Illustration by Gisela Goppel

Illustration by Gisela Goppel

By Diane Hessan (MBA 1977)

My entire career has been a series of pivots: a friend who convinced me to join his firm, a conversation on an airplane that turned into a new job, a middle-of-the-night idea that inspired me to start a company, and so on.

My pivot from the business world to journalism happened in 2016, when a friend who was working for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign called. At the time, I was CEO of an education startup, but I’d spent 14 years building C Space, a next-generation market research firm that helps major brands get insight and advice from consumers via the Internet. (Think: focus groups on steroids.) My friend asked whether I missed the market research field (I did), and after a long conversation, asked if I would be willing to help the campaign understand undecided voters in swing states.

I jumped in. One day I was running a company, with an office and employees and a grand strategy, and shortly thereafter, I was sitting alone in my home office, interviewing Americans about how they were voting and why, digging into everything from how they grew up to how their values had changed over the years. It was a fascinating deep dive into the psyche of voters, just as my former company had done to help brands understand their target customers. Via the online panel, I reported to the Clinton campaign with weekly insights. It was fascinating work, and it became clear that my assumptions about voters were inaccurate in so many areas.

After the election, I wrote an opinion piece for the Boston Globe about what I had learned and what I thought it meant. The column focused on the moment when large numbers of my undecided voters made the decision to support Donald Trump: when Hillary Clinton commented that half of Trump supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables.” The op-ed went viral. After several appearances on CNN and interviews with a range of newspapers, I set up my professional life so I could continue the voter research. Instead of taking another job as a CEO, I added a few boards, formalized my angel investing, and was off and running.

In 2017, I launched a new online panel of 500 voters from all points along the political spectrum, of every age and ethnicity, and from every state in the union. For the next four years I engaged in weekly conversation with them. We talked about their views on everything from immigration to gun control to health care to climate change. Whenever I learned something new, I wrote about it for the Boston Globe. Over the years, two things became clear to me: We have much more common ground in our country than we realize—but we are, sadly, failing to understand each other.

I pulled all my insights together into a book, which I hope will enlighten readers and also inspire people to commit to listening to each other. It’s clear to me that convincing “the other side” is less about talking and throwing data at people, and more about listening and using just three words: tell me more.

Listen, ask questions, and you might learn how a regular person could come to feel the way they do. Listen to a person who has a large gun collection and learn that it’s the same to them as someone else’s precious baseball card collection. Listen to the people who came to the United States illegally and learn how they escaped unimaginable conditions and couldn’t wait to enter the country legally.

To do this, we don’t need to be professional psychologists. We can try it with our friends, our children, and our partners. The more we listen, the more we learn, and the better both sides feel, because almost everyone is dismayed by our state of disunity. We have seen it before: Groups of Republican and Democratic voters sitting in a room, talking for a day, and leaving with more understanding of each other. When people are treated with dignity, when they feel that their perspective matters, they are eventually much better at listening to your facts.

None of this is easy. People aren’t always in the mood for it. We don’t have to put our arms around each other and sing “Kumbaya,” but there is an enormous opportunity to turn down the heat in our country. Walking in another person’s shoes is a critical first step that can change the trajectory of our country in the twenty-first century.

Diane Hessan is the author of Our Common Ground: Insights from Four Years of Listening to American Voters. An award-winning entrepreneur and innovator, she is a nationally recognized expert on the electorate and is the founder, chairman, and former CEO of C Space. She serves on four corporate and four nonprofit boards and is CEO of Salient Ventures, an angel investment company focused on technology.

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