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Everything we’ve talked about so far in this series on persuasive communication psychology is just a means to an end, and that end is making something actually happen. Somebody buys, somebody acts, something changes. Even when you have wholehearted agreement, you haven’t until they’ve followed through.[1] As Alfred Adler said, “Life happens at the level of events, not words.”
How many times have you walked out of a meeting with someone with a clear sense that everybody is on board and knows what to do, and after time passes nothing has happened? How many times has initial enthusiasm fizzled out? Frustrating, isn’t it? What’s WRONG with those people?
It happens all the time, but before you get angry that others don’t follow through on their agreements, think about how many times you’ve broken agreements with yourself. For example, have you set goals that you did not achieve—not because you were incapable but because you didn’t really try? If you made New Year’s resolutions for 2018, how’s that working out for you? Do you ever procrastinate? In some ways, maybe it’s a miracle when someone else actually follows through on their agreements!
So the key is not to get angry about it and give people a hard time or continue to hound them until things get done, but to understand why there’s a gap between decision and execution, and use that knowledge in your approach to maximize your chances of seeing the behavior and action you seek.
What keeps people from acting on agreements?
Persuasive communication is a vehicle for making things happen, and every vehicle needs two things to do its job: motive power and direction. Everything we’ve covered so far deals with the motivation, so I’m going to address the direction part as the major antidote to inaction. Three principal reasons people don’t follow through on agreements is that they may be uncommitted, unable, or uncertain.
Uncommitted
First, despite telling you they agree, they may be lying or at least not telling the full truth. Maybe they’re too nice and don’t want to hurt your feelings. Maybe they’re afraid to openly disagree because you’re the boss or prevailing opinion is against them. Maybe they even hope you will fail for whatever reasons of their own they might have. Or maybe they kind of agree but still have nagging doubts. Sometimes Gut-level Gus prefers to just keep quiet and bide his time for the right moment—when it’s time to do something.
Unable
Even if they have the best intentions and confidence at the moment, they could find themselves unwilling or unable to do what they have to do when the time comes. Unwilling is when you tell yourself that you’re going to wake up an hour early and get a workout in before work, only to “reconsider” your plans when the alarm goes off. What’s going on is a chronological goal mismatch: the sure short term pain of waking up now is a lot more pressing on your mind than the long term promise of being fit at some undetermined future time. The unable part comes when they run into an unexpected obstacle and can’t or won’t muster up the will to take it on or figure it out.
Uncertain
One of the most common and easily solvable reasons for procrastination and excuse-making is uncertainty about what to do. I feel this myself many times when I sit down to write and churn out my goal of 1,000 words a day. When I’m not sure what I want to write about, it’s so much harder to get started. Ambiguity causes anxiety and anxiety tends to default toward the status quo.
How to drive action
To attack these three action-stoppers you must:
- Be sure you have full agreement.
- Make it hard for them to not act
- Make it easy for them to take the action you want
Be sure you have full agreement
It’s tempting to assume things are going well, and it takes a strong person to invite objections, but sweeping disagreement under the rug only guarantees that you will trip over it later. If they don’t agree, better to find out early so you can address it. There are a couple of ways to do this.
The first is to be very clear up front what your ask is. A lot of speakers fear to do this to avoid provoking disagreement, and there’s something to be said for using your discretion if you know they will automatically oppose your idea. But being clear about your ask up front is a great way to find out early where you stand.
Second, ask checking questions to see if they have any concerns; pay close attention to their reaction and invite them to open up about their concerns. If you’re the boss, make it safe for people to speak openly; one way to do this is, bring up specific objections if you think they’re holding back, to show it’s OK to talk about them.
If those fail, you can be more direct and tell them that if you don’t hear objections, you’re going to assume you have complete agreement.
Make it hard for them not to act
As we’ve seen, at the moment of truth it’s so easy to find reasons not to act, so you want to harder for them not to follow through.
Get individuals to commit publicly to act, which increases compliance in two ways. First, it puts their credibility at risk if they change their minds and don’t come through and second, it taps into the Cialdini’s consistency principle. But make sure that they commit to something specific, which I cover in the next section.
Anticipate obstacles and plan for them. If you make the road ahead sound easy, you may get quicker agreement but run into problems later. Planning for obstacles makes it much likelier that they will follow through, because their minds are prepared for them.
Put them in control of their commitment. Most of us hate to be sold, even if we don’t mind buying, so do everything you can to make it the other person’s idea to do what you want them to do.
