Author Archives: Greg Satell

About Greg Satell

Greg Satell is a popular speaker and consultant. His latest book, Cascades: How to Create a Movement That Drives Transformational Change, is available now. Follow his blog at Digital Tonto or on Twitter @Digital Tonto.

Innovation Should Always Serve the People

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Innovation Should Always Serve the People

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The global activist Srdja Popović once told me that the goal of a revolution should be to become mainstream, to be mundane and ordinary. If you are successful it should be difficult to explain what was won because the previous order seems so unbelievable. That’s what true transformation looks like.

Yet many leaders approach innovation and change as if they were swashbuckling heroes in their own action movie. Companies like Theranos, WeWork and Uber squandered billions of dollars on business models that never made any sense. People post their latest ChatGPT prompts on social media while Elon Musk trolls Twitter.

These days, innovation has become, far too often, solipsistic and self-referential, pursued for the glory of the innovators themselves rather than for the benefit of everyone else and there is increasing evidence the venture-funded entrepreneurship model is crowding out more productive investments. We need to move away from hype and focus on impact.

The Eureka Moment Myth

In 1928, Alexander Fleming, a brilliant but sometimes careless scientist, arrived at his lab after a summer holiday to find that a mysterious mold had contaminated his Petri dishes and was eradicating the bacteria colonies he was trying to grow. Intrigued, he decided to study the mold. That’s how Fleming came to be known as the discoverer of penicillin.

Fleming’s story is one that is told and retold because it reinforces so much about what we love about innovation. A brilliant mind meets a pivotal moment of epiphany and—Eureka!— the world is forever changed. Unfortunately, that’s not really how things work. It wasn’t true in Fleming’s case and it won’t work for you.

The truth is that when Fleming published his results in 1929, few took notice. It wasn’t until 1939, a decade later, that Howard Florey and Ernst Chain came across Fleming’s long forgotten paper, understood its significance and undertook the hard work to transform it into a viable treatment that could actually help people.

Yet even then, to make a significant impact on the world, penicillin had to be produced in massive quantities, something that was far out of the reach of two research chemists. Florey reached out to the Rockefeller Foundation for help and moved to the US to work with American labs. In 1943 the U.S.’s War Production Board enlisted 21 companies to produce supplies for the war effort, saving countless lives and ushering in the new age of antibiotics.

The truth is that innovation is never a single event and is rarely achieved by a single person or organization. Rather, it is a process of discovery, engineering and transformation that typically takes decades to complete.

The Rise Of So-So Innovations

It’s been clear for some time now that we’ve been in the midst of a second productivity paradox. The first one, which lasted from the early 1970s to the mid 1990s, saw diminished productivity gains amid increased investment in information technology and prompted economist Robert Solow to note, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

In 1996, with the rise of the Internet, productivity growth began to boom again but then disappeared just as abruptly in 2004 and hasn’t returned since. Despite the hype surrounding things such as Web 2.0, the mobile Internet and, most recently, artificial intelligence, productivity growth continues to slump.

Part of the answer may have to do with what economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo refer to as so-so technologies, such as automated customer service, which produce meager productivity gains but displace workers nonetheless. In effect, they give the appearance of progress but don’t really improve our lives.

Consider an airport bar where ordering has been automated through the use of touchscreens. It’s hard to see how, given the high rent, food preparation and other costs, this technology would have a dramatic effect on productivity akin to, say, replacing a horse with a tractor in an agricultural economy. In fact, given that the technology hasn’t been widely deployed outside airports, the major effect seems to be inconveniencing patrons.

Acemoglu and Restrepo argue that a large-scale version of this phenomenon has been occurring since the late 80s. Digital technologies, to a large extent, have displaced labor, but have not had the same offsetting productivity impact as earlier technologies so the overall effect is to decrease wages rather than to raise living standards.
What Innovation Really Looks Like

Katalin Karikó, published her first paper on mRNA-based therapy way back in 1990. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to win grants to fund her work and, by 1995, things came to a head. She was told that she could either direct her energies in a different way, or be demoted. Katalan chose to stick with it and, if the Covid pandemic had never hit, her name might very well be lost to history.

This type of thing is not unusual. Jim Allison, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on cancer immunotherapy, had a very similar experience when he had his breakthrough, despite having already become a prominent leader in the field. “It was depressing,” he told me. “I knew this discovery could make a difference, but nobody wanted to invest in it.”

The truth is that the next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. Things that really change the world always arrive out of context for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. Kevin Ashton, who himself first came up with the idea for RFID chips, wrote in his book, How to Fly A Horse, “Creation is a long journey, where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead.”

Because digital technology has become so pervasive, offering a substantial architecture that lends itself to tweaking, we’ve lost the plot. Innovation isn’t about Silicon Valley billionaires peacocking around on social media, but solving important problems. We need to shift our focus from disrupting industries to tackling grand challenges.

Building Collaborative Networks And To Tackle Grand Challenges

While researching my book Mapping Innovation, I had the opportunity to interview dozens of great innovators, from world-class scientists to super-successful entrepreneurs and top executives at some of the world’s largest corporations. I was surprised to find that, in almost every case, they were some of the most thoughtful, generous people I’d ever met.

The truth is that, for innovation, generosity is often a competitive advantage. By actively sharing their ideas, innovators build up larger networks of people willing to share with them. That makes it that much more likely that they will come across that random piece of information and insight that will help them crack a really tough problem.

The digital revolution has been, if anything, a huge disappointment and Silicon Valley’s tendency to be solipsistic and self-referential probably has a lot to do with that. The simple fact is that the developers banging away at their laptops can achieve little on their own. To tackle our most significant challenges, such as curing cancer, climate change and global hunger, they need to work effectively with specialists with different skills and perspectives.

What we need today is to build collaborative networks to solve grand challenges. The recent CHIPS Bill is a good start. It not only significantly increases our investment in basic research and development, but also allocates billions of dollars of investments into building regional ecosystems and advanced manufacturing.

Yet the most important thing we need to change is our mindset. We need to focus less on disruption and more on creation and, to create for the world we need to focus on what it means to live in it. We can no longer measure progress in terms of how many billionaires a technology creates. We need to focus on making a meaningful impact on people’s lives.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Google Gemini

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Why Change Doesn’t Have to Start at the Top

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Why Change Doesn't Have to Start at the Top

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 2004 I found myself running a major news organization during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. It was one of those moments when the universe opens up, reveals a bit of itself and you realize the world doesn’t work the way you thought it did. What struck me at the time was that nobody with any conventional form of power had any ability to shape events at all.

One of the myths that is constantly repeated is that change needs to start at the top. Clearly that is not true. It wasn’t true of the Color Revolutions that spread across Eastern Europe. Nor was it true of social movements like the fight for LGBT rights. Despite what you may have heard, it doesn’t hold true for organizations either.

What is true is that if you are going to bring about genuine change you need to influence institutions and that means you need, at some point, to involve senior leaders, but it rarely starts with them. The myth that change has to start at the top is a copout — a reason to do nothing when you can do something. Make no mistake. Change can come from anywhere.

