Great story; don’t mind the facts.
Stories are all the rage in business persuasion today. Everyone loves stories. I love stories, and have written several posts about how they can be so helpful in ensuring your message gets heard, believed and remembered.
Being of a slightly contrarian frame of mind, however, I think it’s important that we remind ourselves that stories do have limits, and excessive reliance on them can weaken our persuasive efforts, especially when our listeners start probing a little deeper to find the real truth behind them.
There are three possible ways that a story can mislead:
The story may be untrue or exaggerated
One of the best examples of this for those who are familiar with psychology is the story of Phineas Gage, the railroad company foreman in the 19th century who was impaled by an iron rod. Gage’s accident took out all or part of his left frontal lobe, and the prevalent story is that it turned him from a likeable and effective person into an unstable and angry man. Almost any book that deals with the role of emotions cites this story to show how important emotions are to a normal, stable life.
It’s a vivid and compelling story, but as this article explains, most of it is not true. Gage went on to lead a reasonably normal life, working successfully in occupations that would have punished erratic behavior. In fact, the story about the story is a cautionary tale about how a few facts can be spun into a convincing story that can be used to “prove” almost any point we want to make.
Stories are always incomplete
By design, stories simplify real life; nuance and complexity get in the way of a good story. Good storytellers know that they have to keep them short and focused, so they omit details that do not contribute to the main point. That’s not a bad thing, unless the omitted details substantially alter the conclusions drawn.
Think back to any of the three presidential debates we’ve just seen: both candidates chose stories to tell about their opponent. They didn’t have to lie (although fact-checkers on both sides will assert that the other one did), they just had to choose which facts to leave out.
The story may be true, but insufficient.
This is one of the most common ways that stories can mislead. It is especially true as the story gets more vivid or compelling. We see it all the time in the media. A savage and shocking crime feeds the perception that a much bigger problem exists, leading to a demand for more law enforcement or for new legislation. Because stories draw us in, we focus on the specific details, which distracts from the larger picture: maybe this situation is not that common.
Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater
Please don’t assume from what I’ve written that I am against the use of stories in presenting your ideas. Stories are a powerful and indispensable tool in any persuader’s kit, but they should never be used alone. Stories and other forms of evidence work best when they support each other. Stories can dramatize statistics, for example, and statistics can prop up the truth of a story. Used together, each is much the stronger for it.
When the famous Greek orator Demosthenes was asked what was the most important aspect of rhetoric, he replied, “Delivery, delivery, delivery.”
That’s a sentiment that I would not normally agree with. While I certainly believe that delivery is important, I’ve always stressed that strong content backed by appropriate evidence is absolutely the most important aspect of any persuasive presentation. If you don’t have solid content the best delivery in the world won’t make you persuasive.
But I received an unexpected education in practical eloquence this afternoon in the unlikeliest place. I was just getting out of my vehicle at the gas station when a man approached. I knew right away that he was going to ask for money and I prepared to give him the cold shoulder. But his opening line took me by surprise: “Excuse me sir, I’m sorry to intrude on your privacy.” He then proceeded to go into one of the familiar stories about a lady with a baby in the parking lot next door who did not have money for gas. That’s usually when I tell them I can’t help them, but his manner and vocabulary captivated me. He was so courtly and articulate that—as a person who values eloquence and verbal artistry—I just enjoyed listening to his pitch.
I decided to give him a few bucks but found that I only had twenties in my wallet. Being of Scottish descent, I may value eloquence but not to the tune of $20, so I told him I didn’t have change. I wish I could remember his exact words, but his reply was so good that I actually went into the convenience store and bought a candy bar so I could make change!
As I drove away, it occurred to me that I had just met a true artist, a real master of delivery. I knew his story was bogus, but I felt good about the few bucks I gave him. It’s like a magic trick: you know it’s not real but you appreciate what you’ve seen.
I wonder if I could go back and find the guy? Maybe he can write a blog post for me.
Who’s the decision maker?
I bet you never thought you would learn about one-celled organisms in a blog about persuasion, but bear with me for a few paragraphs because I want to make an important point.
It’s been quite the fashion over the past few years in sales and persuasion circles to focus on our three brains: the reptilian brain, the rat brain, and the human brain. The idea is pretty simple: our human brains have evolved over eons in a different environment than our modern world; since evolution by definition proceeds from what went before, as our newer brain structures and functions evolved, the old structures remain and continue to be quite active. It’s kind of like the separation of powers in the Federal government: all three branches get involved in the process. So, if you want to persuade someone, you have to appeal to the simpler brains as well as to our logical faculties.