As strange as it might sound, sometimes it helps to make it harder to decide but easier to act once they have decided. Making an effort up front deepens commitments, which is why elite organizations have difficult initiation rituals. Instead of trying so hard to make the decision a no-brainer, we should get them to put skin in the game.
Make it easy for them to act
If you want someone to stay on the path you’ve set, make it effortless by making the path well-marked and smooth as possible.
Make it clear
Your listeners must be absolutely clear about what you’re asking them to do. This starts with being clear in your own mind about your purpose and specific actions before you go in.
Specificity is major ingredient of clarity. There’s a great example in Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath. Donald Berwick, CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in on December 14, 2004 told a room full of hospital administrators that their goal was to save 100,000 lives by 6/14/06, at 9AM. More prosaically, it’s like the difference between saying “let’s do lunch sometime” and “how about next Tuesday at Anthony’s?”
When asking someone to take action, you walk a tightrope: on the one hand, people don’t like being micro-managed, but on the other hand, they are more likely to follow through on clear behaviors. The best way to square this circle is to ask them for their plan and only then make suggestions as you see fit.
So, for example, instead of recommending that you to be clearer in their recommendations, I might suggest that you word your ask in specific and measurable outcomes that a high school sophomore could understand and repeat back to you.
Make it easy
One of the major contributors to the success of Amazon was its development and patenting of one-click ordering in 1997. You may not be able to make it that easy for others to act, but you should strive as much as possible to reduce barriers to action. Chip and Dan Heath call this tactic “shrinking the change”.
You can also shrink the change by breaking things up into small steps which are easier to accomplish. That can help you get things moving and then the power of commitment and constancy will keep the momentum going.
Finally, always close with a call to action. Here’s mine: as soon as possible, write down the three things you are going to do differently in your next presentation to ensure that others will act.
[1] One exception: If it’s simply compliance you’re aiming for, such as permission to proceed and approval of resources, you can stop right here.
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To this point in this series on the psychology of persuasive communication, we’ve covered first impressions, attention, understanding, credibility, and deciding. Could anything possibly go wrong?
Unfortunately, yes. You can’t be sure you’ve persuaded anybody until they’ve made an actual decision—and they may not be ready to that yet. Maybe they want to hear from other points of view, or gather additional information. Maybe they need to convince others. So, when they finally arrive at the decision point, will they remember enough of what you said to make the case for you?
A lot of what we’ve talked about already can certainly help. Capturing their attention ensures that it at least gets into their memory. By making your message clear, it’s more likely to connect to stuff they already know, and if they’ve seen value in what you said, they have an incentive to at least try to remember.
Yet, the sad fact is that people won’t remember most of what you told them even just a short time after the conversation. One book claims that, after a 10 minute presentation, people forget 50% of what you said immediately, 75% by the next day, and 90% a week later. That was an old study, but I would bet that it’s even worse today, with all the distractions we have in our lives.
That sounds bad. You put in all that time to prepare for a critical presentation and 90% of it goes to waste? Actually, it doesn’t have to be bad news. Remember that the test of persuasive communication is whether people actually decide or act the way you want them to, and 10% may be more than enough—as long as it’s the right 10%! So your first rule, if you have a complex topic is BE VERY CERTAIN ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO REMEMBER. Don’t get too ambitious and try to overload them with different points.
Next, to boost the odds that they will retain what you told them long enough to put it to use, here are four general principles:
Get them thinking
Dan Willingham, author of Why Don’t Students Like School?, has a great line: “Memory is the residue of thought.” When you think about it, we’re bombarded daily with stimuli, experiences and information, so our brains need to “decide” what to try to retain. Can you remember the color of the car that was next to you at the red light three blocks form your office yesterday? Most likely not, unless you noticed it and thought about it for some reason. Maybe the driver was acting suspicious, or maybe you’ve been thinking about buying a new car and you liked the color. Willingham says it works like this: if you don’t think about it very much, your brain figures you won’t need it again so it doesn’t bother storing it. But if you think about it, it must be important so the brain figures you’ll need it again.
How do you use this? Do whatever you can to get them thinking and to show you what they’re thinking about it. Ask questions, solicit their feedback and questions and even provoke arguments. If you think they’re bought in and have to get approval from someone else, ask them to tell you what points they’re going to make If memory is the residue of thought, the more they think, the more residue remains.
