Left Out - Saskatchewan's NDP & the Relentless Pursuit of Mediocrity

Chapter2

ATTITUDE: THE OLD SASKATCHEWAN COLLIDES WITH THE NEW

Paging Mr. Lombardi

The greatest football coach who ever lived was Vince Lombardi, coach of the Green Bay Packers from 1959–1967. Although I was a kid when he died in 1970, I read some of Lombardi’s inspirational speeches. They changed my life.

Lombardi’s philosophy was clear: “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job…and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand. The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence—regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.”

In life, attitude is everything. What you believe, what you tell yourself and how you plan, prepare and persevere during your day will usually determine the kind of day you’ll have. At least that’s how I’ve lived my life.

But coming home to host the radio show, I was struck time and time again by one inescapable fact: the Saskatchewan attitude really sucked. Everywhere I turned it was there—an intricately woven web of inferiority, self-loathing, negativism and pessimism, like a movie zombie, shuffling along sucking out the life and hope of everyone in its way.

Beyond being terribly depressing, the bad Saskatchewan attitude had become a big impediment to our collective psyche and even to our economic climate. Who’d want to live in a place where people were just so down all the time?

Managing Expectations Downward

It is puzzling how Canada’s hardest working, most generous and adaptive people came to be such merchants of gloom. But it’s understandable. The earliest roots of our bad attitude grew from the Great Depression of the 1930s which stole hope, wiped out peoples’ futures and saw Saskatchewan topple from our perch as Canada’s third largest province.

From this was spawned an understandable reserve and caution that soon became pessimistic: Why get too excited when everything from this year’s crop to your life savings can evaporate in a drought and the world’s worst economic crash, both unexpected and beyond your control?

Pessimism also led some people to aim low and hope for luck to pull them through. Even the innocent and hopeful “next year country” optimism of Saskatchewan was little more than an excuse to repeat last year’s failings by not learning from the experience of making the same mistake over and over.

This was most apparent, and troublesome, in the Saskatchewan obsession for football where we eventually slipped into accepting mediocrity for the beloved Saskatchewan Roughriders (as long as they didn’t lose money and finished 9-9 “it could always be worse”). This set us up to keep the bar low and fall back on “there’s always next year.” On the football field this began to change when people committed to excellence took over.

Every small town had (and still has) the “King of the Coffee Shop,” the guy on Coffee Row who can be counted on to complain about pretty much everything. “It’ll never work” is his opening line; if something actually does work “it won’t last long”; and, if by chance it succeeds, it’s only because someone is stealing everyone’s money.

Another feature of small town life that made its way into the psyche of Saskatchewan was the belief that it was wrong to “show that you’re doing well”—it would only make your neighbours envious and people might treat you differently. As a result, for years, even in Saskatoon and Regina, people with millions of dollars in the bank preferred the nondescript house in a quiet neighbourhood and the comfort and safety of a Chevy Impala or Ford Taurus.

Having spoken dozens of times at conferences and events on the “Saskatchewan Attitude Adjustment,” I tell the story of a businessman in a small Saskatchewan city who, after years of hard work and success, finally bought the car of his dreams (a fancy M-series BMW) but kept it parked in his son’ s garage in Saskatoon. He’d drive to his son’s, take the car for a spin, even the occasional road trip to Alberta or BC, and then return, switch back to his Taurus and drive home. He told me “if any of my customers knew I had a $90,000 car they’d stop coming to my business—they’d think I was charging them too much money.” Only in Saskatchewan could this kind of silliness make sense. Ironically, as I tell this story to laughing audiences, at the end of many speeches usually someone will approach me, look carefully both ways and then tell me their story—whether buying identical cars to fool prying neighbours or going to lengths to conceal the existence of vacation homes, “you can’t show off your wealth,” they’d say.

When low expectations are allowed to prevail, their effects go deeper, like not striving for excellence, not challenging ourselves or enforcing accountability. And, as alcoholics know from their inspiring Big Book, “we do as we think,” which might explain something about Saskatchewan’s historic failure to perform.

Another pattern of post-Depression Saskatchewan rural life was for some people to compare themselves to their neighbours—after all, it was easy, and why work so hard when all you needed was to be no worse than your neighbour? An unintended and bad consequence of this is schadenfreude, or delight in the misfortune of others. Schadenfreude’s big problem is that you don’t actually have to do anything to improve your life—just wait for others to screw up. And all that hoping for misfortune doesn’t make you the most positive person around.

There’s also a problem when your neighbour does better than you; your smugness soon turns to envy. And when the measuring stick for success isn’t personal bests or excellence but instead keeping an eye on your neighbour, how can anyone feel really good about this? So, it isn’t long before a collective poor self-esteem takes over. As a result, even when good things do deservedly happen, we believe that we’re somehow unworthy. One of my first observations on coming home to Saskatchewan was a reverse sense of entitlement—we were only deserving of the not-so-good things.

Combine this with the self-perpetuated myth that somehow Saskatchewan is “unique” when in fact our people and lives are really little different than anywhere else, and soon uniqueness becomes an excuse for ignoring best practices elsewhere. With all of this, it isn’t long before a negative attitude takes root, as it did in Saskatchewan.

At a political level, as NDP governments from the time of Douglas did, there was an advantage to politically keeping expectations low, or at least doing nothing to raise them. Raising expectations might encourage voters to expect more. And this could lead to expecting better performance from governments.

Like comparing ourselves to neighbours, it doesn’t take much to achieve expectations when they are kept low. And, conversely, when setbacks, mistakes or policy mishaps happen, the fall isn’t as far when the bar is set low. As a result, perennially low expectations also don’t do much for accountability and holding ourselves to higher standards.

Sometimes in life I stumble on little discoveries. If they were bigger and more significant they’d be full blown epiphanies. But they’re not, so I call the small revelations “epiphinettes.” I know that’s not a word but it should be.

One day, waiting for some friends, I overheard two young guys in their twenties, fresh-faced, baby broker types, expounding on “under promising and over delivering.” This is the practice (I did it for years as a lawyer) where you avoid bold and flashy promises, keep expectations manageable and then over-serve clients by delivering more than they expected and, hopefully, outcomes and results which also exceed their expectations.

Eavesdropping on the young business guys, I had the epiphinette: this is what the NDP had messed up. Lacking, for the most part in NDP governments, people with actual experience in business or any credible advisors who knew this, the NDP had tried the “under promise/over deliver” approach but had missed a critical part. Under promising does not mean driving down expectations and actually lowering them; it means managing expectations so they don’t grow beyond the capacity to deliver on, in other words, they don’t get higher than you can control. This also allows you to actually deliver beyond those expectations to create what Keinginham and Vavra called not customer satisfaction, but “customer delight.” There is a big difference. The former ensures ongoing mediocrity; the latter strives to be better than average.

The Lorne Calvert government had so diminished public expectations (as had Roy Romanow’s earlier) that a type of collective negativism and depression had taken hold in Saskatchewan. Once this happened, even when the economy began to turn around as it did at the end of Calvert’s political career, the voters were left with several emotions, all negative. There was an unbelieving incredulity: “It can’t really be good here, they said it never would be.” There was open skepticism: “If good times really have finally arrived, which I doubt, they’ll never last.” And even churlishness: “Nothing good ever happens here and I think the government is lying.”

The NDP’s own bad attitude and mismanagement of expectations had come back to bite the party at the very time it most needed positive expectations and hope. I almost felt sorry for them.

Nothing is as contagious as attitude. From the positive, upbeat and confident “can do” approach of...