The Hedgehog and the Fox

If you haven’t noticed it yet as an “embed” in the “coverage” of communication that my blog is so obsessed with, I’ll hit you over the head with it now: word choice.

In order to talk about word choice, I need to start off with something else.

One of the foremost political thinkers of the 20th century, Sir Isaiah Berlin, went back to ancient times to talk about his symbols for totalitarian and non-totalitarian political systems, the hedgehog and the fox.

The hedgehog knows one big thing.

The fox knows many smaller things.

While I won’t attempt to “unpack” these symbols in terms of Berlin’s larger political points, I will talk about them in terms of word choice.

But first, a relevant anecdote.

In my ill-fated initial attempt to get my master’s degree, in Medieval Studies, I entered the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

Let’s just say that things didn’t work out, and I left after one semester.

But I did learn something quite important intellectually.

I wasn’t a hedgehog. I was a fox.

Graduate school is a hedgehog experience, and I was lucky enough to realize quite early that temperamentally, at least at that time, I was NOT happy learning more and more about ONE BIG THING (or as some people term graduate school, "learning more about less and less").

How does that relate to word choice, and how does that relate to you and speeches?

Here’s how:

When you make speeches to people, in your preparation, your organization, and most important, your word choice, you need both some hedgehog and some fox.

You need a kind of intellectual center about you that the hedgehog represents, a kind of compass that lends continuity, credibility, and authenticity to every speech you do.

However, you also need the flexibility, variety, and varied excitement and inspiration that only a fox can have to “mix it up” and speak appropriately and uniquely to each and every audience.

Still not getting it?

Here’s another way of thinking about the difference I’m trying to get across.
The sharp-edged political conflicts between and among notions of what characterizes a president certainly has killed many a forest and is likely to kill more.

However, people do agree that Ronald Reagan and George Bush the younger have similar characteristics.

Presidents Carter, Clinton, and I suspect Obama are in a different category.
I am not making a value judgment, talking about effectiveness, intelligence or any other preference.

Instead, I will characterize Reagan and Bush 2 as hedgehogs.

Reagan talked about Communism for decades. Finally, sufficient people agreed with his ideas that they elected him President.

Bush 2 talked about terrorism relentlessly. At first, after 9/11, he apparent steadfastness and singularity of speech and ideas seemed exactly the sort of leadership needed. When the language persisted despite the difference in contexts that marked the later part of his administrations, doubts increased.

Carter, Bush I, Clinton, and Obama are foxes…they can work on many things and re-invent themselves in the midst of a presidency. This sort of flexibility can be just as valuable as leadership, and it can also appear to be “flip flopping”.

The hedgehog’s obsessive urge is to continually grapple with a single set of terms of reference in the world; in terms of leadership, a kind of intellectual fundamentalist can make a difference in the right context. A leader who appears to only care about one thing and expresses that one thing over and over again in a crisis, IF he reaches a point of “congruence” with his constituents, can point the way forward even in the darkest time.

However, when contexts change, the variety of tools that the fox employs can be more useful.

After almost three decades in my intellectual “Long War”, I was sufficiently established as a fox that the idea of pursuing an advanced degree not only didn’t turn me off, I enjoyed the process, and I was ready for it.

Never forget who you are or what’s important to you when you talk to people.

In between those times, never stop learning, never stop creating new terms of reference, new ways of considering context and terms, never stop trying something new, because communication means getting something across to people…always try to outfox yourself.

Stay tuned.