If you’re looking to make your persuasive communications more effective and efficient, a powerful tool is to master the use of analogy, as explained in a delightful book: Shortcut: How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas
Analogies are like the water that surrounds a fish: we don’t notice them but they are essential to the way we think and communicate. But it’s helpful to pay attention to analogies because they are powerful tools for persuasive communication; they’re essential to the way we think, learn, and react to new information.
Analogies work because our brains are hardwired to learn from experience and to make judgments with as little hard thinking as we can get away with. As we gain experience in the world, we build mental models of what works or doesn’t work, and what is good or bad. So whenever we encounter new information, we try to make sense of it by comparing it to something familiar. In essence, we choose an appropriate analogy from our vast internal database—usually instantly and unconsciously—and that colors how we react to the new information. Because there can be many familiar situations that might apply, the persuader who chooses the analogy for us creates an easy shortcut for us to take. An astute persuader chooses the best analogy; he does not leave the choice up to the recipient.
According to Pollack, there are five ways that analogies affect the persuasiveness of your ideas:
- Like a native guide in a strange land, they use the familiar to explain the unfamiliar. This is the most obvious function of analogy, and it’s particularly useful in reducing the perceived risk of new ideas.
- Like magicians who direct your attention for maximum effect, they highlight some things and hide others. They help you frame your message in the best possible light.
- They identify useful abstractions and make them concrete so that we can grasp and remember them easier. When FDR faced the difficult task of selling the American people on providing aid to Britain through Lend-Lease, he compared it to lending your neighbors your garden hose when their house is on fire.
- They tell a coherent story. In fact, an analogy is a distilled form of a story, and most stories are just extended analogies.
- They resonate emotionally. The feelings associated with the familiar transfer over to the new.
Analogies are subtle; they’re like the spoonful of sugar which makes it easier to swallow a difficult message—they help you bypass the normal reaction that people have against being told what to do. Analogies are vivid, which helps people remember your key points later on when they use the information you’ve provided to make their decision.
Most of all, analogies are powerful; once they’ve taken hold, they’re difficult to eradicate. It’s true that people who disagree with you may dispute your analogy, but there is definitely a first-mover advantage: if the analogy resonates, it’s difficult to fight it, even when they can point out flaws. An excellent example described in the book was used by John Roberts during his Senate hearings when he was nominated for Chief Justice. Roberts knew that Democratic Senators would challenge his fairness, so he opened by comparing himself to a baseball umpire; his point was that an umpire does not make the rules, he enforces them, and he does so fairly and impartially. Although then-Senator Biden pointed out that as Chief Justice, he would in fact be the one making the rules, the analogy had already taken hold. (If your opponent gets their analogy out first, it’s usually not enough to refute it. You have to fight fire with fire and come up with a better analogy of your own.)
The John Roberts example is just one of dozens that Pollack recounts in the book and which make it a pleasure to read. Read this book and you will be better able to tap into hidden superpowers of persuasion you might not even know you have.
Don't take the first one off the top
It’s generally easy to come up with an analogy to describe or support a concept you’re presenting; our minds are steeped in analogies, which is why so many of them may easily come to the surface. But you can usually improve on the first analogy that comes to mind. Here are some suggestions for choosing just the right one:
- Decide the main point
- Find the right balance between familiarity and novelty
- Test it for weaknesses
Decide the main point. Every situation can be superficially compared to others in different ways. If you want to find the analogy that gets your audience to see your point immediately, you must first be clear in your own mind what that essential point is. Once you do, it acts as a quality filter: just the process of distilling down to key words will activate your imagination and bring better analogies to mind.
Find the right balance between familiarity and novelty. Make it familiar to the audience, but not too familiar. The idea has to be something they will immediately recognize and pay attention to—if it’s familiar, they will recognize it, but if it’s too familiar they won’t pay much attention.
So many analogies are so commonly used that they become what Douglas Hofstadter calls “banalogies”—barely registering in our minds when we hear them.[1] It’s ironic that people who urge us to be more creative can’t think of a better analogy than “thinking outside the box”. Honestly, do you envision a box in your mind when you encounter that phrase?
You have to dig deep. In my own experience, it’s easy to come up with an adequate analogy quickly, but a really compelling or specific analogy takes time. Memory is like a t-shirt drawer: the ones you wear all the time always get put back in on the top, so you use them more often. The most common analogies are always at the top of your memory, and you have to dig down to the bottom to pull up one of the less common ones. The less common ones are more likely to capture the audience’s attention. Memory is also capricious: focusing hard on finding the right analogy doesn’t always work immediately, so if you prepare early by writing a rough draft and then set it aside, better ideas bubble up later—often when you’re thinking of something else.
At the other end, sometimes analogies fail because they don’t make sense to the audience. At the very least, they should be relevant to the culture and even the age of your listeners. Because so much of the training I do is overseas, I’ve developed an awareness of how much of what we say contains references to things in the US that others don’t relate to, especially our sports. Also, as time goes on I find that audience members are getting younger every year, and many of them don’t understand the references I make to TV shows or music that may have been popular before they were even born! I was once brought up short in a training class when I compared presentation structure to a newspaper article, only to be reminded by one of the younger attendees that many people under 30 never read a newspaper.
So what’s the best way to find the right balance? Make it personal, local and timely. You can make it familiar and unique by choosing an analogy that is special to them, perhaps from their own business environment. I knew a salesperson who was selling cellular service to the Michelin plant in South Carolina. When the purchaser said he did not see much difference between the various carriers, she said she understood because she had trouble distinguishing between brands of tires. She further went on to say that there are clear differences if you are willing to look beneath the surface. You can also compare the decision you are asking them to make to a similar one they already have made. Either of these require research, but it pays off many times over in credibility.
For added impact, try to find an analogy that will resonate emotionally as well as cognitively. If you compare it to something that they have strong feelings for, the emotions evoked will attach themselves to your idea as well. One of the best ways is to tap into how they see—or want to see—themselves. For example, at one of my clients, I train their engineers in selling techniques. Because some engineers find selling distasteful, I show how selling is like engineering in certain ways, especially when viewed as a problem-solving exercise.
You especially need to consider using an analogy when referring to numbers. Some numbers needed for business presentations are either so large (billions of dollars of revenue) or so small (Six Sigma quality means 3.4 defects per million), that they are difficult to put into human perspective.[2] Numbers also need to be placed in the proper context to be understood. Steve Jobs was once asked by a reporter how he felt about the fact that Apple’s market share was “stuck” at 5%. Jobs replied: “Our market share is greater than BMW or Mercedes in the car industry.”[3] With one analogy Jobs put the number into context and also compared apple favorably to two well-respected brands.
Test if for weaknesses. Because every situation is different, no analogy is perfect. You have to watch for unintended effects, which is important enough to consider in the next article of this series.
Other articles in this series:
How Analogies Help Sell New Concepts
[1] Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander.
[2] Here’s an excellent example that brings the numbers of the national debt down to human scale.
[3] From The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, by Carmine Gallo.
