The Cookbook: Persuasion
/
If there is one thing I wish I knew before I started creating my company, it would be the fact that persuasion skills are acquired skills. As a leader almost everything you do will require you to persuade and influence someone. Some people are good at this and some people are not. But the amazing fact is that it’s easy to be good at this. That’s because persuading people is a science.
I remember clearly the day I learnt that persuasion is a science.
I was going through a very difficult time at the company. We were just a one pony show then, with our lone customer insisting for the big product release done in days. And my team was asking for weeks to just test it. This was the big launch we have been working for, and if we didn’t get it done on time I knew we’ll lose this customer, and along with them possibly the company. I had spent a horrible day arguing with the lead about how and why I need the testing done fast. It was one of those conversations which ends with both sides feeling they’ve lost the trust they’ve built up over time. I remember the last thing that the lead said, and in front of the rest of the team: “if you release this, this will be your thing only, we will never put our name on a product like this”. The use of the “we” was brutal, but I knew it was felt by everyone. This was the farthest you can go from the concept of a hearty company.
I went back home that day feeling totally lost. This was a time when I haven’t proven that hearty company was even possible. So the feeling of loss was far beyond just the worry that I’ll lose this one customer. It was a feeling that what I had imagined to build as a company wasn’t something that’s possible in the “real” world of business. That little voice in my head kept telling me that companies are the heartless dehumanized beasts they are because that’s what businesses require them to be, to survive.
I remember reading the chapter “Give a dog a good name” in Dale Carnegie’s how to win book that evening. And deciding almost as a last resort that I’ll just blindly try his suggestion of alter casting – “giving a fine reputation to live up to” to persuade people to excel. I went back the next morning straight to the team’s room, and instead of saying “You need to finish testing and ship this by next week” I said “I know it’s hard, but I know you can finish testing and ship this by next week”. Just a play on the words, a substitution really, no change in substance. I was expecting to be shot down right away, I felt really fake saying it. But to my amazement I saw a slightly different reaction to my words than the day before. This gave me the encouragement to continue, I kept to the script of alter casting, making it sound like I knew they would do it, I had the confidence they could. And I couldn’t believe the effect my words had. The same team, the same people, people who are smart and can easily see through my word play and the fact that I was in essence just repeating my words of yesterday, yet the results and the attitude was completely different. Almost immediately I felt that everyone was positive and was willing to at least try. The defensiveness of yesterday was gone. It was all about “let’s try” and “let’s do” as opposed to words like “we can’t”, “it’s impossible” or “never”. To this day I feel angry when I remember this. Why didn’t they teach this absolutely essential life skill? This should be taught in our schools along with our alphabets. This is a power that makes everything possible. A super hero skill that you can pick up in a minute. I felt like screaming.
At the end alter casting wasn’t enough to get us to ship by time, but we did manage to launch with a week’s delay. I am sure that we couldn’t have done that without the help of alter casting. And much more importantly we couldn’t have done it in a way that made everyone energized and happy.
Over the years I’ve invested on learning more of these social psychology science, I guess persuasion strategies is a better but less sexy description. Some of the skills can even be put into a set of simple steps that you have to follow to get the desired results. There is a substantial body of research work in this space done over the past 100 years, so this is very much body of knowledge rather than some pseudo-science or iffy motivation course.
There are many great laymen’s books that you can read to widen your view (starting with Dale Carnegie’s classic). As you learn these new ideas, you’ll find that you are practicing them and enriching your toolbox of persuasion skills with the ideas that work for you. Some of the ideas may rarely work in your context, in your culture or industry. Some are plain wrong, too weird, too sleazy to try. But some are just basic skills that you absolutely must know. The sooner you learn them, the better. You’ll be using them daily. I promise. Here’s my essentials list.
Alter casting
“Give them a fine reputation to live up to, and they will make prodigious efforts rather than see you disillusioned.”
Alter casting, as with my example, is simply stating that someone already possesses a skill or ability that you want that person to possess. You’ve probably used this on your kids many times with lines like “I know you are good in maths and you’ll ace this exam”. Alter casting works just as well on adults. You may have to tone done the words a bit and make sure that it does’t sound patronizing. It creates not just a positive effect on the person or the group you are targeting but it creates a real positive energy in anyone who hears it. As a leader you start giving an impression of being supportive and full of good vibes. So it’s really a no brainer to use at any chance you get. There are just three things you need to be careful about when you are using it:
a) Make sure you are not sounding patronizing. For obvious reasons, you’ll sound fake and it will also start having a negative effect in that it will feel like the person you are using it on is not capable and needs your encouragement to move forward.
b) Don’t use it over and over on the same issue when there’s been failure in the past. Over using it will just make it useless. When it works it works the first time, when it doesn’t you just need to do something else.
c) For some people it never works at all. So identify that group and never use it on them.
