as a wedge. And, you know, again, we saw this, just a horribly wonderful example in the last presidential race. Oh yeah. Where we vilified, right? And I'm not saying, it's interesting because I would have to argue, as a student of leadership, both of the major candidates that emerged, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, gave us enough ammunition, gave each opposition side enough ammunition to attack them, right? Absolutely. But at the same time, it got to such an extreme, right, that there was absolutely no consideration of the issues, and I know that was purposeful. You're absolutely right. Politicians, successful politicians and political groups, are very effective marketeers. But now the same thing again happens in business, right, where sometimes a leader through some action or decision or lack of it, sometimes a mistake, sometimes just, you know, an action or decision that people don't like or has offended an existing group. We see that a lot, right, where there's a change that happens and the existing group wants to preserve the status quo. So the leader, him or herself, becomes the wedge. Are you seeing that too? And if so, how do, how does that particular leader overcome that?

It's a great question. The, one of the other analogies I really like is, um, and here's, here's a good example of, here's a good example of uniting people through hating you is the drill sergeant. Right? So if you think of the drill sergeant, part of their job is to create cohesiveness in their unit and eliminate all possible intra-unit politics that they're training by getting the unit to hate them, right? So they, they, you know, they yell at them and they wake them up with, with, you know, by banging on drums at 5 in the morning and make them run till they puke. Um, and they force these guys to have cohesion both for their physical needs, like carrying the guy that puked and passed out. Um, but also for their emotional needs. So these guys end up leaning on each other for, for support. Now, why do I bring that up? Because the leader— so a bad leader or a leader that people don't like doesn't necessarily create a wedge. However, you probably don't want to run your business like a drill sergeant. The leader that creates a wedge is one that offends, in particular in an emotional way that's, you know, that's critical to that tribe's identity, offends one tribe, and in particular seems to favor another. Exactly. So for example, you know, if your IT department gets a budget cut or something, um, it may not be the best example, but what they may see is, oh, this guy's deprioritizing us, he doesn't value us, he doesn't understand what we're doing, um, you know, she doesn't know what she's talking about. Oh, and look who just got a budget increase, it's the HR department, you know, what a fluffy, etc. So what happens is the wedge grows between these two groups due to the leader's action. Their opinions about the leader can substantially break down their ability to work together. Sure. There are a couple of ways to get out of that. One of them is the drill sergeant way. So for example, if you give everyone a sense of sacrifice, so for example, if you're If you're making big changes in the business, it's because the business is either responding to an awesome opportunity, um, or it's responding to, you know, a threat or a problem. And so if you need to, um, and both of these, you know, should be targets of the business. So the, from a leadership perspective, to take the wedge out of it, if you give everyone together a sense of sacrifice, you know, that we all have to together make changes, take budget cuts if necessary, and/or do a lot of hard work in order to achieve this unified goal, in order to face this unified threat. If you're able to distribute that sense of sacrifice and recognize that sense of sacrifice, then what you've got is to some extent the drill sergeant effect where the drill sergeant is no longer you. You're just its sort of speaker. The drill sergeant becomes the threat to the business, the competitive force that's going on. Each of the different units or silos in your business become the individuals in the platoon that are now leaning on each other to be able to bear the burden and the sacrifice. It actually ends up making them tighter as a result. It could be great for your business.

That's beautiful. Again, it points to the importance of continually developing and cultivating your communication skills because You have to relate this energy somehow. You have to translate this energy out of your brain into the body of the organization, into your team. So, again, at points, we've just got to continually work on that, which is still one of the biggest gaps, right? Hey, listen, we got to wrap things up for today. Oh boy. I mean it from the heart. We've just got to have you back many times. We've got a lot of things to dig into. This is really big territory.

Yeah, I feel like we've just scratched the surface.

Oh my God, no. And everything you're saying, You know, folks, put this to work. I mean, everything Eric's saying, just put it to work. I want to say you've got to get the book Wedged. It's one of my favorites. It's something that I refer to often, and you know, you're seeing it pop up and references to it in some of my other writing. And I am giving you full credit, Eric. I'm not going to give any royalties though. Not yet. We'll collaborate on one. But tell us how to get in touch with you, how to get in touch with your services, and how to buy the book.

Absolutely. So the best place to find my political writing is at reconsidermedia.com, um, reconsidermedia.com. Um, I write about obviously wedging, um, and in particular, you know, we have a look at what's actually going on in the minds of, um, Americans as they look at different issues and how can we look at it, how can we look at each of these issues in a different way such that we end up taking our own power and, um, you know, an authority back instead of being, you know, as the, as the subtitle says, tools of the partisan political establishment. So this is an active practice, uh, kind of blog and podcast for reconsidering, uh, the politics in front of you. And, uh, it's potentially very powerful for business leaders too. It's like meditating, right? If you practice it enough, you're going to be able to start doing it in other situations as well. Exactly. You can find my book on Amazon. So if you just search for Wedged, it's going to say, "Did you mean wedges?" and ask if you want shoes. And you say, "No, no, no. What I want is Wedged." And you'll be able to find it there. And you can contact me if you're interested in learning more or getting me to come work with your business at erik@erikmiller.com. Reconsidermedia.com, and we can chat about how I can help.

And not only will I give Eric and his partner Nathaniel just the highest recommendation to have them come in and help you in many areas of your business, but also I met Eric first when I heard him speak in Hartford. We were doing an event together down in Hartford, Connecticut, and I gotta tell you, he is one of the most engaging, talented speakers that I've run into, and That means a lot, Eric, because I see a lot of these guys.

I was about to say, wow, that's high praise.

Thank you. No, it really is. So if you're looking for an interesting and engaging speaker for one of your upcoming events, you could just give Eric a call. I think you'd be delighted.

Cool. Wow. Thank you, Jim.

There's an emotional moment we just had. Yeah, it is. All right. Hey, thanks so much for being with us today. And again, first of many, many times. We've got a lot of territory to cover.

It's always a pleasure working with you. I can't wait to see what we cook up next.

All right. Thanks so much. Cheerio.

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