Presuasion, Springtime and Fossils

A few of us attended the Benchmark for Business Event last week and I was sitting next to Roderick Miller from IEDP who summed up the event beautifully.. so thought I would share it with you all! Jude

EVENT: If you want to get something done and you need others to help you then some degree of persuasion skill is necessary; often this might be implicit and sometimes explicit. In business it ranges from the obvious sales and marketing functions through leadership and strategy implementation to behavioural activities like getting hotel customers to reuse their towels.

Benchmark for Business ran a workshop in Edinburgh earlier this week led by Steve J Martin who works closely with Robert Cialdini of the University of Arizona on this area of management psychology. Martin used the parable of a man walking down a sunny street when they pass a blind beggar with a sign that states baldly "I am blind" and nothing else, beside his upturned hat; taking out his pen the marketing executive writes three additional words on the card; returning an hour later the beggar recognises his footsteps and asks if he is the man who wrote on his card, as since then he has been much more successful. "What," the beggar asks "did you write?". "Nothing that is not true" says the man, "I just wrote the message differently - 'It is Springtime and I am Blind'".

This tale is not new, but Martin used it elegantly to show not only the power of tapping into people's emotional responses and creating a connection to them, but the necessity of doing so - and also the importance of creating the connection before the transaction was engaged in - his 'pre-suasion'.

Martin uses Cialdini's Six Principles of Persuasion that we have featured before. There is increasing awareness in management and also in government, with the power of individuals'emotional responses to yield greater performance in tasks and projects. The "how" you say things is just as importance as the "what" and the "why" of the things you say. We only have to look at the success of Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge and its influence in both the Obama and Cameron governments (infact Steve J Martin is working with the UK Prime Minsiter's Cabinet Office currently - and the Customs and Revenue department), and the rise of the behavioural economists.

Martin also highlighted the negative effects of well-intentioned advice and warnings, citing the study conducted in the 90's on visitors to a "Prehistoric Forest" in Arizona, where the parks authority asked people not to remove fossils they might find while walking around the area. The study removed the signs and then replaced them some time later and showed clearly that the when the signs were removed less loss occured; the signs merely acted as encouragement to tourists to remove the fossils; no signs - less losses. This is not because the idea would not occur to the visitors to remove the fossil fragments, but that it indicated that sufficient numbers of people were removing them to warrant the sign, and this idea of it not being unusual habituated the concept in people's minds to make it acceptable - even when they were explicitly being asked not to.

The increased influence that comes with greater understanding of how people respond to these triggers is very powerful - and it is important that leaders understand them.

Roderick Miller - IEDP - Executive Development Group.