Weaving Webs of Influence

Movements, as the name implies, are kinetic. They start somewhere and they end up somewhere else. That’s one reason why why so many successful change efforts become misunderstood. People look back at an event like the 1963 March on Washington and think that’s what made the civil rights movement successful. Nothing could be further from the truth. That wasn’t what built the movement, it was part of the end game.

Consider that the first “March on Washington,” the Woman Suffrage Procession of 1913, was a disaster. None of the others since 1963 did much either. The civil rights march came after nearly a decade of boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides and other tactics that built the movement before it finally found its moment. Still, it’s the moment that people remember.

In much the same way, whenever we see a successful transformation we look to the actions of leaders. We see a CEO who gave a speech, a marketer who came up with a big product idea or an engineer who took a project in a new direction. These events are real, but they rarely, if ever, appear out of nowhere. They are products of webs of influence.

When we look more closely, we inevitably find that the CEO was inspired to give the pivotal speech from a conversation he had with his daughter. The marketer got the initial idea for the campaign from a junior team member. Or the engineer changed the direction of the project after a fateful encounter he had in the cafeteria.

Our decisions are the product of complex systems. Anything can start anywhere. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

Going to Where the Energy Is

Transformations, in retrospect, often seem inevitable, even obvious. Yet they don’t start out that way. The truth is that it is small groups, loosely connected, but united by a common purpose that drives transformation. So the first thing you want to do is identify your apostles — people who are already excited about the possibilities for change.

For example, in his efforts to reform the Pentagon, Colonel John Boyd began every initiative by briefing a group of collaborators he called the “Acolytes,” who would help hone and sharpen the ideas. He then moved on to congressional staffers, elected officials and the media. By the time general officers were aware of what he was doing, he had too much support to ignore.

In a similar vein, a massive effort to implement lean manufacturing methods at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals began with one team at one factory, but grew to encompass 17,000 employees across 25 sites worldwide and cut manufacturing costs by 25%. The campaign that overthrew Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević started with just 5 kids in a coffee shop.

One advantage to starting small is that you can identify your apostles informally, even through casual conversations. In skills-based transformations, change leaders often start with workshops and see who seems enthusiastic or comes up after the session. Your apostles don’t need to have senior positions or special skills, they just have to be passionate.

There’s something about human nature that, when we’re passionate about an idea, makes us want to go convince the skeptics. Don’t do that. Start with people who want your idea to succeed. If you feel the urge to convince or persuade, that’s a sign that you either have the wrong idea or the wrong people.

“You have to go where the energy is,” John Gadsby, who built a movement for process improvement inside Procter & Gamble that has grown to encompass 60,000 employees, told me. “We’ll choose energy and excitement and enthusiasm over the right position, or the person at the right leadership level, or the person whose job it is supposed to be to do that.”

Mobilizing People To Influence Institutions

In the early 1990s, writer and activist Jeffrey Ballinger published a series of investigations about Nike’s use of sweatshops in Asia. People were shocked by the horrible conditions that workers — many of them children — were subjected to. In most cases, the owners lived outside the countries where the factories were located and had little contact with their employees.

At first, Nike’s CEO, Phil Knight, was defiant. “I often reacted with self-righteousness, petulance, anger. On some level I knew my reaction was toxic, counterproductive, but I couldn’t stop myself,” he would later write in his memoir, Shoe Dog. He pointed out that his company didn’t own the factories, that he’d worked with the owners to improve conditions and that the stories, as gruesome as they were, were exceptions.

The simple truth is that change rarely, if ever, starts at the top because it is people with power that create the status quo. They are attached to what they’ve built and take pride in their accomplishments, just like the rest of us. That’s why, to bring about genuine change — change that lasts — you need to mobilize people to influence institutions (or those, like Knight, who yield institutional power).

Eventually, that’s what happened at Nike. The protests took their toll. “We had to admit,” Knight remembered, “We could do better.” Going beyond its own factories, the company established the Fair Trade Labor Association and published a comprehensive report of its own factories. Today, the company’s track record may not be perfect, but it’s become more a part of the solution than a part of the problem.

Change Is Never Top-Down Or Bottom-Up

At a pivotal moment during the height of the civil rights movement, Robert Kennedy, Attorney General of the United States and brother to the President, would turn to the activist John Lewis and say, “’John, the people, the young people of the SNCC, have educated me. You have changed me. Now I understand.”

Lewis, just a young kid in his twenties at the time, was himself the product of webs of influence. He was shaped by mentors like Jim Lawson and Keller Miller Smith, as well as by peers such as Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette and James Bevel. They, in turn, influenced others to get out, protest and shape the minds of people like Robert Kennedy.

As I explain in Cascades, transformation isn’t top-down or bottom-up, but happens from side-to-side. You can find the entire spectrum — from active support to active resistance — at every level. The answer doesn’t lie in any specific strategy or initiative, but in how people are able to internalize the need for change and transfer ideas through social bonds.

Change never happens all at once and can’t simply be willed into existence. The best way to do that is to empower those who already believe in change to bring in those around them. That’s what’s key to successful transformations. A leader’s role is not to plan and direct action, but to inspire and empower belief.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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Values Always Cost You Something

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That’s What Makes Them Different From Platitudes

Values Always Cost You Something

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When I was in Panama a couple of years ago for a keynote I had the opportunity to speak with Erika Mouynes, the country’s former Foreign Minister, about the war in Ukraine. Her ministry had strayed from its traditionally neutral stance by calling for “respect for the sovereignty, political independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine based on international law.”

She told me that when she later met with Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, he asked her why she cared about a country thousands of miles away where Panama has no tangible interests. What did she expect to gain? She told him that sometimes you need to make decisions based on values that are important to you.

Her position was not without risk. Panama depends on broad international support for its canal. Yet many of the executives at the event told me how proud they were of her support for sovereignty, an issue that Panama has sometimes struggled with in its history. The truth is that, to mean something, values always cost you something. Otherwise they’re just platitudes.

Gandhi’s Ahimsa

Today, many dismiss Mohandas Gandhi as guileless and quixotic. He himself once said, “Men say that I am a saint losing myself in politics. The fact is I am a politician trying my hardest to be a saint.” He was, in truth, a master strategist, luring opponents into a dilemma that would put them in an impossible position of choosing either surrender or damnation.

One of the first principles of his philosophy of Satyagraha was ahimsa, or nonviolence, which was rooted in the quest for truth. If no one could claim to have absolute knowledge of the truth, then it followed that using violence—or any other means for that matter—to compel people to accede to your will would be to undermine, rather than support truth.

To the modern ear, Gandhi’s views seem idealistic at best, if not completely naive, yet there was much more to his philosophy than met the eye. His aim was to undermine his opponents’ legitimacy. He sought to back them into a corner in which both action and inaction would yield essentially the same result —an upending of the existing order.

As General Jan Smuts, Gandhi’s chief adversary in South Africa, put it, “It was my fate to be the antagonist of a man for whom even then I had the highest respect… For me—the defender of law and order—there was the usual trying situation, the odium of carrying out the law, which had not strong popular support.” Smuts had not only been defeated; he had been won over and lost any rationale to keep fighting.

