Practical Eloquence Blog

Stories Don’t Always Work

By Jack Malcolm / 9.12.2012 / No Comment

Everyone loves stories, but be careful how you use them

Everyone loves to hear stories, don’t they? We’re in the era of story for business presentations. All the experts tell us that stories are the best vehicle for making your content engaging and convincing audiences, and for making your points stick in their memories. Use stories for persuasive presentations, we’re told, because so much of our decision making takes place in the fast, intuitive System 1 thinking process in our brain. For the most part, I agree with this advice, and I can personally attest in my training and speeches that using stories to illustrate my points can boost credibility, engagement and retention. (It also boosts my instructor ratings—not that I pay any attention to that)

But stories do not always work for every audience, and may even backfire in some situations.

Audiences can differ in their need for cognition, which is a fancy way of saying that some audience members like to think carefully and deeply about the points that are being presented to them. In fact, everyone has a need for cognition in the right circumstances. If you are being asked to make an important decision that requires considering various complex factors, you are much more likely to engage your slow, deliberative and analytical System 2 thinking. But some audiences place much more emphasis on careful thinking than others, especially if you’re presenting a proposal that will cost a lot of money or require major change.

Besides, not everyone in the audience is the same. When you consider the social styles of individual audience members, roughly half may be analytics or drivers. In some audiences, you will have a much higher proportion of analytics and drivers. If you’re presenting to a high-tech company that has a very engineering-driven culture, you will often have a majority of analytics in the room. Or, if you’re presenting to senior managers, they will tend to have a higher share of drivers than a regular audience. Analytics will be automatically suspicious of stories because they think they are being deliberately used to hoodwink them, and drivers will become impatient for you to get to the point.

Once, after running a sales training class, I received a complaint from their sales director that I should have told fewer stories and finished the class earlier. Yet, I later heard from others that he often repeated a couple of the stories he heard during the class to make his points in sales meetings. So, I’m definitely not advocating that you dispense with stories altogether—just make sure you modify your approach to match the needs of your audience. For analytics you should lead with data to earn the right to follow up with an anecdote to make it real; for drivers, keep the stories as short as possible, and be prepared to cut one short if you notice signs of impatience. Above all, make sure they are spot-on relevant to your point.

What if the audience is mixed? That’s where your preparation and audience analysis are critical. Make sure you know the style of the most important decision-makers in the room and plan your use of stories accordingly.

Persuasive communication

How Complete Is Your Questioning Toolkit?

By Jack Malcolm / 9.11.2012 / No Comment

Have you ever known a leader or manager who was an expert questioner? It seems like some people have the rare and valuable skill of being able to ask the right question at the right time. You go to them to approve a proposal and they get right to the heart of the matter. Or, you need advice about a situation and they ask you questions that get you to see things from a different perspective and find your own solution.

These people seem to have a natural knack, but nobody is born fully equipped to ask the right questions for every situation. It’s a skill that only looks effortless because it has been developed over years of experience, practice, and maybe even formal training. As you go through your business and personal life, you may pick up the skill by trial and error, learning which questions seem to get the best results, or you may develop the critical thinking skills that allow you to spot the weaknesses in a proposal, or you may evolve standard algorithms/checklists for specific situations, over time you accumulate a toolkit of effective questions.

You need a complete toolkit because you face a variety of tasks, and the types of questions that work very well for one task may be exactly the wrong ones you need in another. For example, the questions that find flaws in a proposal may be helpful if you’re a CFO deciding how to allocate resources, but they will get you thrown out the door if you’re a salesperson.

Fortunately, a lot of smart people have developed excellent questioning protocols and have written about them, which allows everyone to cut the time and pain needed to develop and practice the skills.

A complete questioning toolkit addresses the major tasks that a leader has. Here are some:

Decision-making and problem-solving questions are used to make sure you’re getting the best thinking out of your people, so that you can make the best possible decisions. I’m biased because I teach it, but the best set of questions I have come across for this are Vervago’s Precision Questions, which comprises seven categories of questions, arranged under these general questions:

Do we talk about this now?
What do you mean?
What are you assuming?
How do you know?
What caused it?
What are the effects and consequences?
What should we do?

Persuasive questions are used to get people to talk themselves into the direction or solution you want by making it their idea. Whether it’s motivational interviewing used by psychologists, or some variant of SPIN questioning, the basic aim is to bring out gaps between what is and what could be and guide the answerer in the right direction:

What are you doing today and/or what would you like to be doing?
What needs to change to improve the situation or to achieve your goals?
What happens if you don’t?
What do you need to do next?

