One of the most important pillars of persuasive communication is outside-in thinking, which is thinking about an issue or a situation from the point of view of the other person. I’ve written about it extensively and it’s a fundamental part of every sales or communication course I teach.
Obviously, the ability to predict other’s thinking and attitude about what you’re trying to persuade them about (what psychologists call perspective taking) is a tremendous asset, because it allows you to frame your idea in a way that is most attractive to them, or even change your idea to accommodate their needs, such as in a win-win negotiation. That’s why I always urge you to research the other person, including what their interests are, how they are measured, how they’ve made similar decisions in the past, and their possible reasons for objecting. We’re all self-centered so outside-in thinking doesn’t come naturally to us; that’s why simply asking yourself those questions is an excellent way to remind yourself and engage your mind into their perspective.
The benefit of outside-in thinking is so clear that there should be nothing more to be said. But what if it’s wrong?
I’ve recently learned that outside-in thinking is inadequate, and may even hinder your persuasive attempts. A recent journal article by three researchers involving 25 separate experiments has found that while people may think they understand the other person’s perspective by engaging in outside-in thinking, evidence shows that they don’t. We’re just not as good at figuring out others’ minds as we think we are. Even married couples are consistently wrong about predicting what their partner will answer. In one of the experiments, one spouse was asked to predict how the other would react to certain statements. They predicted they would get 13 out of 20 right; in reality they got an average of five.
If even married couples can be so consistently wrong and overconfident, it’s apparent that simply making the attempt to understand the other person’s perspective is not enough. In fact, if it causes you to become overconfident in your estimation of what they’re thinking, it can actually backfire on you.
I’m not recommending that you ditch outside-in thinking. By all means, do the preparation and ask yourself the questions. But don’t stop there. Be humble about your initial conclusions, because they’re only predictions, and predictions give you the illusion of knowledge. You’ll be better off if instead of predicting how the other person will react, you think of it as a hypothesis.
A hypothesis needs to be tested, and the simplest way to test a hypothesis about what another person is thinking is to just ask them. This is about as blindingly obvious as can be, but according to the authors of the study it’s rarely done. I’m not sure why, but I’ll take a stab at perspective taking here and make a hypothesis about what’s going on in the minds of people who don’t ask: they either assume they already know, or they’re afraid of finding out they’re wrong.
Outside-in thinking can be a great start as long as you don’t stop there. Go beyond perspective taking to what one of the authors of the article, Nicholas Epley, calls “perspective getting.” You can prepare in advance by thinking of questions you can ask to verify your assumptions about the other person but then go into the conversation with an open and curious mindset. Ask your questions and then really listen to the answers; probe further if you need clarification; paraphrase back your perceptions to confirm your understanding.
Asking questions, listening, and engaging in a sincere effort to understand the other person’s point of view will give you a much more accurate picture of what they’re thinking. Perhaps even more importantly, they will send a clear message to the other person that you actually care—and that’s probably the most important reason you shouldn’t take outside-in thinking for granted.
Piggybacking off last week’s article about personal renewal and the importance of staying curious, I would like to recommend Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It
For starters, being curious makes you easier to talk to. Actually caring enough to want to know about the other person is what gets us to ask questions and thus use our ears more than our mouths. Curiosity focuses attention and shows caring… If you want to be interesting to other people, show an interest in them; when you’re curious about them, and about the things that they care about, you will find that they will talk to you at length.
That’s called empathic curiosity, by the way, and it’s one of the three forms of curiosity that Leslie describes in his book.
Empathic curiosity is a key quality for successful salespeople as well. It’s the central ingredient in outside-in thinking, in which you strive to get what you want by helping the other person get what they want. You can find out a lot about the other person because it’s part of your job, or you can be intrinsically curious about who they are and what makes them tick—and people can tell the difference.
