Why the most common mode of persuasion is often doomed to fail
“SAVI is such a useful tool!”
“You have to try these brownies — they’re delicious.”
“Those pants look kind of silly with those loafers.”
“Terminator 2 is a great date movie.”
Many readers who are familiar with SAVI will easily recognize this type of communication: the opinion. You may even recall that it is the single most widely used communication behavior. Opinions are everywhere. We all have them — about ourselves, people we know, politics, sports, religion, popular culture, and any other topic you can think of. All beliefs, speculations, evaluations, interpretations, and judgments are opinions.
A defining feature of an opinion is that it is never true or false. No amount of research can ever prove or disprove the idea that your new shirt looks lovely on you, that Ulysses is a brilliant novel, or that your boss is a boring old drone; these will forever be matters of individual judgment. However, whenever we believe very firmly in a particular opinion, it’s very easy to see it as true — as a fact.
Now, why do we give so many opinions? And why do they fail so miserably in persuading other people to agree with us? One of the most compelling — and certainly the most dramatic-sounding — answers we’ve found is something called The Curse of Knowledge. This concept comes from the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath (which we highly recommend).
They give a beautiful illustration of this phenomenon, with a variation of a “name that tune” sort of challenge. In a 1990 study at Stanford, subjects were split up into pairs consisting of one “tapper” and one “listener.” The tapper’s job was to pick one of 25 well-known songs (such as “Happy Birthday to You” or “The Star Spangled Banner”) and tap out the rhythm of that song for the listener; the listener’s job was to guess what song was being tapped out.
As it turns out, the listener’s job is extremely difficult. Out of 120 songs that got tapped out, listeners guessed only 3 correctly (a success rate of 2.5 percent). What was fascinating, though, was that to the tappers, the task didn’t seem nearly so tough. Before the listeners guessed the song, the tappers were asked how likely it was that the guess would be correct. Their response: 50%. So there’s an enormous discrepancy here: The tappers expected their messages to come through 50% of the time, but they actually got through less than 3% of the time.
What accounts for that difference? Try tapping out a song for yourself, and you can easily see (or, rather, hear) what happened. As you tap out the song, you’ll be aware not only of the song’s rhythm (which you’re indicating through tapping), but also of the tune (which is playing only in your head). In fact, it’s impossible to do this task without hearing the tune. This is what happened to the tappers in the study — and because they could hear the tune, it seemed pretty obvious how all the taps went together. They couldn’t imagine what it was like for the listeners, who were just hearing strings of disconnected taps.
As Chip and Dan Heath explain, “This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has ‘cursed’ us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.” In their book, they relate this problem to all sorts of difficulties in getting a message across. For instance, when a CEO talks to employees about abstract concepts such as “unlocking shareholder value,” “there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can't hear.”
The same principle can help explain why an opinion that seems obviously true and convincing to one person can be entirely unpersuasive to others. Every opinion is the tip of a much larger intellectual and emotional iceberg. When we state only opinions, we’re expressing the bare-bones conclusions we’ve come to (like isolated taps), without all the depth of knowledge and experiences that led us to those conclusions (the tunes in our head).
For instance, for a person with a strong belief that U.S. healthcare should include a public insurance option, the tune might include any number of personal experiences with insurance and health services, stories from friends and acquaintances, and knowledge gained from articles, television programs, and other media reports on the subject. When this person tells his opinion to others, there’s no guarantee that his listeners are hearing a similar tune. In fact, what often happens is that different people hear conflicting tunes based on completely divergent experiences. (For instance, a personal history and knowledge base that point to the dangers of a public insurance option.) So it should come as no surprise that much of the time, we all end up coming to different conclusions and getting into arguments over our competing opinions.
What’s the solution? Stay tuned for the next post!
(In the meantime, you can read excerpts from Made to Stick at http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/. Search for “tappers” to find the study we’ve been discussing here.)
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
The Neuroscience of Conversational Flexibility
Studies of brain functioning provide insight into what drives our habitual communication patterns and what it takes to overcome them
In the past several posts, we’ve been talking about the rigid patterns that develop in our communication and what we recommend as an antidote — conversational flexibility. Developing conversational flexibility involves:
1) being aware of what it is we’re doing that isn’t working, and
2) being able to stop ourselves from doing it, so that we can then
3) have a free choice to do something new instead of automatically reacting in our habitual way.