As “science” it came into social psychology 1963 from research work done by sociologists Eugene Weinstein and Paul Deutschberger. But in the everyday use of this technique definitely came from Dale Carnegie’s book.
Yes ladder
The yes ladder is a technique of asking for small commitments and eventually asking for the big one. It works on the simple human behaviour of wanting to stay consistent. It’s known more commonly as the “the foot in the door” principle, since it’s a common sales technique of selling a lower priced product – thus gain a foothold with a customer and then up-selling a bigger priced product. It’s a yes ladder because the act of saying yes to someone leads to saying yes later on in the conversation.
As an idea it must’ve been known through generations of sales people, but as a science it came out during a series of studies in the 1960s done by Stanford scientists Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser (published first in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in 1966). In one such study, people in a California neighborhood was asked to install a big, unsightly billboard on their front yard with a public service message of driving safety. For obvious reasons less than 17% agreed. But within the same neighborhood another group of people were first requested to put a very small poster for driver safety on their windows and then two weeks later they were requested to put up that large billboard. In this group the people agreeing shot up to 76%. A clear indication that a small yes leads to bigger a yes down the line.
The most common use of the yes ladder in our context is when you are trying to reach consensus in a group. I usually start by asking the group if they agree on something that I know they will agree on, and then over the course of the conversation ask progressively difficult things to agree on to lead the group up the yes ladder of agreement. Let me give an example of how I might use this. A very difficult decision for a software group is to agree if they want to introduce a strict rule of estimating individual tasks in a project. I could try my yes ladder here with a first question of “Do we all hate waterfall?”. No software developer in their right mind would say they like waterfall (the antiquated software development process), so I would get my first yes. I could then discuss a bit about what’s not waterfall and then ask the slightly more difficult question of “Do we want to measure our work output?”. You can only say yes to that, because saying no makes it sound like you don’t care about your efficiency. You can see where this is going, right? I’m getting the group to agree on the obvious, setting their mindsets to say yes on topics that lead to my ultimate ask of “Do we want to put hour estimates on individual task tickets?”. The yes ladder conditions the team to say yes and the little commitments they have made leading to the big ask convinces them to say yes there too.
I have to cover the big question that must be coming up in your mind by now: “Isn’t this plain and simple manipulation?”. The answer is yes. Because you are using techniques, let’s call them what they are: tricks, to reach consensus. This is true for all the persuasion skills I mention here. If you don’t use these without proper judgment you’ll be causing harm – to individuals and to the company. You’ll be pushing your ideas forward at the cost of other possibly better ideas. So just as with any other great power, you need to be careful. Use it when you know persuasion is helpful in making a decision. Use it when your team goes into that hated analysis paralysis mode, or when there are endless meetings without any decisions being reached etc. Use with care.
Use because
The use because principle says that every request you make should include a reason to believe to make it effective. As a leader you might think “do this” is what you have to say to move the group. That is the command and control like leadership an army requires. But in a hearty company you need a consultative leadership – where the leader creates consensus in the decision she takes. And for this situation you need to add a “because” to your line and say: “do this, because”. Now the funny thing is that the part after the because, the actual reason to believe, just doesn’t matter a lot! The fact that you structured you sentence with a reason to believe, that you added a “because” to it, makes it do its magic. Weird, but it is science!
It all started when Harvard scientist Ellen Langer published the results of a study in 1978. Langer experimented with subjects requesting to break in on a line of people waiting to use a Xerox machine at Harvard. Xerox machines made copies of your documents, the hi-tech of those days, and student would line up for a long time to do something which we do instantly with our printers now. The table below shows the lines the subjects used the following requests to go to the front of the line and their success:
Notice the amazing power of the “because”? The last line’s because was not giving any reason at all! But by merely adding the word because the success rate shot up to almost the same level as a case with a real sounding reason.
““These studies taken together support the contention that when the structure of a communication, be it oral or written, semantically sound or senseless, is congruent with one’s past experience, it may occasion behavior mindless of relevant details.””
I know this from my everyday interactions with my teams. The mere addition of a reason to believe changes the team’s motivations. It’s a simple yet powerful technique that is creates inclusive decision making and compliance without pressure. I love the title of Langer 1978 paper that published the result:
“The Mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action: The Role of "Placebic" Information in Interpersonal Interaction”
Don’t you just love science? :)
You Frame
Dale Carnegie’s sums it up succinctly when he says: “…the only way on earth to influence people is to talk about what they want”. You frame is framing your requests and instructions in a way that it aligns with what people want. So, for an example, instead of saying the “I frame” of “I need to ship this product” move to the you frame of “We need a break (so we want to ship this product and be done)”.
Dale Carnegie starts his chapter on this idea with story about how he loves strawberries yet when he goes fishing he would never imagine using strawberries as baits. He uses worms because fish loves worms. Obvious isn’t it? We can only convince people if we present the arguments to them with what they want. There is no point of saying what I want, since no one is interested in what I want. I need to find out what the person I’m trying to persuade wants and then try to frame my arguments that fits with his want so that he gets interested and agrees. Carnegie puts this principle as – “arouse in the other person an eager want”.