Besides showing you care, your curiosity is what prompts you not to accept the easy, surface answers, and to dig deeper into situations—to ask why with the tenacity of a four-year-old until you get to the real issues. This can be extremely useful in consultative selling, and especially in negotiations, where the ability to understand others’ perspectives can help uncover their true interests behind their declared positions.
Persuasion also depends to a large extent on having something useful or important to say, and that requires a mind filled with knowledge about the world, which you can only get if you are truly and deeply curious about how things work and how people think. This is called epistemic curiosity, and it’s the mechanism that drives us to learn for the sake of learning. Epistemic curiosity built our modern world because it led humans to explore outside the safety of their fire, to sail out of sight of land, and to question what the authorities called wisdom.
Epistemic curiosity is what the book is mostly about. It’s what drives us to dig deep into the details and nuances of a topic. The big difference between epistemic curiosity and the shallower sort is that it requires effort, and that effort is repaid through deeper learning and greater understanding. Of course, when you’re truly curious, the effort is not work, it is joy. It’s also curiosity with a specific direction, where you are in control of your own effort and learning, not pulled along by the latest shiny distraction that comes your way.
However, curiosity is not all good. While it may not kill you, it can certainly kill your productivity. The form of curiosity that fills your otherwise productive time is diversive curiosity, and unfortunately it’s probably the most common. It’s what attracts us to novelty; it’s shallow and strives for instant gratification. Unlike epistemic curiosity, diversive curiosity controls you. As Leslie tells us, imagine what you would tell someone from fifty years ago about the future:
“I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.”
It doesn’t have to be that way. The internet can make you smarter or dumber, depending on how you use it. Be careful what you put in your mind. Just as you are what you eat; you are what you read.
Curious is a fascinating blend of history and science. Chapter 2 explores the development—or lack thereof—of curiosity in children. Kids ask up to 100 questions per hour. Until about 30 months, their questions focus on what and where, and then they move on to why and how questions. Curiosity continues to flourish when adults answer the question and engage them with questions of their own, and dies when they don’t.
For me, the best chapter is the one in which Leslie demolishes the trendy idea that we don’t have to learn anything deeply anymore because we can Google it. We’re told that it’s more important to think critically and be creative than to stuff our minds with facts. The problem is that critical thinking and creativity require a deep database, because that’s the only way our mind can make the meaningful connections. In his words, ”Creativity starts in combination”, and you need a lot of useful information in your mind to make the necessary combinations.
Today we’re in the Age of Answers. The thing about Google is that it is very good at finding answers to things you specifically want to know, but it’s terrible at helping you stumble across things you don’t even know yet that you want to know more about.
The benefit of building your store of knowledge is why, according to recent research cited in this book, curiosity may be as important to success as intelligence and grit. It provides the intrinsic motivation to learn that keeps you engaged. To the curious, every day and every encounter is a new opportunity for growth.
Fortunately, curiosity is a state, not a trait. This means you can increase your general level of curiosity. Leslie provides seven suggestions.
7 ways to stay curious:
Stay foolish: don’t let success quench your curiosity.
Build the database: Facts are not separate bits of knowledge, they are nodes in a network of knowledge. “knowledge loves knowledge”.
Forage like a foxhog: Is it better to have deep or broad knowledge? Leslie’s take on the comparisons between hedgehogs and foxes is that you need t-shaped knowledge: deep in one area combined with breadth.
Ask the big Why. Understanding others’ motivations will make you a better negotiator and influencer.
Be a thinkerer. Ideas are nothing without hard work to make them come to fruition. Thinking and action have to go together, so you need both the big picture and the small details.
Question your teaspoons. Anything can be interesting if you study it closely enough.
Turn puzzles into mysteries. Turn puzzles into mysteries. Puzzles can lose their interest when solved. Mysteries can intrigue forever.
Well-researched and well-written, Curious is a fascinating book, which I strongly recommend[1].
[1] The only thing I did not like is the poor quality of the citations, because they make it difficult for those of us who are curious to dig even deeper into the topic.