We explained that this process takes time, practice, and quite a bit of patience. In this post we’ll tell you a little more about why that is — why it is so difficult to make lasting changes in our behavior. The information below draws from the work of Janet Crawford, an executive coach who specializes in applying neuroscience research to leadership development and organizational change. See the end of this post for a link to a chapter from Crawford’s upcoming book, which addresses these issues in greater detail.
The first point to understand: Conscious intentions are overrated.
It’s not that conscious intentions aren’t important. In fact, they’re absolutely crucial in helping us to make any sort of lasting change. However, they don’t play as large or as powerful a role in driving our behavior as we tend to assume they do.
Only a very tiny fraction of the cognitive processing in our brains is conscious (or explicit). The vast majority is unconscious, or implicit. Now, this is not a bad thing. If most of our activities were not automatic and habitual, we’d all be in big trouble! It would take you so much time and energy just to attend to your basic needs (like getting yourself cleaned, clothed, and fed) that you’d never make it out the door in the morning. You’d never get around to doing more interesting things like reading this blog and going to work each day.
However, there is a major downside to the power and pervasiveness of implicit processes — explicit knowledge or motivation isn’t enough to change them. To change an unconscious habit, we need to play by the rules of unconscious habits. This brings us to our next point:
Unconscious habits are stubbornly persistent.
There’s a major conflict between the part of your brain that understands why change is good and the part of the brain where that change actually needs to happen. That first part of your brain is the prefrontal cortex — the seat of your empathy, emotional resiliency, attuned communication, self-control, moral reasoning, and other aspects of emotional intelligence and complex planning and decision making. When you start trying to improve the way you communicate, it’s your prefrontal cortex that says, “It’s really not helpful for me to Yes-but my colleagues so much. I want to stop doing that.”
The problem is, your Yes-butting isn’t driven by your prefrontal cortex. It’s an automatic habit driven by older structures in your brain — particularly the basal ganglia. We can sum up the general attitude of the basal ganglia in two simple principles: 1) stability is good, and 2) change is scary. This part of the brain likes things just fine the way they are, thank you very much. From its perspective, all those implicit patterns that have been shaping your behavior for years are working just fine. The simple proof of that is that you’re still alive; the sum total of all the different patterns you’ve accumulated has been sufficient to help you survive until now. Changing anything that has worked so well for so long is a risky prospect. So when the prefrontal cortex says, “I want to stop Yes-butting” the basal ganglia say something like, “I know you do, but that’s just too bad.”
Now, if you wanted to discourage someone from changing their behavior, how would you do it? The brain has a brilliant strategy for this — making change feel bad. We’re wired in such a way that when we try to change a habitual pattern, it causes anxiety. To enable a new pattern to develop, the prefrontal cortex needs to be strong enough to calm this anxiety. And it needs to do that again and again and again, so the new pattern occurs frequently enough to replace the old one.
Keeping all this in mind, we can understand the steps required for change in even more detail than what we described earlier. As Janet Crawford explains, lasting change requires people to:
1) recognize the old unwanted pattern
2) have a commitment to change the pattern
3) understand that they’ll feel uncomfortable doing it
4) have a new choice that’s specific enough that they can take action on it in about .2 seconds (otherwise the implicit processing takes over)
5) have a healthy prefrontal cortex that can do that (which is influenced by early nurturing and by lifestyle factors, including sleep, exercise, diet, and others)
6) do this enough times that they consolidate the new pattern
While this may sound daunting, we hope you’ll take a positive message away as well. Often, Crawford points out, “people get frustrated because they know they should change and they haven’t.” It’s easy to take that personally and feel bad about it. We’ve seen this plenty of times in the people we teach. But once we understand the underlying neurological mechanisms of change, it’s easier to see our difficulties for what they really are — “a natural process, not a moral failing.”
We also want to emphasize the benefits of having practical, concrete tools to help in this process. SAVI is particularly useful for steps 1, 4, and 6: helping people to understand and recognize patterns; giving specific strategies; and offering opportunities for the type of practice necessary to consolidate new, more effective ways of communicating.
As time goes on, we expect to return periodically to the topic of neuroscience and how it relates to communication. In the meantime, we recommend Janet Crawford’s book chapter “Brain-Friendly Organization,” available here: http://www.brainfriendlyleader.com/JC/Resources.html. Enjoy!
In the past several posts, we’ve been talking about the rigid patterns that develop in our communication and what we recommend as an antidote — conversational flexibility. Developing conversational flexibility involves:
1) being aware of what it is we’re doing that isn’t working, and
2) being able to stop ourselves from doing it, so that we can then
3) have a free choice to do something new instead of automatically reacting in our habitual way.
