It's like a horse, only different
In Part 1 of this series, we saw how analogies can play a central role in persuasive business presentations. We’ll develop that thought further in this article by considering how analogies can make it easier for your audience to accept the change you are trying to sell.
In view of the constant change and relentless innovation of today’s economy, one would think that getting people to accept new ideas is easy, but in fact anyone trying to convince someone else to accept a new idea faces three tough obstacles to gaining acceptance. First, the more different something is, the harder it is to understand. Second, our minds prefer the comfort of the familiar and assign greater weight to risk in the risk/reward calculation. Finally, we don’t like being told what to do.
Any one of these obstacles can be poison for your presentation, but the antidote to all three is an apt analogy.
Analogies make things easier to understand. You can’t persuade others if they don’t understand what you’re saying. The mind learns by relating new information to existing information structures, and if you’re presenting highly technical information or introducing a new product that is different from anything the audience is used to, you can save a lot of explanation by building off what they already know. How would you describe a zebra to someone who has never seen a horse?
Analogies also make concepts easier to understand by helping the audience filter out all the relevant information and get to the heart of the matter.
Finally even when your audience totally gets it, the success of your implementation will likely depend on their being able to get additional buy-in from others in their organization. A compelling analogy will arm them with an easy-to-remember message to take to their internal stakeholders.
Analogies reduce perceived risk by making new things seem more familiar. The old saying that familiarity breeds contempt is usually not true. We gravitate toward, and prefer, what is familiar to us. The decision to try something new always involves a mental struggle between risk and reward. Any time we consider something new, whether it’s a product or an idea, we have to contemplate leaving the safety of the familiar for the opportunity of the unfamiliar. If the concept is too different, it’s likely to be dismissed without even giving equal time to considering its benefits.
Evolution is easier for most of us to handle than revolution. Analogies, by definition, work by comparing a new situation to something more familiar. When Apple first came out with a graphical user interface, they could have gone in virtually an infinite number of directions, but they chose to make something completely different seem like something very old and familiar by giving us a “desktop” with which to work.
An analogy lets the decision maker have their cake and eat it too. It provides a safe base in their mind from which they can explore new opportunity.
Analogies lower resistance to your message. As kids, anytime my mother told me something was good for me, I would automatically determine not to like it. Most adults haven’t outgrown that tendency toward reactance, which is why sometimes trying to teach or to sell the benefits of a new idea can backfire if you try too hard. As Churchill said, “I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught.”
As I mentioned in my previous post, analogies, once implanted, work below the level of consciousness to guide the search for information and to bend the stream of thought into a certain direction. The analogy plants itself in the mind and the audience member’s mind does the rest. In fact, it has been demonstrated that the target audience has a better comprehension of product benefits when the detailed information is left out.[1] It’s like a joke: if you have to explain it, it’s not funny.
Analogies can be fruitful
I’ve written before about how useful analogies can be to make your presentation memorable, but if you want to build a powerful presentation, analogies are useful for much more than decoration—they can serve as its very foundation, and make your presentation much stronger as a result.
In fact, while stories are getting all the press nowadays, analogies are really doing most of the work. They’re far more common and more effective in getting your points across. Most stories are actually vehicles for conveying an analogy.
Analogies are inevitable. They influence what we perceive and what we remember. They are useful mental shortcuts that we take when we encounter new and unfamiliar situations that require a judgment or decision. Instead of starting from scratch when we encounter an unfamiliar situation that requires a judgment or decision, prescription we search our experience for similar situations. Analogies help us understand, organize and make sense of incoming information.
In fact, analogy is the foundation of learning from experience. People with more experience have a richer store of analogies to draw from, which is what enables them to rapid right decisions without having to agonize over every detail.
We always see more—and less—in a situation than is there. Our minds see more because we look for patterns and then fill in the gaps with what’s not there. We also see less because we filter out information we consider irrelevant. Analogies
Once we choose an analogy, it leads us to focus on certain aspects of the situation and ignore others. Actually, we often don’t consciously choose analogies—sometimes they choose us, implanting themselves stealthily without our knowledge. Research indicates that “resistance is futile”: implanted analogies can affect our memories so that we may remember things in the presentation that were not actually there.[1]
Business is full of examples of how a powerful analogy can make the difference in important decisions. In 1997, Intel was opposed to developing a low-end chip for PCs because they thought it would cheapen the brand. But in a training seminar, Harvard professor Clayton Christensen explained how established steel companies ignored low-end products like rebar, providing an opening for minimills. By establishing themselves on the low end, they were then able to move up the value chain and seize the high end. That analogy turned Andy Grove’s thinking around, and it began promoting its Celeron processor.[2]
Analogies carry special weight in business presentations because the senior decision makers you want to influence cut their teeth on them—the case study method used in business schools is nothing but analogical thinking on a large scale. As they gain experience in their careers, they are stuffing their minds with analogies that they draw on when they make judgments about new situations.
If you can find the right analogy that resonates with them, you can short-cut a tremendous amount of detail and context and have the inside track on a favorable decision.
I will write much more about analogies in future posts, but for now here is a list of all the benefits that analogies can provide for persuasive communicators:
- Focus attention on certain aspects over others—influence belief
- Transfer emotion—improve motivation
- Make things easier to understand—improve understanding; make things more concise
- Make the message more vivid—improve memory
- Make the message more interesting—improve attention
- Lower resistance to your message
- Lower perceived risk by making new things seem more familiar
[1] Resistance is futile: The Unwitting insertion of analogical references in memory. Perrott, Gentner, Bodenhausen (2005).
[2] How Strategists Really Think: Tapping the Power of Analogy, Gavetti and Rivkin, (2005).
If you put your left hand into a bucket of cold water, and your right into hot water, and then plunge them both into a single bucket of room-temperature water, a funny thing will happen. Your sensations will reverse: your left hand will feel warm and your right hand will feel cold. There’s no magic in it, it’s simply the contrast between the starting and ending points of each that makes the difference.
In a similar way, the contrast between your start and end points in a presentation or sales call can make all the difference between success and failure.
Contrast is important for two reasons: it can create attention and it can affect the perception of the facts.
In her excellent book, Resonate
Is this the best you can do?
I first heard this story during a speech given by G. Gordon Liddy in 1979 when he spoke at Florida Atlantic University. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but in the words of Jimmy Buffett, “don’t care if it’s true, ‘cause I love it so well.”
When Henry Kissinger became President Nixon’s National Security Adviser in 1969, he brought a reputation as a demanding taskmaster. So, when a staffer was given an assignment to write a position paper for his new boss, he understandably put in extra hours and took great pains to produce top-notch work. A day after he had turned it in, Kissinger called him into his office and asked him, “Is this the best you can do?”
The staffer promised he could improve it, and went back to his desk. He cancelled his other appointments, called his wife to tell her he would be home very late, and worked feverishly on the report: fine-tuning it, adding information, clarifying where necessary, etc. At the end of the week, he turned it in.