Although 2013 is still young, I predict that Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success
The premise of the book is quite simple: the world comprises three types of people: givers, takers and matchers. Which type tends to be most successful? Although we’ve all been raised on the homily that it’s better to give than to receive, the bad news is that the left side of most bell curves is populated by givers, those who contribute more to others than they expect in return. Quite simply, they do less for themselves, people take advantage of them, and they are prone to burnout.
But the real surprise is that the right side of bell curves is also a givers’ neighborhood. Combining extensive research with inspiring examples, Grant shows us how and why successful givers do well for themselves at the same time that they contribute so much to others. Successful givers approach four principal aspects of relationships differently. The four aspects are networking, collaborating, developing talent and communicating.
Successful givers are excellent networkers, but so are a lot of takers and matchers. The difference is that successful givers proactively do things without expectation of return, creating goodwill and possibly setting an example that may be contagious. One of the excellent tips in this chapter is the suggestion to revive dormant connections. The benefit is that when most people tap into their network for help, their strong ties are trusting and disposed to help, but their weak ties have more diverse information. People you haven’t talked to in a long time combine the assets of strong ties and weak ties.
Givers are also excellent collaborators, quick to help others in a team environment and without spending too much time worrying about who gets credit. They tend to demonstrate what the National Outdoor Leadership School calls expedition behavior, putting the needs of the mission and the team ahead of your own. In the long run, this behavior increases their prestige and the willingness of others to help them when they need it.
Givers are also excellent at spotting talent, because they’re not worried about creating rivals who may outshine them. Also, because they tend to assume competence and talent on the part of others, they may be generating self-fulfilling prophecies. I found this chapter to be rather long on anecdote and thin on evidence, but the next chapter made up for it.
For me the meatiest chapter covered the successful practices that givers follow in communicating with others, in presenting, selling, and negotiating. Successful givers ask more meaningful questions and have an effective mix of confidence and humility in their advocacy. They also tend to be good at perspective-taking, which is the cognitive equivalent of empathy: instead of feeling what the other person is feeling, they are adept at thinking what they’re thinking. In studies, people with high empathy do worse in creating value, because they are more apt to give the other person what they want. Those high in perspective taking are better at coming up with creative ideas to give both sides more of what they want.
The second section of the book is for those who are too giving, and tend to fall at the bottom of the success distribution because they get taken advantage of and exhaust their energies serving others rather than themselves. The key insight is that self-interest and other-interest are not opposite points on a single line; they are separate axes on a graph. Those who give too much have a high score for other-interest, and a low score for self-interest. Successful givers are at the top right of the graph, combining a high other-focus with high self-interest. As a result, they are in better control of their giving, seeing it as a positive choice rather than an obligation, and being more proactive in allocating their giving time and energy.
If you get inspired by Grant’s book, what you’ll really want to know is how to become a more successful giver. The Catch-22 is that giving has to be sincere if it’s to work, and if you try to make it strategic it’s not sincere. I do think, however, that if you begin changing your behavior for strategic purposes, and start doing more for others, two positive things may happen. First, regardless of the motive, you’re contributing to the sum total of benefit and happiness. Even more important is that your attitude may begin to catch up with your actions. The mind does not like cognitive dissonance, so if we’re acting in a giving manner we will begin to see ourselves more as givers, leading to a virtuous circle. The book finishes with ten suggestions for becoming more of a giver—I’ll keep you posted on how it works.
The one weakness in the book is that in some of the chapters, as mentioned above, there was less evidence than it seemed on first reading. You get pulled in to the inspiring stories, but on closer reading you don’t find enough evidence to be able to make up your mind whether those examples are the rule or the exception.
Despite this, the message in Grant’s book is so powerful that I give it five stars. But it’s not a gift—it’s truly earned. The book itself is a gift to anyone who reads it, and to countless others who may be on the receiving end of their stepped-up giving.
