The Culture of the United States is a Strategic Asset

Dear President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Harris,

Congratulations on your historic win! It warmed my heart and eased my nerves to support your campaign and celebrate our victory. I was delighted to see such empathy, gravitas and resolve in your campaign and am inspired to witness it strengthen during this unique transition period. Specifically, the campaign promise to heal the soul of our nation is one that I sincerely hope will usher in a new era of American pride and solidarity.

The reason I’m writing to you is that healing the soul of the nation is easier said than done, as you know. It will take work. I would like to suggest that we treat culture more strategically and explicitly than it has been treated in previous administrations. We are an increasingly divided nation and do not possess a shared view of reality. It’s not just rural conservatism vs. urban liberalism that divides us. We are also divided along racial, gender, sexuality, religious, educational, economic and generational lines. Some troubling culture indicators:

• 86% of Democrats and 91% of Republicans view each other unfavorably (Pew, 2016)
• 84% of us believe the media is to blame for our division (Gallup/Knight, 2020)
• 83% of us are stressed out by the state of the nation (APA, June 2020)
• 66% of us think our nation is in decline (IASC, October 2020)
• 61% of us are lonely (Cigna, 2019)

Your bipartisan and calming leadership style, robust pandemic response, environmental platform, and economic stimulus will go a long way in terms of raising the quality of life and lowering the fear profile in our culture. However, unless we also explicitly attend to our cultural divides, I fear our divisions will impede our progress.

In the business world, the saying goes “culture eats strategy for lunch,” meaning that we cannot just implement policy and allocate resources, but we must also deliberately attend to our culture. Nowhere is this more evident than in the private sector. A recent Harvard Business Review study of over 800 organizations and their diversity and inclusion efforts revealed that these efforts had neutral to negative effects on hiring, retention and promotion of diverse candidates.  

The reason for this is that these efforts were largely policy-driven around employee resource groups (ERG’s), compliance, harassment and hiring goals, and were not accompanied by an effective inclusive culture strategy, such that people in the dominant class (straight white males) developed bonds with diverse candidates, or mentored and promoted them. Accordingly, unless our country tends to its deficit of trust and cultural divides, I believe it is possible that our much needed reforms will suffer a similar fate.

Therefore, I recommend appointing a Special Culture Advisor to the White House with a broad mandate to ensure truth in journalism and to develop empathy, trust and solidarity at the national, state and local levels.

I know that we have the tools, built right here in the United States, to heal the soul of our nation. I have had the pleasure to develop scalable platforms and programs that empower organizations such as Walmart, Blue Shield of California, Ancestry.com and LinkedIn to effectively develop inclusive culture and leadership at scale. At ion, we pioneered a scalable social learning method (research study) using small, diverse cohorts and saw some powerful results:

• 98% of learners experienced respect from their diverse peers.
• 96% of learners experienced empathy from their diverse peers.
• 85% took new actions, and 76% formed new daily habits.
• Participants learned on average 63% more from discussions with their diverse peers than they would have from the content alone.

Along with other critical reforms, this method can be deployed in our education system and public and private sectors to help us learn, empathize, trust and find common cause with our fellow diverse Americans.

Below are some near-term, mid-term and long-term initiatives I believe this Special Culture Advisor should consider developing: 