Gerstner’s Devotion To The Customer

When Lou Gerstner took over as CEO of IBM in 1993, the company was near bankruptcy. Many thought it should be broken up. Yet Gerstner saw that its customers needed the firm to help them run their mission-critical systems and the death of IBM was the last thing they wanted. He knew that to save the company, he would have to start with its values.

“At IBM we had lost sight of our values,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of Gerstner’s chief lieutenants, told me. “IBM had always valued competitiveness, but we had started to compete with each other internally rather than working together to beat the competition. Lou put a stop to that and even let go some senior executives who were known for infighting.”

Gerstner had been a customer and knew that IBM did not always treat him well. At one point the company threatened to pull service from an entire data center because a single piece of competitive equipment was installed. So as CEO, he vowed to shift the focus from IBM’s “own “proprietary stack of technologies” to its customers’ “stack of business processes.”

Yet he did something else as well. He made it clear that he was willing to forego revenue on every sale to do what was right for the customer and he showed that he meant it. Over the years I’ve spoken to dozens of IBM executives from that period and virtually all of them have pointed this out. Not one seems to think IBM would still be in business today without it.

“Lou refocused us all on customers and listening to what they wanted and he did it by example,” Wladawsky-Berger, remembers. “We started listening to customers more because he listened to customers.”

The World’s Debt To Katalin Karikó

In the early ’90s, Katalin Karikó was trying to solve a tough problem. A young researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, she had been working on an idea to hijack the protein manufacturing machinery in our cells (called ribosomes) to directly produce things that could help our bodies fight disease. Yet despite her best efforts, she was making little progress.

To understand the problem, imagine you want to hijack someone else’s factory to make your own product. Because the factory is automated, it is just a matter of installing software at the factory, but to do that you need to get past security. Replace “software” with genetic instructions and “security” our body’s immune system and, in a nutshell, that is what Katalin had to overcome.

By 1995, things came to a head. Unable to secure grants to fund her work, the university told her that she could either direct her energies in a different way, or be demoted. “I thought of going somewhere else, or doing something else,” Katalin would later recall. “I also thought maybe I’m not good enough, not smart enough. I tried to imagine: Everything is here, and I just have to do better experiments.”

She decided to stick it out and eventually struck up a partnership with Drew Weissman, an immunologist who had some ideas about how to slip the genetic instructions past the cell’s natural defenses. Their work led to a breakthrough and, when the Covid pandemic broke out in 2020, the mRNA technology they invented led to life saving vaccines in record time.

Today, mRNA is being used to develop a number of therapies beyond vaccines, including cures for cancer and other diseases. Sticking to her values certainly cost Katalin Karikó, but the rest of us benefited enormously.

Values Are How An Organization Honors Its Mission

Values are essential to how an enterprise honors its mission. They represent choices of what an organization will and will not do, what it rewards and what it punishes and how it defines success and failure. Perhaps most importantly, values will determine an enterprise’s relationships with other stakeholders, how it collaborates and what it can achieve.

When we sit down with executive teams to help them drive transformation and change, one of the first things we ask them is to define their values. Usually, they can easily rattle off a list such as, “the customer,” “excellence,” “integrity,” and so on. Then we ask them what those values cost them and we get blank stares.

The problem is that values are often confused with beliefs. When you’re sitting around a conference table, it’s easy to build a consensus about broad virtues such as excellence, integrity and customer service. True values, on the other hand, are idiosyncratic. They represent choices that are directly related to a particular mission.

Make no mistake. Real values always cost you something. They are what guides you when you need to make hard calls instead of taking the easy path. They are what makes the difference between looking back with pride or regret. Perhaps most importantly, they are what allows others to trust you.

Without genuine commitment values there can be no trust. Without trust, there can be no shared purpose.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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Your Feelings Are Often Triggers That Mislead You

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Your Feelings Are Often Triggers That Mislead You

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt developed the metaphor of the Elephant and the Rider to describe the relationship between our emotional and cognitive brains. While the rider (representing our cognitive brain) may feel in control, it is the elephant (our emotions) that is more likely to determine which direction we will go.

That’s why it feels so good to act on our emotions. Rather than struggling with the reins to get the elephant to go where we want it to, we can just give in and race with abandon towards our destination. It’s usually not until we’ve run off a cliff that we realize that we should have exercised more restraint. By that time, it’s often too late to undo the damage.

The truth is that our brains are wired for survival, not to make rational decisions for a modern, industrialized economy. That’s why we shouldn’t blindly trust our feelings. We should see them as warning signs to proceed with caution because, while they can alert us to unseen dangers, they can also be triggers that others use to manipulate us.

The Thrill Of The Shift & Pivot

As Eric Ries explained in The Startup Way, when General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt wanted to implement a more entrepreneurial approach he asked Ries to help him implement “Lean Startup” methods at the company. The resulting program, called Fastworks, trained 80 coaches and launched a hundred projects in its first year. Pretty soon, Immelt was calling his company a 124 year-old startup.

A key ambition was the development of Predix, an industrial software platform. No longer would GE be a boring old manufacturing company, but would make a “pivot” to the digital age. It did not go well. During Immelt’s tenure, the company’s value would fall by 30%, while the broader maker more than doubled. Eventually the firm would collapse altogether.

Pundits love to tout the change gospel, but there’s little evidence that “pivots” are necessarily a good idea. Look at the world’s most valuable companies, Apple still makes most of its money on iPhones, Microsoft’s success is still rooted in business software, Alphabet’s profits come from search and so on. There are exceptions, of course, but most organizations become and stay successful by deepening their capabilities in a few key areas.

But that’s boring. Journalists rarely write cover stories about it. Business school professors don’t get tenure for writing case studies about how Procter & Gamble stuck with soap for more than a century or how Coke continues to make money off of sugary water. “Pivots,” on the other hand, are thrilling and fun. They get people talking. They feel good. That’s why they’re so popular.

The Eden Myth

Watch pundits on cable news or on stage at conferences and you may begin to notice a familiar pattern. They tell us that once there was a period when everything was pure and good, but then we—or the organization we work for—were corrupted in some way and cast out. So to return to the good times, we need to eliminate that corrupting influence.

This Eden myth is as old as history itself and it continues to thrive because it works so well.. We’re constantly inundated with scapegoats— the government, big business, tech giants, the “billionaire” class, immigrants, “woke” society—to blame for our fall from grace. The story feeds our anger and, much like the “thrill of the pivot,” makes us want to act.

Perhaps most importantly, the Eden myth makes us feel good. The outrage it triggers stimulates the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine which affects the pleasure centers in our brain. Our adrenal glands then begin to produce cortisol, which initiates a “fight or flight” response. Our senses get heightened. We feel motivated and alive.

Who wouldn’t want to feel like that? That’s why we can become addicted to the outrage-dopamine response machine and continually look for new opportunities to get our fix. We begin to need it and tune in every night, doom scroll on social media and seek out social connections that promote it. Ultimately, we’re going to want to act on it.

People who seek to manipulate us know all about this and design their approach to trigger an emotional response.

Creating An Echo Chamber

Once our neurons are primed and our senses are tuned to respond to specific stimuli, we will begin to frame what we experience in terms that reinforce those biases. Psychologists have found that we tend to overweight information that is most easily accessible and then look for information to confirm those early impressions and ignore evidence to the contrary.