Make it meaningful
Just as a jigsaw puzzle is difficult to complete without seeing the picture on the box, unconnected facts are tough to remember unless there’s some bigger picture to remember, which is why John Medina says, “meaning before detail”. But when you understand the larger meaning, the facts are easier to recall when you reconstruct the meaning. Make sure they get the big picture, which is incidentally the bulk of that 10% you want them to get.
Meaning is easier to get when they can perceive a clear structure to your logic. Chess masters can glance for just a few seconds at multiple games in progress and accurately reconstruct them from memory, which novices can’t do. But when their memory is tested using boards on which pieces are placed at random, their memories are just as bad as yours and mine—because there’s no logic for them to follow.
Far and away the easiest structure to remember is the basic structure of every story ever told: situation, conflict, and resolution, or as Kurt Vonnegut put it: “Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again.” It works great for entertainment but also just as well for persuasion. Any time you’re trying to talk someone into something, you need to get them into trouble then get them out.
Make them feel it
Emotions can be messy, and that’s exactly the point: messes can be hard to erase. So, if you’re talking about a problem that needs to be solved, you need to bring out more than the financial impact. Should they be afraid, angry, disgusted? If it’s a great opportunity, should they be excited, expectant, greedy?
If you want to talk about customer dissatisfaction, put a face on your statistics. Use vivid details that they can see, hear, feel and touch in their minds.
Make it sticky using five memory SAVER tools
Not all information is created equal in terms of its ability to stick in the minds of your listeners. Here are five tools under the acronym SAVER:
STORIES: Stories stick. I’ve mentioned story in the sense of the structure of your overall conversation or presentation, but this is about individual anecdotes. Humans have passed on learning for millennia, and our brains are exquisitely attuned to hearing them, getting drawn in to their reality, and remembering them. But make your stories have a purpose beyond mere entertainment: because they’re so memorable, it’s important that any story you tell supports your theme or one of your main points.
ANALOGIES: Familiar things are more easily remembered, and analogies make things familiar. If you’re presenting an idea that is a big change from the status quo, analogies can make it seem safer by its familiarity. If it’s a sales presentation, some of the best analogies are drawn from the way your customer does business. If you can show them how your solution fits with something they already do, you get the double benefit of familiarity and credibility.
VISUALS: Forget the myth about auditory, visual and kinesthetic. We’re all visual learners; pictures stay in our minds far more commonly than abstract concepts and words. John Medina tells us in his book Brain Rules that retention goes from 10% to 65% when pictures are used. As with stories, this makes it important to make sure your pictures support your points, rather than just being decorative.
EXAMPLES: Examples make abstract things real. You see it every night on the evening news: if they run a story about the unemployment rate, they will profile a family struggling to make ends meet. Chip and Dan Heath call it the Mother Teresa effect, because she said, “If I see one, I will act.”
REPETITION: Churchill said, “If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack.” This is excellent advice, but pay attention to the subtlety: Churchill repeated it slightly differently each time, so that it doesn’t sound repetitious.
I’d like to leave you with one last thought, and I hope you will remember it. Of all people you want to remember your presentation, you are the most important. In fact, the study of memory was actually started by folks in my line of business. You might say they were my professional ancestors: those who taught public speaking skills in the ancient Greece and Rome. I those days speakers spoke for hours and it was considered unmanly to need notes, so they devised different ways of memorizing their points, and a lot of the mnemonic devices they used are the same ones that people in professional memory contests still use today. Today we’re told not to memorize our presentations because it makes you seem too scripted, but there’s a lot to be said for knowing your material cold—not word for word, but being able to talk without referring to notes, or what’s worse, looking back at your slides. People who have an excellent command of the facts are always impressive, and I would submit even more so today.
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Psychologists love to mess with economists’ heads. One of the best ways they’ve found to do this is with the Ultimatum Game. It goes like this: The experimenter makes an offer to two people. The first is given $10 and told to offer as much or as little of it as he wants to the second. The catch is that if the other person doesn’t accept the offer, no one gets the money. Here’s the question: if you are the acceptor, what is the minimum amount you would require to accept the offer?
If you were a truly rational economist, you would accept any amount greater than zero, even a penny—because it would leave you better off. But if you have blood rather than bits and bytes running through your veins, you would probably get insulted by a low offer and refuse it, in effect punishing yourself just so you could punish the other person. For the vast majority of actual human beings, emotion trumps logic in that case, and in many other cases as well.