• TENDING THE FLOCK (near-term): Pardon the Christian metaphor, but we are a flock that has longed for not just a steady hand on the wheel in matters of governance, but leaders who remind us who we are, who evoke our better angels and summon the wisdom and heart of our origin story. As Jonathan Haidt illuminated in “The Righteous Mind”, “The process of converting pluribus (diverse people) into unum (a nation) is a miracle that occurs in every successful nation on Earth. Nations decline or divide when they stop performing this miracle… The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the ‘American civil religion.’ The president must invoke the name of God… glorify America’s heroes and history, quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus into unum.” As such, I invite you to hold bi-weekly fireside chats / town halls for at least the first 6 months of 2021, where all of our diverse voices can be heard, acknowledged and transformed into national pride, unity and purpose. When people do not feel heard, seen and validated, they spin off into silos of grievance, and in our case disinformation, e.g., QAnon, Newsmax, Parler. As such, I believe that these townhalls will have a calming, healing and unifying effect on our nation.
• MEDIA (near-term): A renewed and expanded FCC Fairness Doctrine that treats internet platforms / social media publishers in the same way we once treated our news networks. We would legally require and enforce that all platforms ensure that no fake news proliferates, while still protecting our first amendment right of free speech. We would still be able to render our opinions as citizens and commentators, but would require that the commentary shared on these networks and platforms is balanced, and cannot assert falsity as fact, e.g., the numerous unfounded conspiracy theories shared by QAnon, Plandemic, OAN, and other extremists/talking heads. With these measures in place, over time, Americans will again be able to trust their leaders, institutions and news organizations.
• SPORTS (medium-term): It may seem odd to include sports as an arena to impact national culture, however, our sports teams are existing diverse “tribes” that can be leveraged to instill a sense of unity at the local level. The now famous Heineken video, “World’s Apart” features people with different beliefs, genders and sexuality engaging in a guided discussion and a shared task to create deeper empathy and trust. By partnering with a sports league such as the NFL or MLB, each local team can empower a similar sense of local/team unity, e.g., “#JerseyStrong”, wherein diverse fans of each team come together to communicate and work together on a shared task. The videos from these efforts would be shared at games and on television, and a broader invitation would then be made for local fans to connect, learn and unite around local activities and community projects.
• CITIZENSHIP (long-term): Let’s expand and upgrade the AmeriCorps program to be an attractive civil service option available to any American over the age of 18, to spend two years in public service during which they earn an Associates Degree in Civic Leadership. This program would be equal parts academic, developing our citizens in the principles and practices of empathetic communication, critical thinking, media analysis and servant leadership, AND applied, wherein students would complete internships with local public agencies, nonprofits and social enterprises to improve the economic, social and ecological condition of the United States. The academic portion of this program would also leverage small, diverse learning cohorts to develop empathy, trust and solidarity among our diverse citizens. The program would be federally funded, including a modest living stipend of $2k a month and delivered by our nation’s community colleges. The effect would be that legions of people who otherwise could not afford an associate’s degree, can further their career pursuits, develop empathy and trust with their fellow Americans and find their own unique expression of citizenship. Graduates of this program would then receive free tuition to any approved trade school or four-year state university to continue their education and career pursuits.
• EDUCATION (long-term): We must leverage natural social dynamics, such as the “contact hypothesis” and “jigsaw method”, to cultivate an ethos of diverse learning in our schools, federal agencies, military forces, non-profits, and private companies. When diverse people learn together in small groups, empathy and trust develop. Diverse perspectives expand our understanding of the subject matter and what it means to live in a country of such remarkable diversity. The more time we spend with people who have different beliefs and backgrounds the more we see their humanity and stand for their dignity and prosperity. The Department of Education, The Institute of Education Sciences, The Federal Interagency Committee on Education, The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education and The Office of Postsecondary Education would play a central role ensuring small class sizes in K-12 education and at the college level, and that small diverse group learning is central to every education experience. The Department of Commerce, General Services Administration, the Chief Human Capital Officers Council and the Small Business Administration would play a similar role in ensuring the private sector adopts this method in their organizational training and development efforts.

I would be honored to discuss these initiatives further and see if there is a way to leverage the latest developments in scalable culture change to fulfill our purpose as a nation and ensure that there is widespread and long-lasting bi-partisan support for your platform. If we are successful in activating empathy and trust at scale, we can finally embrace these immortal words “E Pluribus Unum” as true and sacred.

I look forward to discussing these ideas with you.

In solidarity,

Brandon Peele

Founder, Unity Lab (https://unitylab.co)