These effects are multiplied by tribal tendencies. We form group identities easily, and groups tend to develop into echo chambers, which amplify common beliefs and minimize contrary information. We also tend to share more actively with people who agree with us and, without fear of questioning or rebuke, we are less likely to check that information for accuracy.

We are highly affected by what those around us think. In fact, a series of famous experiments first performed in the 1950’s, and confirmed many times since then, showed that we will conform to the opinions of those around us even if they are obviously wrong. More recent research has found that the effect extends to three degrees of social distance.

It’s likely that some version of this is what doomed Jeffrey Immelt at General Electric. When he took over as CEO in 2001, Silicon Valley was in a process of renewal after the dotcom crash. As the startup boom gathered steam, it captured the imagination of business journalists. He brought in Ries to “cast out” the old ways of plodding, industrial firms and surrounded himself with people who believed similar things. Everything must have felt right.

The elephant was in full control and the rider just went along—all the way off the cliff.

Don’t Believe Everything You Feel

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes we encode experiences in our bodies as somatic markers and that our emotions often alert us to things that our brains aren’t aware of. Another researcher, Joseph Ledoux, had similar findings. He pointed out that our body reacts much faster than our mind, such as when we jump out of the way of an oncoming object and only seconds later realize what happened.

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests that we have two modes of thinking. The first is emotive, intuitive and fast. The second is rational, deliberative and slow. Our bodies evolved to make decisions quickly in life or death situations. Our rational minds came much later and don’t automatically engage. It takes effort to bring in the second system.

There are some contexts in which we should favor system one over system two. Certain professions, such as surgeons and pilots, train for years to hone their instincts so that they will be able to react quickly and appropriately in an emergency. When we have a bad feeling about a situation, we should take it seriously and proceed with caution.

However, our feelings need to be interrogated, especially in areas for which we do not have specific training or relevant expertise. We need to gain insight into what exactly our feelings are alerting us to and that requires us to engage our rational brain.

Yes, feelings should be taken seriously. They are often telling us that something is amiss. But they are much more reliable when they are alerting us to danger than when they are pushing us to overlook pertinent facts and proceed with a course of action. When we go with our gut, we need to make sure it’s not just because we had a bad lunch.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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5 Simple Keys to Becoming a Powerful Communicator

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5 Simple Keys to Becoming a Powerful Communicator

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Sometimes the hardest thing is merely to make yourself understood. Things that change the world, or even a small part of it, always arrive out of context because, by definition, the world hasn’t changed yet. That’s why innovators need to be great communicators, because an idea that doesn’t gain traction is an idea that fails.

That’s easier said than done. As Fareed Zakaria has put it, “Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them.” Clearly, if he struggles, we all do.

Yet the good news is that most people can immensely improve their communication skills by following a few simple rules. While, like any skill, they take a lifetime of practice to hone and perfect, you can start seeing progress within a few hours. It doesn’t matter if you’re an entrepreneur, a senior executive or just starting out, you need to communicate effectively.

1. Clarity Before Creativity, Always

Most people want their writing and speaking to be impressive. They have an idea in their heads of what a “professional” sounds like and they try to emulate those traits. They use big words, infuse acronyms and technical language or try to pluck a choice term or two out of the zeitgeist.

Yet trying to conform to some abstract notion of “professional” or “impressive” is a sure way to garble your message. Instead of trying to impress, just try to be clear. Different people have different conceptions of what they consider to be professional or impressive, but everyone knows what is clear.

The truth is that nobody cares how clever you are if they can’t understand what you’re trying to tell them and few will take the time and effort to figure it out. Most probably, they will assume you haven’t really thought things through and move on to other things.

So as you formulate your message, whether it’s an email, a pitch, a keynote or whatever, continually ask yourself, “how can I make it more clear?”

2. When In Doubt, Take It Out

Born in the late 13th century, William of Ockham was a giant of his age. As one of the few intellectual lights of medieval times, his commentaries on reason, logic and political theory are studied even today. His ideas about the separation of church and state were literally centuries ahead of their time and formed the basis for our own constitutional principle.

Yet he’s best known for Ockham’s Razor, sometimes known as the “principle of parsimony.” Often, the principle is interpreted as “Keep It Simple Stupid,” but that’s not quite right. A much more accurate translation would be, “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, if something doesn’t need to be there, it shouldn’t be.

A useful device I use for applying Ockham’s razor is to imagine my audience, whether that is a reader or a listener, as having an internal “cognitive budget” they are willing to devote to whatever I’m trying to tell them. Then I judge everything I include by the standard of, “is this worth using up my cognitive budget?”

So be cautious and respectful with your audience’s attention. If you have any doubts whether it needs to be there, it probably doesn’t. Take it out and see if anything meaningful is lost. If not, keep it out and don’t look back.

3. If It Sounds Like Writing, It’s Probably Not Good

When we’re taught to write in school, we’re usually urged to follow a certain form. This often involves an academic, detached tone of voice. For many of the same reasons, when we speak to an audience, our tone takes on a “speaker’s voice. In both cases, the result is that we come off as performative and inauthentic.

Your communication, whether you’re speaking or writing, should sound like you, not someone you’re trying to be at a particular moment. Your vocabulary shouldn’t be significantly different when you write than when you speak. Your grammar and turns of phrase shouldn’t vary too much either. There’s absolutely no reason for you to come off as someone else.

Style should be invisible. If your audience is focusing on how you’re writing or speaking, then that steals cognitive energy away from concentrating on the message you’re trying to communicate. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to sound a certain way, just focus your energy on being as clear as possible.

4. Default To One Point

If you’re going to rob a bank, as a general rule anything you say after “put the money in the bag or I’ll blow your head off,” will be somewhat superfluous. That one simple point is perfectly sufficient for the job at hand. In fact, the uncomfortable pause that follows will probably accentuate the impact of your message.

Now, clearly there are exceptions to the “default to one point” rule. For example, if you kidnapped the teller’s family, that kind of time and effort might warrant adding a second point. Even then though, you might want to let your first point sink in and keep your second point in reserve in case you need to overcome an objection.

Obviously, I’m being facetious and not suggesting anyone actually rob a bank, but the point stands. In most contexts, but especially if you’re on a panel or doing a Q&A session, you’re usually, although not always, better off sticking to one point and making it well than trying to jam in a too much information

And, of course, if they like your one point they’ll be likely to ask for more. That’s how you build a conversation.

5. Dare to be Crap

The hardest thing about starting a project of any sort is that we always compare initial efforts to finished products and, not surprisingly, those efforts always seem to come up short. As Pixar President Ed Catmull wrote in his book, Creativity, Inc., “early on, all of our movies suck.” If it’s true of Pixar movies, it’s probably true of our work.

That makes it really hard to begin writing or scripting, because whatever you first put down is bound to be a disappointment. Your wording will be clumsy, your points will be unclear and you’ll begin to realize that your great idea is actually, as Fareed Zakaria put it, “a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them.”