Coaching questions are used to develop your people. They’re similar to persuasive questions, in that they are meant to steer the conversation toward change talk, preferably making it the answerer’s idea so that they are more likely to fully commit to it. The principal difference is that the initial questions are used to test the perception of the person being coached to assess whether they know their current behavior needs to be changed. There are many different effective models, such as the GROW model:

Goals: Where do you want to be?
Reality: How far away are you from your goal?
Obstacles/options: What obstacles are in your way and what options can you think of to remove them?
Way forward: What specific action steps will you take?

Columbo questions are not a formal questioning process, but I’ve learned from being on the receiving end that they can be the most effective general questioning technique of all. Inspired by the famous TV detective, they are merely the application of intense curiosity and almost naïve simplicity:

I’m not sure I get it, could you please explain it again?

How does that work?

Probes are different from these other questions in that they are more reactive, following the thread of the conversation, and because they are useful for all purposes. Here are three simple types that you can use to squeeze the juice out of just about any conversation:

Clarify: Can you explain what you mean? Can you give me an example?
Dig: Can you give me more detail about that?
Extend: What else?

This is not meant to be a complete list of all type of questions for all occasions, but if you can master these you will be one of the people who come to mind when others are asked who is the best questioner they know.

Book reviews - Success

Book Recommendation: So Good They Can’t Ignore You

By Jack Malcolm / 9.6.2012 / No Comment

I’ve been following Cal Newport’s ideas for a while now, so when I learned that he was coming out with a book, I pre-ordered it from Amazon. I was not disappointed. If you have a child or know someone in college who is trying to figure out what to do with their life, or even if you’re north of fifty and still wonder what you’ll be when you grow up, then this book is for you. So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, is so good that you shouldn’t ignore it.

The central premise that sets this book apart from so much life advice that is out on the market is that following your passion is terrible advice. There are two main reasons for this: first, very few people at a young age know enough about life to choose something to be really passionate about, and even if they do, they are bound to be wrong. If Steve Jobs had followed his early passion, maybe he would have made a dent in the universe as a Buddhist monk.

Second, while most people would love to have a job that allows them to be creative, make an impact on the world, and have control over how they choose to spend their time, jobs like that are rare and valuable, and the only way to get something valuable is to offer something in return. And the only way to be in a position to do that is to master a difficult skill. Passion doesn’t waive the laws of economics, and if it’s not difficult it won’t be rare. The book cites the example of Julia, who quit a secure job in advertising to pursue her passion of teaching yoga. Armed with a 4-week course, she quit her job, began teaching, and one year later was on food stamps. Here’s a hint: if a four-week course is enough to allow you to set up shop, do you think you might have a little competition?

Taking the economic model a step further, the book argues that you must develop career capital, which comprises skills, relationships and a body of work. The long and arduous process of building your capital also opens up your options and refines your own understanding of what you really like to do and what you can be good at.

Newport offers the craftsman mindset in place of the passion mindset. The passion mindset asks what the world can offer you in terms of fulfillment and fun; the craftsman mindset forces you to look inside and ask what you can offer the world. You have to create value to get value, and that takes time and deliberate practice. It’s the only way to get so good that they can’t ignore you. The nice benefit is that rather than being good at something because you love it, you love doing something because you’ve gotten good at it. (Note the similarity to Carol Dweck’s growth mindset.)

What’s the little idea? Another idea that Newport challenges is the common advice that you should have a big idea—set a big hairy audacious goal for your life and then work backward from it. The master plan approach certainly works for some people, but how many people do you know who have actually lived their lives that way? Instead, you should work forward from where you are, taking small steps that expand your capabilities and build up your career capital. In this way, more options and possibilities open up. Newport compares career discoveries to scientific discoveries, most of which occur in what’s called the “adjacent possible”, or just on the other side of the cutting edge of current knowledge. Although I never thought of it that way, that’s exactly how my training and consulting career has progressed. Any time I’ve developed new material it’s because a client has asked me to develop something for them that is just outside my current knowledge or skill set.[1] It’s close enough that they and I have the confidence that it can be done, but different enough that it leads to new material. In this way, I keep learning more and more and develop more career capital that in turn makes me even more valuable to the market.

The book is well-written. Newport emulates Malcolm Gladwell’s technique of telling individual stories to illustrate the main point in each chapter. In addition, the arc of the stories follows a master story thread through the book, so that you feel like you are brought along on his quest to figure it all out.

Here comes the part I did not like about the book, and I would not devote so much space to it if the author were not an MIT PhD, just beginning his career as an assistant professor of computer science.

The methodology in the book is suspect in two ways. While its stories are the book’s great strength, the plural of anecdote is not data, and it’s surprising how little hard data we’re given. I certainly buy in because it makes sense and it matches my own life experience, but someone with a more skeptical point of view may be a tougher sell.

Here’s an example. Between the ages of ten and twenty, I had an absolute passion to be a fighter pilot that I followed with a laser focus, so much so that I only filled out two college applications, to the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy. When my straight shot to my goals was sidelined by a vision problem in my sophomore year at the Academy, my passion was up in smoke and I haven’t found anything since to quite match it. So, my own experience supports Newport’s hypothesis. But then I think of my friend Dirk, who followed the same path—except that he stayed on it and recently retired after a long and distinguished career doing exactly what he wanted to do.