Despite the best efforts of corporations to implement elaborate processes and systems to inoculate themselves, emotions are impossible to remove from every business decision, especially the more important ones. Gut-level Gus always has a place at the table, and effective persuaders ignore him at their peril – but they also know how to get on his good side. Gus is especially important to have as an ally because he’s the one most likely to see any decision turned into action.
In fact, we often—maybe even almost always—decide on an emotional/subconscious level and then afterwards tell ourselves or others a story that proves we used logic. We are not so much rational animals as rationalizing animals.
I probably don’t need to spend too much time convincing you that emotions can lead to less than optimal business decisions. Researchers have documented a correlation between sunny days and stock price rises, and many national stock markets fall when their country’s team is eliminated from the World Cup. Personally, we all have regretted things done or said in anger, excitement or lust. As the song says: “I know what I was feeling, but what was I thinking?”
But you may be surprised to know that emotions can actually improve the quality of decision making. We all have had the sense that something feels right, or feels wrong, and it pays to listen to your gut. (The normal metaphor is head vs. heart, but I use gut because it’s about a combination of the two.) It’s called introception, and it can actually be measured. In one experiment, hedge fund traders who were better attuned to what they were feeling at a particular time were more profitable in their trades, and the more experienced they were, the better they were at detecting their internal body signals.
Gus is fast. While Rational Randy is gathering additional data and calculating possible permutations, Gut-level Gus has already sized up the situation unconsciously and is signaling his decision through emotions. It’s like a chess master who sees a familiar pattern and knows exactly what move to choose without having to think several moves ahead.
Other studies have shown that people who have had damage to their orbitofrontal cortex, which connects their frontal lobes with their emotions, literally can’t tell what they’re feeling, and so they have severe trouble making even the simplest decisions in life.
One way to think about the emotions you feel just before you decide is to treat them as additional input for your decision. They don’t have to be decisive, but you shouldn’t ignore them or try to suppress them, either.
How to use pathos to improve your persuasion
But right now I’m not going to focus on how to use emotions to improve your own decision making. Let’s focus on how to use emotions to improve the quality your listeners’ decision-making (measured selfishly as how likely it is that they will buy into what we’re selling).
In many ways, modern science isn’t telling us things we haven’t already known to a certain extent for thousands of years. Aristotle called it pathos, and it was co-equal with logos and ethos as a persuasive tool.
Which emotions are particularly important?
Fear: It sounds bad, but fear is the most powerful emotion you can tap into for persuasive effect. I’ve already talked about prospect theory, which tells us that potential losses outweigh gains. You might say that fear is the most rational emotion you can have, because it protects you against danger and possible loss. It can be used defensively, like IBM used to do with its FUD sale, by playing on the fear, uncertainty, and doubt associated with straying from the tried and true. Or it can be used offensively, by playing up the risk of not changing.
Anticipated regret: Mark Goulston, in his book, Just Listen, says that his long experience with top executives has shown that many are more afraid of making a mistake than in doing something right.
Shock: Sometimes people need to be jolted out of their complacency. John Kotter tells the story in his book Leading Change where an executive was having trouble selling his idea for centralizing his company’s procurement process, with a projected savings of close to a billion dollars. He had an intern go out and buy one pair of work gloves from each approved vendor, and piled them up on a conference table. When executives walked in and saw a three-foot-high-pile containing 424 pairs of gloves, they were shocked into action. As Kotter says, successful long term change in companies is not a product of analyze-think-change; it is driven by see-feel-change.
Happiness: You can also recruit positive emotions to help you sell your ideas. When people are in a good mood, they are more optimistic about the future, and more wiling to consider risks. They also are more affected by heuristics (mental short-cuts), such as whether they like you.
Pride: I’ve covered this one at length in episode 12, but let me remind you that people love to feel proud of their actions, so when you can show how their decision makes them or their organization live up to its values, it can be a powerful reason to act.
How to use appeal to Gut-level Gus
Your challenge is to know the emotional state of your listeners, and diminish or enhance it depending on how it aligns with your idea. Here are a few things you can do to get Gut-level Gus on your side:
- Know your audience. How do they feel about the topic or situation? What is their emotional state at the time you’re talking to them?
- Decide which emotions you want your audience to feel. As Maya Angelou said, “they won’t remember what you said, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.”
- Get in tune with your own emotions.
- Choose your time wisely. When emotions get too hot, logic gets crowded out.
- Name it and tame it. If your listeners are in the “wrong” emotional state, you might be tempted to ignore it, but that won’t make it go away. You need to bring it out into the open. Acknowledge what they’re thinking, and empathize. As Goulston says, people like to “feel felt”.
