At age 28, she took a big step when she helped architect a suffrage parade the day before Woodrow Wilson’s first presidential inauguration, a seminal moment that revealed her encodings for quiet, fearless leadership and a penchant for crafting spectacles of protest. She also began to show what would be one of her most distinctive leadership encodings: strategic insight. Paul had an impressive ability to see with piercing clarity the grand strategies that would lead to victory. In particular, she saw that the best strategy lay in pursuit of a constitutional amendment, rather than seeking suffrage state by state, and she co-founded with Lucy Burns the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage dedicated to that strategy.

Sherman influenced events with a rare instinct to wait until precisely the right moment to speak. Historian George Bancroft wrote of Sherman, “In the convention he never made long speeches, but would intuitively seize on the turning point of a question, and present it in terse language, which showed his own opinion and the strength on which it rested.” This ability to sense “the turning point of a question” proved to be one of Sherman’s most effective leadership encodings.

In the source notes for chapter 12, I’ve included some of the most useful materials we found on Sherman, if you’re interested in learning more about this unsung hero of the Constitution.

In the end, Franklin drew upon his earned respect and facility with language to formally move for adoption of the Constitution in a final speech (read aloud for him by the Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson) to secure enough support of the delegates to send it to the states for ratification. Franklin had come to see the wisdom in human affairs of embracing the best imperfect result.

SUB-CAPABILITY NO.3: CREDIBILITY EQUITY

Sherman and Franklin made a huge impact late in life partly by drawing upon storehouses of credibility they’d built over decades. It wasn’t just Franklin’s words at the end of the Constitutional Convention that held sway, but also that these words came from Franklin. It wasn’t just that Sherman articulated a strong argument to preserve the actual text of the Constitution and use the amendment mechanism to include the Bill of Rights, but also that the argument came from Sherman.