In at least one case, where he does use a peer-reviewed study for support, he overstates the case. Citing a paper by Amy Wrzesniewski, he states that the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but those who stayed around long enough to be good at what they do. If you read the actual paper, you won’t find that conclusion, and in fact the author stresses that the sample size of 24 is too small to draw any firm conclusions.

That said, I strongly recommend this book to just about anyone, regardless of where you are in your career.

Related articles:

Bad Advice from the Passionistas

The Talent that Really Matters

Hard Work, Yes, But on What?

[1] I call it the “dream of fields” approach: If they come, I will build it.

Presentations

USE This Structure with a Hostile Audience

By Jack Malcolm / 9.5.2012 / No Comment

The only way to bring them to your side is to go over and get them

Presenting to a skeptical or hostile audience is usually a very bad idea, and strategic presenters do everything possible to shape opinions and gain supporters before the actual event. If you can’t do that, it’s often a good idea to “lose early”, because failed persuasion attempts often make the intended target even more committed to their original positions.

Yet, in real life you can’t always choose your battles. The prospect may be so high profile that you have to at least go down swinging, or you may have an important project that you’re trying to obtain funding for internally. In this situation, you will need to put away your standard structures and deploy an indirect approach that will to maximize your chances of success. I call it the USE structure, which stands for understand, small agreement, explanation.

Understand:

With most presentations to high level decision makers, it’s a good idea to give them your bottom line up front; it works because it reinforces an existing level of shared understanding. That shared understanding is precisely what’s missing with a skeptical audience, so it’s exactly the wrong approach to take with skeptics. If you do, their likely reactions will be either to ignore you or to begin formulating counterarguments in their mind as they listen. If that happens at the beginning of your presentation, nothing you say afterwards is going to help.

The most important principle is to begin with something they agree with. If you think of yourself and your audience standing on opposite sides of a chasm, you can’t yell across the gulf and compel them to cross over—you have to cross over and get them. That means you begin from their point of view and work backward: What parts of it are non-negotiable? What parts are based on incorrect or incomplete information? What has changed since they formed their opinion? As Covey said, “Seek first to understand, then be understood.”

(One side benefit of this is that, by taking their perspective, you might learn something that improves your own perspective or position. It will also help you to temper your goals for the presentation. Because minds can usually only be changed a little at a time, aim for something challenging but attainable.)

By starting with their point of view, you’re showing yourself to be reasonable and well-informed. You’re also enlisting the persuasive power of similarity (showing you’re like them) and reciprocity (give them the gift of understanding and they are more likely to give it back). Besides, you may surprise them a little bit, which definitely helps get their attention.

It’s not enough to thoroughly research and understand their point of view; you also have to show that you understand their point of view, by articulating their position as well as they can. For excellent demonstrations of this, check out any editorial in The Economist.

Small agreement

So, you’ve crossed the chasm to their side and now you want to bring them over to yours, but the chasm is usually too wide to cross in a single jump. You need to get them to a safe position somewhere in the middle. You do this by getting them to agree to a smaller point, which then makes it possible to cross the rest of the way. When opposing sides see the situation in pure black and white, the only way for them to agree is for one side to “lose”. When the issue is what shade of grey you’re talking about, there is scope for agreement.

Here are three of the many ways to get a small agreement:

Reframe: Reframing is about getting them to look at a different aspect of the situation than the one they are focusing on. For example, in sales presentations, one of the most common sources of skepticism may be that your solution is perceived as too expensive. Your job would be to change the frame: maybe to look at the total lifetime costs rather than the upfront price; or reframe it as an investment so that they will focus on the return instead of the cost.

Change the analogy: Everyone reasons by analogy—that’s the essence of learning from experience. The trick is to understand the analogies your audience is using to view your proposal, and then either stress the differences between that situation and this one, or get them to substitute a different analogy. When presenting to customers, the most powerful analogies are those that compare your approach to the way that they do business.

Reversal: This is a form of verbal jiu-jitsu which uses the weight of their own argument to lead them where you want them to go. “You’re right: we did have problems with the last implementation. But because we learned from it, that’s what makes us the best qualified to make sure it goes exactly right this time.”

Explanation

There’s not much to say here, because you will know your own best reasons that support your position. Just make sure that what you say in this part of your presentation connects to the “US” part. I’ve seen too many presentations where the presenter did a great job showing empathy and understanding for the audience’s point of view, then ruined it by merely bolting on something generic at the end.

In summary, it may be uncomfortable to contemplate presenting to a hostile audience, but you will have no greater satisfaction than winning them over, when you USE the right approach.

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