STRATEGIC DESIGN AND THE 2016 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

One of the most important ideas in Dan Hill's Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary is that of a MacGuffin. It's a Hitchcockian appropriation, a critical plot trigger with little to no value in and of itself. Hill explains, first quoting Hitchcock:

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"'A MacGuffin you see in most films about spies. It’s the thing that the spies are after. In the days of Rudyard Kipling, it would be the plans of the fort on the Khyber Pass. It would be the plans of an airplane engine, and the plans of an atom bomb, anything you like. It’s always called the thing that the characters on the screen worry about but the audience don’t care… It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story.' 

According to the British Film Institute’s Mark Duguid, the MacGuffin, is 'the engine that sets the story in motion.' In Notorious, it’s uranium ore hidden in wine bottles. In North by Northwest, it’s the entirely vague 'government secrets.' There is a long history to the idea of the plot element that kick-starts and drives the narrative but is somewhat inconsequential in the end. More obviously, the golden fleece is what drove Jason and his Argonauts through multiple narrative scenarios in Greek mythology. More recently, the briefcase in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is a good example."

Hill then goes on to provide an extended example of how this works in strategic design, recounting a building development project that acts as a MacGuffin for larger, systemic changes, for example, to the Finnish fire codes. 

I thought a lot about Dark Matter and Trojan Horses, strategic design, and MacGuffins specifically reading this Vox article on the deceptively ambitious scope of Hillary Clinton's platform--almost too perfectly summed up in the rhetoric of innovation as "a plan for a minimal viable product of social democracy."

The image of Hillary Clinton as strategic designer, using a collection of incremental fine-print policy changes as MacGuffins that together create a colossal societal paradigm shift, fascinates me for several reasons:

1. MacGuffins tend to be bottom-up strategies, often specifically designed to trigger the powerful into enacting systemic change by those who lack the power and political clout to do so themselves. 
2. It goes against the candidate mythology that's been built up in this election, pitting Clinton as an entrenched "Washington elite" contra Donald Trump as the "outsider who would stir things up." 
3. Dark Matter and Trojan Horses is written from a Nordic perspective; Hill is specifically interested in how to allow for the extreme positive outliers you find in US-style capitalist societies while maintaining the Nordic floor. Clinton faces precisely the opposite challenge. (In the Vox article, Lane Kenworthy posits: “I think a lot of Clinton’s proposals are very much a step in the direction of a Nordic-style or social democratic welfare state.")

Peter Thiel notwithstanding, Clinton is the innovator's candidate. And not just because she's Silicon Valley's choice. She may not be very likable, but she seems like a shrewd strategic designer aimed at the same no-ceiling-high-floor spot Dan Hill describes. As the most powerful person in the world, she might just be able to prototype and pilot it. Given the alternative ("Make America Great Again" is, incidentally, the ugly flip side of futuristic nostalgia), I sure hope she gets the chance to try.