Your first efforts are always crap. Yet that shouldn’t blind you to the fact that all great works start out that way. As Vladimir Nabokov put it, “writing is rewriting.” The greatness comes not from the initial spark of inspiration, but from the long hours spent honing it down to reveal its core. But before you do that, you need to dare to be crap and produce a first draft.

The truth is that communicating even fairly simple ideas can be very hard work. As in most things, talent is overrated. You produce good work not from having a knack for a clever turn of phrase, but by putting in the effort to express your ideas clearly.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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Three Myths That Kill Change and Transformation

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Three Myths That Kill Change and Transformation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1975, more than 80% of US corporate assets were tangible assets, things like factories, equipment and real estate. When leaders in an organization made decisions about change, they tended to involve tangible, strategic assets, such as building a new factory, entering a new market or launching a new line of products.

So when the modern practice of change management arose in the 1980s, that’s what it was designed to address. Managers began to recognize the need to communicate changes to the rank and file, so that they could better understand it and contribute to its success. An entire cottage industry of consultants arose to fill that need.

But now that situation has flipped and more than 80% of corporate assets are intangible. When we talk about change today we are usually talking about changes in people themselves, in how they think and how they act. Clearly, that’s a very different type of thing and we need to approach change differently. Unfortunately, too many people are mired in the past.

Myth #1: If People Understand Change, They Will Embrace It

Leaders like to be seen at the cutting edge and, to be effective, they need to believe in themselves. That’s what makes transformational initiatives so attractive. They’re much more fun than the more mundane aspects of managing an enterprise, like improving operations or cutting costs. Change gives leaders a chance to dream.

That’s what the practice of change management was designed to support. Someone high up in an organization would get an idea to, say, launch a new product line for a new market and the consultants would be brought in to help communicate the idea so that everyone could understand just how brilliant the idea was.

Of course, even if employees thought the idea was stupid there wasn’t much they could do about it. If a CEO wants to launch a new product line, invest in new factories and equipment and hire new people, there’s nothing the rank and file can do about it. Leadership has full control over tangible, strategic assets.

But today, when the vast majority of corporate assets are intangible, transformation initiatives involve changes in how people think and what they do, which leadership does not control. People have the power to resist and you can be sure they will. That’s why change fails, not because people don’t understand it, but because they don’t like it and actively sabotage it.

The truth is that humans form attachments to other people, ideas and things. When they feel those attachments are threatened, they will often lash out. That’s why when you ask people to change how they think or what they do, you will invariably offend some people’s identity, dignity and sense of self and they will act out in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. That doesn’t make them bad people—we all do it—it just makes them human.

Myth #2: You Have To Convince The Skeptics

There is something baffling about human nature. Whenever we have an idea we are passionately about we feel intense desire to convince skeptics. Our inner marketers want to identify specific objections and then devise airtight arguments to counter them. We envision ourselves being dazzlingly persuasive and making our case.

Change management consultants encourage this type of thinking. They advise us to “provide simple, clear choices and consequences” and “show the benefits in a real and tangible way.” They also suggest that we have “open and honest conversations” and “even make a personal appeal” in order to “convert the strongest dissenters.”

This may make sense if the objections are rational, but often they are not. In fact, the most visceral dissent almost invariably has more to do with how people see themselves. That’s why change so often offends people’s dignity, because their identity is so often wrapped up in what they think and what they do. You can’t ask people to stop being who they think they are.

The good news is that you don’t have to. Consider the scientific evidence:

Sociologist Everett Rogers‘ “S-curve” research estimated that it takes only 10%-20% of a system to adopt an innovation for rapid acceptance by the majority to follow.
Professor Erica Chenoweth’s analysis of over 300 political revolutions in the past century finds that it only took 3.5% of active participation in a society to succeed, and many campaigns prevailed with less.
Recent research by sociologist Damon Centola at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that the tipping point for change is getting 25% of people in an organization on board.

There’s no need to waste time trying to convince people who hate your idea and want to undermine it in any way they can. Any engagement is very unlikely to be successful and very likely to frustrate and exhaust you. You are much better off focusing your energies on empowering those who are enthusiastic about change to succeed, so that they can bring in others who can bring in others still. That’s how you build traction.

Myth #3: Things Will Get Easier After A “Quick & Easy” Win

Change management pioneer John Kotter, who first started writing books about organizational transformation in the 1970s, has long advised to establish short-term wins. He stressed that these must be unambiguously successful, visible throughout the organization and clearly related to the change effort.

The concept is problematic for a number of reasons. First, and this isn’t really Kotter’s fault, but the idea of a “short-term win” is often understood to be a “quick and easy win,” which can backfire. If a change isn’t meaningful and relevant, then touting it can make a leader seem out of touch, discrediting the transformation effort.

More problematic is the idea that we should be shooting for projects that are unambiguously successful. That level of success is exceedingly rare. If we are going to wait for perfect projects, we may be waiting a long time. What we want to do is start with a Keystone Change and then learn from whatever successes and failures we encounter on the way.

Perhaps most dangerous of all is the notion that early projects should be visible to large numbers of people. Remember, if a change is significant and has the potential for impact, there will always be people who want to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Why would we want to broadcast early efforts so they can knock them down?

The truth is that things don’t get easier after initial successes. They often get harder because those who oppose change now see it is really possible. That’s why you need to build a plan to anticipate resistance and Survive Victory from the start.

Change for the World We Live In

In the early 20th century, the great sociologist Max Weber noted that the sweeping industrialization taking place would lead to a change in organization. As cottage industries were replaced by large enterprises, leadership would have to become less traditional and charismatic and more organized and rational.

He also foresaw that jobs would need to be broken down into small, specific tasks and be governed by a system of hierarchy, authority and responsibility. This would require a more formal mode of organization—a bureaucracy—in which roles and responsibilities were clearly defined. Weber’s model reigned for a full century.

Over the past few decades we’ve undergone a similar shift from bureaucratic hierarchies to connected ecosystems and that affects how we need to approach transformation. The changes we need to implement today have less to do with decisions made about strategic, tangible assets and more to do with how people think and act. That presents a very different set of challenges and we need to adapt.

What we can’t do is pretend that the world is the same as it was 30 or 40 years ago and continue with practices that are so obviously failing. Just as Weber dispelled myths about infallible leaders a century ago, we need to break free of outdated concepts that have led to unacceptably poor results.

It’s time to leave myths behind and take a more clear-eyed approach to leading change.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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We Must Stop Fooling Ourselves and Get Our Facts Straight

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GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Mehdi Hasan’s brutal takedown of Matt Taibbi was almost painful to watch. Taibbi, a longtime muckraking journalist of some renown, was invited by Elon Musk to review internal communications that came to be known as the Twitter Files and made big headlines with accusations regarding government censorship of social media.

Yet as Hasan quickly revealed, Taibbi got basic facts wrong, either not understanding what he was looking at, doing sloppy work or just plainly being disingenuous. What Taibbi was reporting as censorship was, in fact, a normal, deliberative process for flagging problematic content, most of which was not taken down.

He looked foolish, but I could feel his pain. In both of my books, I had similarly foolish errors. The difference was that I sent out sections to be fact-checked by experts and people with first-hand knowledge of events before I published. The truth is that it’s not easy to get facts straight. It takes hard work and humility to get things right. We need to be careful.

