Barack Obama was my boss during his 2008 campaign and first term as president. So with my wife and children, I attended the opening of the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.
It’s a monument to “Yes, We Can” and “Got Hope?” optimism, and it’s prompting reflections on how America got from there to here and whether we can still embrace “hope and change” at a time when some say the values he represented are being shredded.
The center evokes the sense that yes, we can.
After the hope of Obama’s election and the Affordable Care Act came the 2010 midterms and change in congressional leadership. Cynics argue “hope and change” ran into legislative gridlock.
But this misses the key point, which Obama articulated in his 2017 farewell speech, now inscribed on the center’s wall: “I’m asking you to believe. Not in my ability to bring about change — but in yours.”
“Hope and change” was never about giving our proxies to leaders; it was about a deep societal shift toward personal agency emerging in 2008 and the years following. Self-organized citizens’ movements spawned the Tea Party, #MeToo and youth-led campaigns to stop gun violence. People increasingly tackled complex social problems from their kitchen tables instead of waiting for Washington.
Technology was part of it. Social change tools once reserved for elites — academics, think tanks, publishers, media moguls — were now on everyone’s phones.
But it was more than that. An ascending spiral of social change was rendering structures inherited from the industrial revolution obsolete. The old paradigm of assembly-line repetition and siloed specialization and compartmentalization under the top-down authority of a single leader using a fixed set of rules was on its way out. A flexible new operating system was on its way up.
Obama recognized this, and our campaign organization internalized it. Contrary to what pundits say, it wasn’t early adoption of social media that propelled our success so much as a “social technology” that broke silos and called everyone in the organization to collaborate and co-lead. All of us owned our agency, tore down hierarchical barriers and brought nonusual collaborators together in fluid teams to tackle tough problems. The locus of leadership and impact shifted from the top to the entire organization.
This was born of necessity. We were drinking from a firehose, and it was the only way to keep up as the campaign caught on. But it’s also a microcosm of what’s happening in our society as waves of change ripple across it.
When everyone has the ability to co-lead change and as we start using it, it generates more innovation and redoubles the pace. Change becomes explosive and omnidirectional. Legislatures and other institutions built for the old, rules-based game can’t keep up, and new rules become obsolete as soon as they’re written, so responsibility for leading change in a positive direction increasingly rests with us all.
This was emerging in 2008; it’s evident today and vital going forward. As change grows exponentially, old-school rulemaking won’t keep up — ask any executive of an artificial intelligence company. Prior fixed norms and institutions won’t contain it — ask any fired federal agency worker.
We must rely on ourselves, our collective agency and civic virtues — entrepreneurial spirit, service heart, the empathy collaboration requires — to solve America’s problems, fulfill its ideals and lean into change for the good of all. Hence the Obama center’s ambition to “bring change home,” to affirm the idea that the power to lead change resides not in leaders, but citizens; not in capitals, but communities.
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It’s a vision of an empowered society where everyone leads and contributes. But for it to work, “everyone” has to mean everyone, no matter which side they’re on. It requires building trust that your idea of change is no threat to me, mine is no threat to you, and when everyone leads, the whole society thrives. That’s the only way to navigate explosive change without tearing ourselves apart.
This is not so different from the Founders’ vision of democracy, in which a federal system with independent, coequal branches of government forces collisions of competing interests that can get contentious, even chaotic, before compromises are forged. And it’s consistent with Obama’s view of politics as a full-contact sport. “Our democracy is not self-executing,” he said. “It depends on us all as citizens, regardless of our political affiliations.”
This comes with risk. Citizens might redistrict and silo themselves into factions, until we succumb to fear that one side’s idea of change threatens the other. AI might lead to massive job disruption and filter truth, moral conscience and empathy out of our decision-making, until one day we find “truth has stumbled in the public square, and honesty cannot enter,” according to Isaiah 59:14.
But how that goes is up to us. Somehow, walking through the center with my family, I don’t think it will go south. At this inflection point in our democracy, we have the power to choose to reinvigorate it. We can all pick up the mantle of leadership and make a way forward in shared struggle to be better together.
The Hon. Henry De Sio was the 2008 chief operating officer of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and former White House deputy assistant to the president for management and administration. He is the author of “Changemaker Playbook: The New Physics of Leadership in a World of Explosive Change.”
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