by David Crankshaw on January 27, 2010
When Obama speaks, why do his words confirm the beliefs of both Democrats and Republicans? Whatever he says reinforces the agreement that Democrats feel. And it reinforces the skepticism of the Republicans.
It’s our psychology. If someone tells us something, even if it is factually or logically sound, we will ignore the facts and logic if we are feeling skeptical.
Why does this happen?
Our memory is largely composed of stories. When we communicate, I tell you a story which reminds you of a story which you tell to me, and so on. When we hear Obama or any politician speak, it reminds us of a “story”, in this case the story of our political beliefs on that particular subject.
If the speaker’s words conflict with our story, then we work to dismiss the speaker’s comments so that we can confirm what we already believe. Once we’ve resolved the conflict, we actually experience a kind of pleasure.
Scientists have observed this operating in the brain. When people are feeling skeptical, the factual evidence they hear doesn’t engage the reasoning part of their brains. It engages the parts of the brain that are involved with regulating emotion and the parts involved with resolving conflict.
Psychologists call it a “confirmation bias.” What we hear tends to confirm what we already believe.
Now imagine what happens when a skeptical buyer reads or hears information from your company. If you start explaining the facts too early they will turn your facts against you. Your logical argument will simply confirm what these skeptics already believe. The audience will actually become more resistant to you, not less!
How to combat confirmation bias?
Focus on the moderates. You aren’t going to persuade everyone. The most confirmed skeptics will remain skeptical no matter what you do, so stop trying. Focus on the audience in the middle. These people are more moderate in their skepticism and more open to the possibility of another point of view.
Put your audience in a state of persuadability. As Cicero said, you want your audience to be attentive, trusting, and willing to be persuaded. Before launching into the logic of your argument, gain their attention and trust. Communicate how you share their values. Demonstrate that you have practical experience in the subject. Show that you have their interests in mind.
Begin with values or beliefs the audience already holds. Make the premise of your core argument something that the audience already believes. Then build the logic of your argument so the audience believes your choice to be the one that is also advantageous to them.
by David Crankshaw on January 19, 2010
Entrepreneurs are energetic. They are ambitious for themselves, their ideas, and their organization. They hustle to convince investors, employees, and customers to believe their vision.
Scientists and engineers who start companies are especially energetic. More is at risk. Their ideas are unproven, but confidence in their technology propels them forward.
And yet, the communication from these companies too often hides the bustle and the drive underneath. The text on their websites and in their white papers uses a passive voice. The reader gets the impression that an unseen actor is causing events to occur, that no one in particular is driving the machine.
Why is this? Why do these hard-charging risk takers allow their company to communicate a sanitized story in a passive voice?
One culprit you can blame is the tendency of bureaucratic large companies to obfuscate. And our tendency to imitate their flabby and passive language. To avoid showing any weakness or imperfection, in business writing we too often adopt a language that allows no one in particular to take responsibility.
But that’s not the only cause. You can also blame scientific writing and the scientific training of people in technical fields. In science, the goal is to discover and communicate facts. We don’t negotiate facts, they are the truth and we discover them. The passive voice is often used in scientific writing to communicate the message: “This isn’t just me saying these results are true. These experiments were conducted and the truth emerged.”
However, business is not science. It is not only about facts. It is about a truth that you negotiate. It is a truth that requires more than the just the logic of your argument. To persuade others, they must have confidence in your character and feel you have connected with their emotions and attitudes.
What should business writing be like? Richard Lanham states firmly:
It ought to be fast, concrete, and responsible. It should show someone acting, doing something to or for someone else. Business life offers few occasions for the descriptive set-piece; it chronicles history in the making, depicts someone working on matter or with people. It seldom relates abstract concepts for the fun of it; abstractions occur as parts of a problem to be solved. Business prose ought, therefore, to be verb-dominated prose, lining up actor, action, and object in a causal chain and lining them up fast.
In business we have to know who is doing what to whom. Buyers have to know you will take action and what you will do. The active voice states clearly that you take responsibility for the results you will produce.
by David Crankshaw on January 16, 2010
First you hardly notice it. Then it starts to bother you. The more you think about it, the more you wonder if there is some way to make the problem go away. You try a few things. They don’t work. There’s no easy solution. Of course, if it was easy, it would have already been solved by someone else.
You try a few more things. They don’t work. You put it down for a while and go on to other matters.
Then one day, via a different route, you get a glimmer of how to go about it.
More blind alleys, more failed experiments. But you feel you are on the right track. You persevere.
Then one day it comes to you. You try it a different way. It works! Feeble, clumsy, but it works. Getting it to work consistently in an elegant way will come later. The main thing today is that you closed the gap. A gap that had bothered you for a long time between your desire to solve the problem and the reality of being unable to find a solution.