Of all the persuasion techniques I know, this is the one that I get to use the most. This has never failed for me, mainly because it’s so obvious. And the best thing about this strategy is that it forces you, the leader, to think from the perspective of your team. Sometimes this thinking alone opens up new ideas about how something can be done. However, finding the you frame in typical business wants can be difficult. Let’s face it, most business’ immediate request involves you to work a bit harder so that the business can make some money.
How do you find the you angle in such a situation? I re-purpose an approach taken from Stephen Covey’s famous 7 habits book: begin with the end in mind. I figure out what the win would be like at the end and then work backwards to find the wording that would work to frame the request. I’ll give you an example from a situation that’s very common in my space. As a software team we have to pick up work on new technologies all the time. There’s always some concerns about taking up a completely new technology in the team, people worry about their performance or their ability to meet deadlines. But one of the wins of taking up a new technology is the skill you learn that bumps up career potentials. I’ve always found that the best approach to take here is to make my team visualize what they will gain in their career from a project like this. A new technology is likely to become a high demand skills in a year’s time. So highlighting the fact that individuals will gain a great skill to mention in their CV creates an immediate “eager want”. Much better than saying “We need to use this technology to make our clients happy”!
Social Proof
We like things that other people like. That is the gist of the idea of social proof. If others like it then it must be good, it must be supportable – this is something that’s innately built into us. This is probably another evolutionary hand me downs – we survived more when we followed others. Social proof is the reason why we stay at hotels with more star in their reviews, we buy books that have more recommendations or we wear colors that others say suits us better. Sometimes we know that the social proof is fake, intentionally made up to make us consume or like. The classic one is the “canned laughter” in sitcoms. We know they are pre-recorded laughter, put in the end of jokes to make laugh too. But it works. And there’s enough studies to prove that it works, starting with a Smyth and Fuller (1972) who found consistently that you can make a group laugh at not so funny materials if you just add canned laughter in the mix.
To use this principle in your everyday work of making a team come to an agreement you’ll need to recruit someone as your sidekick. Ask the sidekick to support you at the right time during the conversation. The fact that someone else is approving your idea has an instantaneous effect on the approval of the group.
Another way I use social proof is to think up of examples from the past where my idea has worked and bring that up and point to someone I know who would agree with me. In this strategy you don’t need to have the sidekick setup at all. If you choose the correct story, it should resonate with someone in your team to support you. And you are on your path to social proof.
There is another issue in our everyday work life where this principle is very relevant, but in a very different way. Whenever you have group of people and a risky decision needs to be taken you run into a common human problem of “bystander effect”. This is related to the social proof principle – since no one is taking up the lead and committing everyone feels the social proof that they don’t need to take action either. This is probably the biggest cause of why big companies become slow at responding and reacting. There are just too much social proof of non-risk takers. In smaller organizations with smaller groups it’s hard to get that feeling of anonymity and people don’t get enough social proof to stay unresponsive. There is enough evidence to support this as a science, for example a study done with a staged medical emergency showed that when there’s just one bystander there’s a 85% chance of receiving help compared to 31% when there are five people. As a hearty company you have to address this issue and I cover this in a later section of my series.
Further Reading
How to win Friends & Influence People - Dale Carnegie
This is the classic book that probably started the trend of self help books. Worth a read just for the sake of reading a classic, but the ideas are very much relevant and useful today.
Influence: Science and Practice - Robert Cialdini
A classic in the psychology of persuasion where the author comes up with a list of common persuasion techniques based on extensive research work in this interesting area. A good read on it’s own, but superb also to build up your skills for convincing people to follow you - must skill in this business of setting up an organization!
And if you are worried about how all these persuasion techniques can be used against you and how you protect yourself from them then each chapter in the book has a section on such defense :)
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey
Hugely successful book about strategies of making yourself more productive. There are some ideas in the book that are good strategies for persuasion too. Good read, but the book could’ve been made much shorter - it keeps rambling on and on sometimes which I find very distracting.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business - Charles Duhigg
If you are fascinated by some of the ideas in this post and want to follow up a bit more on how we do things out of habit or without thinking this book explores this in detail (maybe a bit too details in some parts to be interesting). Worth a read. I liked it and it gave me a lot more to think about.
Outliers: The Story of Success - Malcolm Gladwell
This book has nothing to do with the topic of persuasion.
But if you, like me, get fascinated by the fact that seemingly irrational human things (like decision making) can be codified with patterns and modified and predicted by science, then this is a book you should read. Well you should read this book anyway, it’s one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. The tangential connection with the topic of the post and this book is that Gladwell shows how human genius and success are all dependent on certain factors. Follow the factors the genius seems like a natural outcome. You can be a genius too if you had just followed the steps, well you feel that way at least when you read the book :)