- Redirect the emotion if possible. If you can’t beat it, use it. For example, if they’re feeling anxious about change, you can ask questions to get them to articulate the risk of not changing.
- Use impact questions. “How would you explain it to your boss if that happens?”
- Personalize it.
- Make it vivid.
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What if you could get the other person to make a decision that would not only be good for you but make them feel good about themselves? You can, by appealing to the decision maker in their mind that I call Norma. Who is Norma and how does she affect decisions?
Before I answer that, In The Art of Woo, there’s a story of how Bono approached Senator Jesse Helms to enlist his support for African debt relief so that those nations could devote more resources towards combatting AIDS. He began his pitch with a data-filled explanation of the problem, (this approach had worked very well with Bill Gates), but quickly saw that Helms was losing interest. Bono, a born-again Christian who knew Helms was also, switched to the language of the Bible and quoted Scripture to make his case. By the end of the meeting, Helms rose to his feet to embrace him, and went on to help raise $435 million for the cause. The point of the story is that no amount of data would have changed Helms’ mind—rational Randy was definitely not in charge. Norma was.
I call her Norma, but she also could be called Ida, or Val, because of three closely related ways we make decisions. We have an identity, which is sense of who we are. That identity is usually how we see ourselves as individuals and as part of a group. Individually, we pay attention to our values, and we also go along with group norms.
Why is Norma so important? Two reasons. First, it can contradict two powerful tendencies in human judgment, motivation and decision making. Second, it’s kind of like the perpetual motion machine of decision making. Let me explain what I mean.
One of the oldest ideas in selling is WIFM, or “What’s in it for me?”[1] It’s a great reminder that you should frame your persuasive message in terms of the other person’s self-interest. WIFM is enormously useful in persuasive communication, because it puts you into the outside-in thinking frame of mind, and forces you to consider your product or idea from the perspective of the person whose agreement you want. I love the idea of WIFM, and have used it for over two decades in my training classes. But WIFM has limits. People do care about more than just their personal self-interest.
Striving for the ideal self is so powerful that it can actually stand Maslow’s hierarchy on its head. History is full of examples of people who have risked even survival itself for the self-actualization of living up to their ideal identity. The Economist ran an obituary of Private Bill Millin, who hit the beaches of Normandy as a bagpiper in the British army. “He led the company down the main street of Bénouville playing “Blue Bonnets over the Border”, refusing to run when the commander of 6 Commando urged him to; pipers walked as they played.”
Second, appealing to Norma makes for sustainable decisions. Its like a perpetual motion machine because it doesn’t wear off and it feeds on itself. If you want to drive lasting behavior change, you’ve got to find ways to get people to do things for their own reasons, and the best way to do this is to use their sense of who they are to provide internal, long-lasting motivation.
In his book, A Primer on Decision Making: How Decisions Happen, James March tells us that when confronted with a decision, people make a rapid unconscious calculation that answers these questions: What kind of situation is this? Who am I? What does a person such as I do in this type of situation? Our identities—who we are and how we see ourselves—are extremely important to us.
So, how do you use this in persuasive communication?
First, realize that you probably under-use it. The problem is that we are often wrong about others’ motivations. Research has shown that we overestimate to what extent others rely on self-interest. We tend to see ourselves as more noble than others, so we overestimate their reliance on “selfish” extrinsic rewards.
Second, know your audience and their values. You have to really understand your customer to know what they truly value. It’s not enough to go to their website and copy down their vision and values statements—too often these are the stuff of plaques and platitudes that no one takes seriously; I used to refer to them in my sales training classes until I quickly realized that most of the participants couldn’t even pick out their own corporate values statements in a multiple choice question.
Third, get them to speak about their values. It’s best if it comes from them, not from you. Fortunately, the process you go through in discovering their values has the added benefit of bringing those values to the top of their minds as you’re talking to them.
Fourth, appeal to WIFU. It’s not time to get rid of WIFM, but it’s a good idea to add other tools. The first is WIFU, or “what’s in it for us?” Many people will do things for the good of the group they belong to, even when it carries a personal cost to themselves. Asking this question in addition to WIFM, will enable you tap into higher motivations.
Finally, be very careful with it. Bono’s approach worked with Jesse Helms because he shared his values. If he didn’t, it would have come across as cynical and would probably have backfired on him. In addition, trying to combine values with value can backfire on you.