What a relief. It’s exciting, this thing you’ve worked on for so long. You want to tell other people about your solution. And you do tell them. But they don’t seem as excited. In fact, the opposite, they are bored, even annoyed.
How could this be? It’s such a problem. Don’t others want to know how solve it?
Well, no, they don’t.
Why? Because they don’t feel the problem the way you did. And until you can help them feel the itchy, bothersomeness of this problem, the gap between what they want and the reality of what they can do, until they feel that it is a problem they MUST solve, they won’t be interested in how you solved it.
That’s the irony of marketing. You have the solution. But your audience won’t be interested in your solution until they feel the problem as deeply as you do.
You have to go back to the beginning when you barely registered the problem, when you just started to notice it. Then you have to walk the other person through a simulation of your experience. Answering their questions along the way. Highlighting the gap between desire and the harsh reality that they don’t have the solution yet.
It was a mystery for you. Make it a mystery for them too.
by David Crankshaw on January 4, 2010
The last two posts were about the nature of trust and levels of trust that exist between people who work together (here and here).
If common stories are how we build trust in each other, where do people start who have no stories in common? How can two people initiate a business relationship that requires a level of trust to even get started? How can they develop confidence in each other about actions they can’t control?
- Start with realistic assumptions about how much the other individual can trust you.
- Study the other person’s professional life. Companies they’ve worked for and what they did, where they went to school, the arc of their professional development.
- Learn about what they are trying to accomplish and the obstacles they face.
- Find the links between the other person’s stories and your own stories - people, companies, geographies, experiences you might have in common.
Now you have questions to ask, areas to look for connection. You can remind the other person of their own stories in a way that coordinates these past events with the possibility of future events that include you. You can simulate common stories with the other person in order to initiate trust more systematically and quickly.
by David Crankshaw on January 3, 2010
In the last post I described Schank’s idea on intelligence and storytelling:
Intelligence is our ability to understand what has happened to us well enough to “predict when it might happen again.”
“We get reminded of what has happened to us previously for a very good reason. Reminding is the mind’s method of coordinating past events with future events to enable generalization and prediction.”
And further that conversations between people strike at the heart of intelligence because they involve reminding.
“Storytelling and understanding are functionally the same thing. Conversation is no more than responsive storytelling. The process of reminding is what controls understanding and therefore, conversation.”
Trust derives from common stories
The level of trust that exists between two people is largely a function of the stories they have in common. The more stories that you have in common with another person, the better able you are to coordinate past events with future events in relation to this person. These common stories allow you to generalize and predict what might happen in the future with this person.
The common stories are strengthened if there was something important at stake in your common experiences (jobs or lives were on the line) and if you faced significant obstacles together (the deal with the customer kept threatening to fall through or the emergency surgeries almost failed).
You may have a long history with your mail carrier, but very little is at stake and you faced few obstacles together that tested your character. But if you were in battle with another person or worked in the same firehouse or raised children with another person, you have a history together. You had something at stake and it tested your character.
If two people are considering doing business together - a project, a deal, a purchase - they need a level of confidence about what the other person will do if far away, or if it is in the future, of if their actions can’t be verified. They need a level of trust. The risk of the business and the level of trust between them will determine whether they will consider moving forward.
You could divide the amount of trust between two people into three levels.
First level - You and the other person have a long and deep relationship. The two of you have faced many obstacles where the stakes were high. You tell each other your common stories until they are the same story. You coordinate these stories in relation to your plans for the future. Because of your history together, you have a high degree of confidence in your ability to face obstacles in the future together, even if you are far away from each other or if what the other person does cannot be verified.
Second level - You and the other person don’t know each other, but you have a third party in common with whom you both have a history and with whom you share many stories. If this third party introduces the two of you, the third party brings up the stories that he or she has in common with each of you and begins to build a story between the two of you - colleges you attended, other friends or family in common, companies where you worked, books you’ve read and places you’ve travelled. The third party coordinates the stories in common with both of you to create an imagined future where the two of you would create your own stories together. The third party uses story to create an initial level of trust between the two of you.
Third level - You’ve never met the other person. You don’t have any third parties in common that can share a story with each of you. The two of you are on your own and you are starting from square one.
If you want to do business with someone, the best person to choose is someone at the First Level where a high level of trust already exists. If that’s not possible, then a good introduction to someone is the next best. You’ll still have to establish trust with each other by building a history of common experiences where you face obstacles where there is something at stake, but the third party gives you a foundation to start from.
The Third Level is the hardest. You are starting from scratch. In the next post we’ll look at how to simulate stories in common with a person at the Third Level that will get you closer to agreeing to initiate a relationship.