A Stupid Mistake

Some of the most famous business stories we hear are simply not accurate. Gurus and pundits love to tell you that after inventing digital photography Kodak ignored the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, its EasyShare line of cameras were top sellers. It also made big investments in quality printing for digital photos. The problem was that it made most of its money on developing film, a business that completely disappeared.

Another popular fable is that Xerox failed to commercialize the technology developed at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), when in fact the laser printer developed there saved the company. What also conveniently gets left out is that Steve Jobs was able to get access to the company’s technology to build the Macintosh because Xerox had invested in Apple and then profited handsomely from that investment.

But my favorite mistold myth is that of Blockbuster, which supposedly ignored Netflix until it was too late. As Gina Keating, who covered the story for years at Reuters, explains in her book Netflixed, the video giant moved relatively quickly and came up with a successful strategy, but the CEO, John Antioco, left after a fight with investor Carl Icahn and the strategy was reversed.

Yet that’s not exactly how I told the story. For years I reported that Antioco was fired. I even wrote it up that way in my book Cascades until I contacted the former CEO to fact-check it. He was incredibly generous with his time, corrected me and then gave me additional insights that improved the book.

To this day, I don’t know exactly why I made the mistake. In fact, as soon as he pointed it out I knew I was wrong. Somehow the notion that he was fired got stuck in my head and, with no one to correct me, it just stayed there. We like to think that we remember things as they happened, but unfortunately our brains don’t work that way.

Why We Get Fooled

We tend to imagine that our minds are some sort of machines, recording what we see and hear, then storing those experiences away to be retrieved at a later time, but that’s not how our brains work at all. Humans have a need to build narratives. We like things to fit into neat patterns and fill in the gaps in our knowledge so that everything makes sense.

Psychologists often point to a halo effect, the tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another. For example, when someone is physically attractive, we tend to infer other good qualities and when a company is successful, we tend to think other good things about it.

The truth is that our thinking is riddled with subtle yet predictable biases. We are apt to be influenced not by the most rigorous information, but what we can most readily access. We make confounding errors that confuse correlation with causality and then look for information that confirms our judgments while discounting evidence to the contrary.

I’m sure that both Matt Taibbi and I fell into a number of these pitfalls. We observed a set of facts, perceived a pattern, built a narrative and then began filling in gaps with things that we thought we knew. As we looked for more evidence, we seized on what bolstered the stories we were telling ourselves, while ignoring contrary facts.

The difference, of course, is that I went and checked with a primary source, who immediately pointed out my error and, as soon as he did, it broke the spell. I immediately remembered reading in Keating’s book that he resigned and agreed to stay on for six months while a new CEO was being hired. Our brains do weird things.

How Our Errors Perpetuate

In addition to our own cognitive biases, there are a number of external factors that conspire to perpetuate our beliefs. The first is that we tend to embed ourselves in networks that have similar experiences and perspectives that we do. Scientific evidence shows that we conform to the views around us and that effect extends out to three degrees of relationships.

Once we find our tribe, we tend to view outsiders suspiciously and are less likely to scrutinize allies. In a study of adults that were randomly assigned to “leopards” and “tigers,” fMRI studies noted hostility to out-group members. Research from MIT suggests that when we are around people we expect to agree with us, we don’t check facts closely and are more likely to share false information.

In David McRraney’s new book, How to Change a Mind, he points out that people who are able to leave cults or reject long-held conspiracy theories first build alternative social networks. Our associations form an important part of our identity, so we are loath to change our opinions that signal inclusion into our tribe. There are deep evolutionary forces that drive us to be stalwart citizens of the communities we join.

Taibbi was, for years, a respected investigative journalist at Rolling Stone magazine. There, he had editors and fact checkers to answer to. Now, as an independent journalist, he has only the networks that he chooses to give him feedback and, being human like all of us, he subtly conforms to a set of dispositions and perspectives.

I probably fell prey to similar influences. As someone who researches innovation, I spend a lot of time with people who regard Netflix as a hero and Blockbuster as something of a bumbler. That probably affected how I perceived Antioco’s departure from the company. We all have blind spots and fall prey to the operational glitches in our brains. No one is immune.

Learning How To Not Fool Ourselves

In one of my favorite essays the physicist Richard Feynman wrote, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that,” He goes on further to say that simply being honest isn’t enough, you also need to “bend over backwards” to provide information so that others may prove you wrong.

So the first step is to be hyper-vigilant and aware that your brain has a tendency to fool you. It will quickly grasp on the most readily available data and detect patterns that may or may not be there. Then it will seek out other evidence that confirms those initial hunches while disregarding contrary evidence.

This is especially true of smart, accomplished people. Those who have been right in the past, who have proved the doubters wrong, are going to be less likely to see the warning signs. In many cases, they will even see opposition to their views as evidence they are on the right track. There’s a sucker born every minute and they’re usually the ones who think that they’re playing it smart.

Checking ourselves isn’t nearly enough, we need to actively seek out other views and perspectives. Some of this can be done with formal processes such as pre-mortems and red teams, but a lot of it is just acknowledging that we have blind spots, building the habit of reaching out to others and improving our listening skills.

Perhaps most of all, we need to have a sense of humility. It’s far too easy to be impressed with ourselves and far too difficult to see how we’re being led astray. There is often a negative correlation between our level of certainty and the likelihood of us being wrong. We all need to make an effort to believe less of what we think.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: 1 of 1,050+ FREE quotes for your meetings & presentations at http://misterinnovation.com

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We Must Hold AI Accountable

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We Must Hold AI Accountable

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

About ten years ago, IBM invited me to talk with some key members on the Watson team, when the triumph of creating a machine that could beat the best human players at the game show Jeopardy! was still fresh. I wrote in Forbes at the time that we were entering a new era of cognitive collaboration between humans, computers and other humans.

One thing that struck me was how similar the moment seemed to how aviation legend Chuck Yeager described the advent of flying-by-wire, four decades earlier, in which pilots no longer would operate aircraft, but interface with a computer that flew the plane. Many of the macho “flyboys” weren’t able to trust the machines and couldn’t adapt.

Now, with the launch of ChatGPT, Bill Gates has announced that the age of AI has begun and, much like those old flyboys, we’re all going to struggle to adapt. Our success will not only rely on our ability to learn new skills and work in new ways, but the extent to which we are able to trust our machine collaborators. To reach its potential, AI will need to become accountable.

Recognizing Data Bias

With humans, we work diligently to construct safe and constructive learning environments. We design curriculums, carefully selecting materials, instructors and students to try and get the right mix of information and social dynamics. We go to all this trouble because we understand that the environment we create greatly influences the learning experience.

Machines also have a learning environment called a “corpus.” If, for example, you want to teach an algorithm to recognize cats, you expose it to thousands of pictures of cats. In time, it figures out how to tell the difference between, say, a cat and a dog. Much like with human beings, it is through learning from these experiences that algorithms become useful.

However, the process can go horribly awry. A famous case is Microsoft’s Tay, a Twitter bot that the company unleashed on the microblogging platform in 2016. In under a day, Tay went from being friendly and casual (“humans are super cool”) to downright scary, (“Hitler was right and I hate Jews”). It was profoundly disturbing.