That may be true, but why stop at the reptile brain? If we trace our ancestry even further, we all evolved from one-celled organisms—amoebas, if you will, and we were amoebas even longer than we were reptiles. So, should we also tailor our persuasive efforts to the amoeba brain that surely lurks within all of us?
I can see it now: make sure you have a lot of light when you make your presentations, because amoebas move toward the light. You wouldn’t have to explain your solution, because people can get it by osmosis. We could call it “celling”. I realize I’ve reached the point of absurdity, but unfortunately so have many of the “scientific” persuasion experts.
The basic idea is sound, as long as it’s not carried too far. Aristotle, the father of modern persuasion science, made it the core of his Rhetoric, acknowledging that persuasive appeals comprise three strands, ethos, pathos, and logos. More recently, research has categorized and measured myriad ways in which our decisions and behaviors deviate from the purely rational. Science has learned a lot about the brain in the past few decades, and technologies such as functional MRIs let them see real time into our brain activity as we make decisions, respond to stimuli, etc. A lot of that research has confirmed, refined, or changed our understanding of how our minds work.
But new scientific discoveries are inevitably seized upon immediately by modern-day snake oil salesmen to add some legitimacy to their half-baked ideas. The ink was barely dry on the first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species when the Social Darwinists hijacked his theories to justify their own notions of how society should be organized. In the same spirit, a lot of experts have picked up on the colorful pictures showing various areas of the brain lighting up during controlled laboratory experiments to market their services to companies, promising that they can read consumers’ brains and know what makes them tick, even better than the consumers themselves can. (By the way, if you’ve ever been inside of one of those machines, you know just how “natural” that situation is.)
When a book applies the idea to B2B sales, telling us that, “In spite of our modern ability to analyze and rationalize complex scenarios and situations, the old brain will regularly override all aspects of this analysis and, quite simply, veto the new brain’s conclusions.”[1], then the idea has gone too far.
I have a lot of respect for the work of one of the deans of persuasion science, Robert Cialdini, but even he goes a little too far. His six principles for influence are implied to be so powerful that you can’t sell a good idea without them, and you can definitely sell bad ideas with them. You can trigger fixed-action patterns that cause people to act like a mother turkey does when she hears “cheep-cheep”, and that’s what his book is about.[2] Cialdini at least acknowledges the importance of rationality—in a footnote—saying of course material self-interest is important, but that it goes without saying.
Yet, that’s the problem: it doesn’t go without saying. When a Harvard Business School professor tells us that “what you say is less important than how you say it”, and “style trumps content”, then it has to be said.
Content has to come first
This article is a plea for a little more, well, rationality in the understanding of what it takes to get ideas approved and products sold. Of course it’s important to be able to appeal to more than just the rational parts of the brains of your persuasive target. I’ve written about ways to do that many times on this blog. But it has to start with a sound, logical and defensible business or personal case—with what Cialdini called material self-interest.
One of the oldest sayings in sales is that you should sell the sizzle, not the steak. But what happens when they buy the appetizing sizzle and then find out the steak is crappy? They won’t come back. That’s why you have to make absolutely you have an excellent steak before you worry about the sizzle. Regardless of how many persuasive cues you employ, or which regions of the brain turn which color in the fmri, if the idea does not work, you soon won’t, either. Bad ideas are bad ideas, no matter how they’re dressed up.
One problem with fixation on techniques to appeal to the old brain is that they distract from the main job of putting together a strong proposal. There are people who spend most of their time learning “the tricks of the trade” in the hope of finding shortcuts, when they should be learning the trade itself. I’ve seen people put more time in the choice of fonts for their slides than they do in critically examining the strength of their ideas.
Whether you’re trying to get a proposal approved internally or selling a solution to a customer, most business decisions are complex enough to require extensive data, deep analysis, and careful decisions. That’s the reality of our modern world, which was built by the human brain. Never forget that it’s still the most important decision maker.
[1] Patrick Renvoise and Cristophe Morin, Neuromarketing, viii.
[2] Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice.
It’s not magic
We all admire and envy those individuals that have it: the ability to walk into a room and captivate the attention of everyone. Imagine how much easier your life and your work would be if you had that natural quality. Everyone would want to be around you, would hang on every word that comes out of your mouth, and would want to do what you want.
In The Charisma Myth, Olivia Fox Cabane makes a convincing argument that you can have that ability, because charisma is the product of a certain mindset and behaviors that are trainable. In short, if you read this book, and practice and apply its techniques, you too can be the lightbulb instead of one of the moths.
When you come across a book like this, you may be reminded of the old ads in comic books when you were a kid, that promised to turn you from a 98-pound weakling into a musclebound stud who ruled the beach and got all the girls. The reality is that you can make the change—just don’t expect it to happen overnight or without a lot of hard work. You have to work at the exercises even when they get hard.