Bias in the learning corpus is far more common than we often realize. Do an image search for the word “professional haircut” and you will get almost exclusively pictures of white men. Do the same for “unprofessional haircut” and you will see much more racial and gender diversity.

It’s not hard to figure out why this happens. Editors writing articles about haircuts portray white men in one way and other genders and races in another. When we query machines, we inevitably find our own biases baked in.

Accounting For Algorithmic Bias

A second major source of bias results from how decision-making models are designed. Consider the case of Sarah Wysocki, a fifth grade teacher who — despite being lauded by parents, students, and administrators alike — was fired from the D.C. school district because an algorithm judged her performance to be sub-par. Why? It’s not exactly clear, because the system was too complex to be understood by those who fired her.

Yet it’s not hard to imagine how it could happen. If a teacher’s ability is evaluated based on test scores, then other aspects of performance, such as taking on children with learning differences or emotional problems, would fail to register, or even unfairly penalize them. Good human managers recognize outliers, algorithms generally aren’t designed that way.

In other cases, models are constructed according to what data is easiest to acquire or the model is overfit to a specific set of cases and is then applied too broadly. In 2013, Google Flu Trends predicted almost double as many cases there actually were. What appears to have happened is that increased media coverage about Google Flu Trends led to more searches by people who weren’t sick. The algorithm was never designed to take itself into account.

The simple fact is that an algorithm must be designed in one way or another. Every possible contingency cannot be pursued. Choices have to be made and bias will inevitably creep in. Mistakes happen. The key is not to eliminate error, but to make our systems accountable through, explainability, auditability and transparency.

To Build An Era Of Cognitive Collaboration We First Need To Build Trust

In 2020, Ofqual, the authority that administers A-Level college entrance exams in the UK, found itself mired in scandal. Unable to hold live exams because of Covid-19, it designed and employed an algorithm that based scores partly on the historical performance of the schools students attended with the unintended consequence that already disadvantaged students found themselves further penalized by artificially deflated scores.

The outcry was immediate, but in a sense the Ofqual case is a happy story. Because the agency was transparent about how the algorithm was constructed, the source of the bias was quickly revealed, corrective action was taken in a timely manner, and much of the damage was likely mitigated. As Linus’s Law advises, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

The age of artificial intelligence requires us to collaborate with machines, leveraging their capabilities to better serve other humans. To make that collaboration successful, however, it needs to take place in an atmosphere of trust. Machines, just like humans, need to be held accountable, their decisions and insights can’t be a “black box.” We need to be able to understand where their judgments come from and how they’re decisions are being made.

Senator Schumer worked on legislation to promote more transparency in 2024, but that is only a start and the new administration has pushed the pause button on AI regulation. The real change has to come from within ourselves and how we see our relationships with the machines we create. Marshall McLuhan wrote that media are extensions of man and the same can be said for technology. Our machines inherit our human weaknesses and frailties. We need to make allowances for that.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Flickr

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The Keys to Changing Someone’s Mind

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The Keys to Changing Someone's Mind

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When is the last time you changed your mind about anything substantial? Was it another person that convinced you or an unexpected experience that changed your perspective? What led you to stop seeing something one way and start seeing it in another? I will bet it does not happen often. We rarely change our minds.

Now think about how much time we spend trying to change other people’s minds. From sales pitches and political discussions, to what we are going to have for dinner and when the kids should go to bed, we put a lot of time and effort into shaping the opinions of others. Most of that is probably wasted.

The truth is that we cannot really change anyone’s mind. Only they can do that. Yet as David McRaney explains in his new book, How Minds Change, there are new techniques that can help us be more persuasive, but they don’t require brilliant sophistry or snappy rhetoric. They involve more listening than speaking, and understanding the context in which beliefs arise.

Why We Fail To Adapt

We don’t experience the world as it is, but through the context of earlier experiences. What we think of as knowledge is really connections in our brains called synapses which develop over time. These pathways strengthen as we use them and degrade when we do not. Or, as scientists who study these things like to put it, the neurons that fire together, wire together.

It’s not just our own experiences that shape us either. In fact, a series of famous experiments done at Swarthmore College in the 1950’s showed that we will conform to the opinions of those around us even if they are obviously wrong. More recent research suggests that this effect extends out to three degrees of influence, so it’s not just people we know personally, but the friends of our friends’ friends that shape how we see things.

Finally, there are often switching costs to changing our minds. Our opinions are rarely isolated thoughts, but form a basis for decisions. Once we change our minds, we need to change our actions and that can have consequences. We may need to change how we do our jobs, what we choose to buy, how we act towards others and, sometimes, who we choose to associate ourselves with.

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes the point that our beliefs become closely intertwined with our identity. They signal our inclusion in a particular “team.” That’s why contrary views can often feel like an attack. Rather than taking in new information we often feel the urge to lash out and silence the opposing voice.

Meeting The Mind Changing Threshold

As closely as we cling to our beliefs, sometimes we do change our minds. In one study that analyzed voting behavior, it was found that when up to 20% of the information that people were exposed to contradicted their beliefs, they dug in their heels and grew more certain. Beyond that, however, their resolve tended to weaken. The informational environment can deeply influence what people believe.

Their relationship to the subject matter is also important. The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and the heuristic-systematic model (HSM) developed in the 1980s both suggest that we treat different topics in different ways. Some topics, such as those that are important to us professionally, we’re willing to invest time in exploring systematically. Others are more marginal to us and we will tend to look for shortcuts.

For example, if we are researching a business investment, we’ll want to gather facts from a variety of different sources and study them closely. On the other hand, if we’re trying to decide which craft beer to select from a large selection at a bar, we’ll rely on subtle cues such as packaging, how the beer is described or what we see others drinking.

If we want to change someone’s mind about something we need to understand their relationship to the subject matter. If they are heavily invested in it, they are unlikely to be swayed by superficial arguments. In fact, weak or purely emotive arguments may suggest to them that the opposite is true. At the same time, if someone is not very knowledgeable or motivated to learn about a topic, bogging them down with a lot of facts is likely to bore them.

Two Strategies For Persuasion

If you want to change somebody’s mind, you can follow two different kinds of approaches. The first, which can be called “topic denial”, argues the facts. The second, called “technique denial,” exposes flaws in reasoning. For example, if you want to convince a vaccine skeptic you can either cite scientific evidence or refute the form of the argument, such as pointing out that while there may be a minimal risk to taking a vaccine, the same could be said of aspirin.

While research shows that both approaches can be effective, we need to keep context in mind. If you are in a trustful environment, such as a professional or scientific setting, a fact-based topic rebuttal can often be effective. However, if you’re trying to talk your crazy uncle out of a conspiracy theory at Thanksgiving dinner, you may want to try a technique rebuttal.

In recent years a variety of methods, such as Deep Canvassing, Street Epistemology and the Change Conversation Pyramid have emerged as effective technique rebuttal methods. Interestingly, they don’t rely on any elaborate rhetorical flourishes, but rather listening empathetically, restating the opposing position in a way that shows we understand it, identifying common ground and exploring how they came to their conclusion.

The truth is that we can never truly change somebody’s mind. Only they can do that. All too often, we treat opinions as if they were artillery in a battle. Yet attacking someone’s beliefs is more likely to raise their defenses than to convince them that they are in error. Before we can convince anyone of anything, we need to first build an environment of safety and trust.

Let Empathy Be You Secret Weapon

When we want to change somebody’s minds, our first instinct is to confront their beliefs. We want to be warriors and fight for our position. Yet because people’s opinions are often a result of their experiences and social networks, countering their beliefs won’t feel to them like merely offering a different perspective, but as an attack on their identity and dignity.

That’s why we’re much better off listening and building rapport. That’s not always easy to do, because staying silent while somebody is voicing an opinion we don’t agree with can feel like a surrender. But it doesn’t have to be. In fact, if we can identify a shared value and a shared language in an opposing viewpoint, we have a powerful tool to argue our position.

The truth is that empathy isn’t absolution. In fact, it can be our secret weapon. We don’t have to agree with someone’s belief to internalize it. We all have a need to be recognized and when we take the time to hear someone out, we honor their dignity. That makes them much more willing to hear us out. Lasting change is always built on common ground.

At some point, we all need to decide if we want to make a point or make a difference. If we really care about change, we need to hold ourselves accountable to be effective messengers and express ourselves in terms that others are willing to accept. That doesn’t in any way mean we have to compromise. It simply means that we need to advocate effectively.

To do that, we need to care more about building shared purpose than we do about winning points.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Flickr

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Making Empathy Your Secret Weapon

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GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When I first moved to Kyiv about 20 years ago, I met my friend Pavlo, who is from Belarus. Eventually our talk turned to that country’s leader, Alexander Lukashenko, and an incident in which he turned off the utilities at the US Ambassador’s residence, as well as those of other diplomats. It seemed totally outlandish and crazy to me.

“But he won,” Pavlo countered. I was incredulous, until he explained. “Lukashenko knows he’s a bastard and that the world will never accept him. In that situation all you can win is your freedom and that’s what he won.” It was a mode of thinking so outrageous and foreign to me that I could scarcely believe it.

Yet it opened my eyes and made me a more effective operator. We tend to think of empathy as an act of generosity, but it’s far more than that. Learning how to internalize diverse viewpoints is a skill we should learn not only because it helps make others more comfortable, but because it empowers us to successfully navigate an often complex and difficult world.

Identifying Shared Values

We all have ideas we feel passionately about and, naturally, we want others to adopt them. The ideas we believe in make up an important facet of our identity, dignity and sense of self. For me, as an American living in post-communist countries, the ideas embedded in democratic institutions were important and it was difficult for me to see things another way.

My conversation with Pavlo opened my eyes. Where I saw America and “the west” as a more just society, people in other parts of the world saw it as a dominant force that restricted their freedom. My big insight was that I didn’t need to agree with a perspective to understand, internalize, and leverage it as a shared value.

For example, once I was able to understand that some people saw Americans as powerful—something akin to an invading force—I was able to shed the feelings of vulnerability that arose from being in a strange and foreign land and focus on the shared value of safety in my dealings with others.

A great strategy for identifying shared values is to listen closely to what your opposition is saying. People say and do things because they believe they will be effective. Once I was able to stop dismissing Lukashenko as a corrupt thug, I was able to identify the issues surrounding safety and dominance that could be useful to me.

Building Shared Purpose

Using empathy to identify shared values is a crucial first step, but doesn’t achieve anything by itself. To move things forward, we need to build a shared purpose. Consider a famous study called the Robbers Cave Experiment, which involved 22 boys of similar religious, racial and economic backgrounds invited to spend a few weeks at a summer camp.

In the first phase, they were separated into two groups of “Rattlers” and “Eagles” that had little contact with each other. As each group formed its own identity, they began to display hostility on the rare occasions when they were together. During the second phase, the two groups were given competitive tasks and tensions boiled over, with each group name calling, sabotaging each other’s efforts and violently attacking one another.

In the third phase, the researchers attempted to reduce tensions. At first, they merely brought them into friendly contact, with little effect. The boys just sneered at each other. However, when they were tricked into challenging tasks where they were forced to work together in order to be successful, the tenor changed quickly. By the end of the camp the two groups had fallen into a friendly camaraderie.

As Francis Fukuyama writes in his recent book, “Identity can be used to divide, but it can also be used to integrate,” which is exactly what I found in my years working is foreign cultures. Once I was able to leverage shared values to create a shared purpose and began engaging in shared actions, that purpose and those actions became part of a shared identity. Yes, I was still an American, with American values and perspectives, but I became their American.

Overcoming Conflict By Designing A Dilemma

Unfortunately, building a shared purpose isn’t always possible. A simple truth is that humans build attachments to people, ideas and things. When those attachments are threatened, they will lash out. That’s why whenever we set out to make a significant impact, there will always be those who will work to undermine what we are trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive.

When that happens—and it always does eventually—we can get sucked into a conflict, which will likely take us off course and discredit what we’re trying to achieve. Yet, here too, developing empathy skills to identify shared values can be extremely helpful once we learn how to design a dilemma action, which puts the opponents into an impossible position.

Dilemma actions have been used for at least a century—famous examples include Gandhi’s Salt March, King’s Birmingham Campaign and Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels—but more recently codified by the global activist, Srdja Popović. They are just as effective in an organizational context, using an opponent’s resistance against them.

One of the great things about dilemma actions is that you approach them exactly the same way you approach building allies—by identifying a shared purpose. Once you do that, you can design a constructive act rooted in that shared purpose that advances your agenda. Your opponent then has a choice: they can disrupt the act and violate the shared value or they can let it go forward and let change progress.

For example, I was once running a transformation project that was being impeded by a Sales Director hogging accounts. Although it was agreed that she would distribute her clients, she never got around to it, so I set up a meeting with a key account and one of our salespeople. When she tried to disrupt the meeting, she violated the shared value we had established, was dismissed from her position and everything fell into place after that.

Empathy Is Not Absolution

Empathy, as powerful as it can potentially be, is widely misunderstood. It is often paired with compassion in the context of creating a more beneficial workplace. That is, of course, a reasonable and worthy objective, but the one-dimensional use of the term is misleading and limits its value.

When seen only through the lens of making others more comfortable, empathy can seem like a “nice to have,” trait rather than a valuable competency and an important source of competitive advantage. It’s much easier to see the advantage of imposing your will, rather than internalizing the perspectives of others.

One thing I learned over many years living in foreign cultures is that it’s important to understand how people around you think, especially if you don’t agree with them and, as is sometimes the case, find their point of view morally reprehensible. In fact, learning more about how others think can make you a more effective leader, negotiator and manager.

Empathy is not absolution. You can internalize the ideas of others and still vehemently disagree. There is a reason that Special Forces are trained to understand the cultures in which they will operate and it isn’t because it makes them nicer people. It’s because it makes them more lethal operators.

It is only through empathy that we can understand motivations—for good or ill—and design effective strategies to build shared purpose or, if need be, design a dilemma for an opponent. To operate in an often difficult world, you need to understand your environment. That’s why building empathy skills can be like a secret weapon.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pexels

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