We explained that this process takes time, practice, and quite a bit of patience. In this post we’ll tell you a little more about why that is — why it is so difficult to make lasting changes in our behavior. The information below draws from the work of Janet Crawford, an executive coach who specializes in applying neuroscience research to leadership development and organizational change. See the end of this post for a link to a chapter from Crawford’s upcoming book, which addresses these issues in greater detail.
The first point to understand: Conscious intentions are overrated.
It’s not that conscious intentions aren’t important. In fact, they’re absolutely crucial in helping us to make any sort of lasting change. However, they don’t play as large or as powerful a role in driving our behavior as we tend to assume they do.
Only a very tiny fraction of the cognitive processing in our brains is conscious (or explicit). The vast majority is unconscious, or implicit. Now, this is not a bad thing. If most of our activities were not automatic and habitual, we’d all be in big trouble! It would take you so much time and energy just to attend to your basic needs (like getting yourself cleaned, clothed, and fed) that you’d never make it out the door in the morning. You’d never get around to doing more interesting things like reading this blog and going to work each day.
However, there is a major downside to the power and pervasiveness of implicit processes — explicit knowledge or motivation isn’t enough to change them. To change an unconscious habit, we need to play by the rules of unconscious habits. This brings us to our next point:
Unconscious habits are stubbornly persistent.
There’s a major conflict between the part of your brain that understands why change is good and the part of the brain where that change actually needs to happen. That first part of your brain is the prefrontal cortex — the seat of your empathy, emotional resiliency, attuned communication, self-control, moral reasoning, and other aspects of emotional intelligence and complex planning and decision making. When you start trying to improve the way you communicate, it’s your prefrontal cortex that says, “It’s really not helpful for me to Yes-but my colleagues so much. I want to stop doing that.”
The problem is, your Yes-butting isn’t driven by your prefrontal cortex. It’s an automatic habit driven by older structures in your brain — particularly the basal ganglia. We can sum up the general attitude of the basal ganglia in two simple principles: 1) stability is good, and 2) change is scary. This part of the brain likes things just fine the way they are, thank you very much. From its perspective, all those implicit patterns that have been shaping your behavior for years are working just fine. The simple proof of that is that you’re still alive; the sum total of all the different patterns you’ve accumulated has been sufficient to help you survive until now. Changing anything that has worked so well for so long is a risky prospect. So when the prefrontal cortex says, “I want to stop Yes-butting” the basal ganglia say something like, “I know you do, but that’s just too bad.”
Now, if you wanted to discourage someone from changing their behavior, how would you do it? The brain has a brilliant strategy for this — making change feel bad. We’re wired in such a way that when we try to change a habitual pattern, it causes anxiety. To enable a new pattern to develop, the prefrontal cortex needs to be strong enough to calm this anxiety. And it needs to do that again and again and again, so the new pattern occurs frequently enough to replace the old one.
Keeping all this in mind, we can understand the steps required for change in even more detail than what we described earlier. As Janet Crawford explains, lasting change requires people to:
1) recognize the old unwanted pattern
2) have a commitment to change the pattern
3) understand that they’ll feel uncomfortable doing it
4) have a new choice that’s specific enough that they can take action on it in about .2 seconds (otherwise the implicit processing takes over)
5) have a healthy prefrontal cortex that can do that (which is influenced by early nurturing and by lifestyle factors, including sleep, exercise, diet, and others)
6) do this enough times that they consolidate the new pattern
While this may sound daunting, we hope you’ll take a positive message away as well. Often, Crawford points out, “people get frustrated because they know they should change and they haven’t.” It’s easy to take that personally and feel bad about it. We’ve seen this plenty of times in the people we teach. But once we understand the underlying neurological mechanisms of change, it’s easier to see our difficulties for what they really are — “a natural process, not a moral failing.”
We also want to emphasize the benefits of having practical, concrete tools to help in this process. SAVI is particularly useful for steps 1, 4, and 6: helping people to understand and recognize patterns; giving specific strategies; and offering opportunities for the type of practice necessary to consolidate new, more effective ways of communicating.
As time goes on, we expect to return periodically to the topic of neuroscience and how it relates to communication. In the meantime, we recommend Janet Crawford’s book chapter “Brain-Friendly Organization,” available here: http://www.brainfriendlyleader.com/JC/Resources.html. Enjoy!
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
A Timely Article on Complaining
Thanks to Michael Rutter for pointing out a recent article on the hazards of complaining at work, which provides a nice follow-up to our last post:
Soft Skills at Work: Complaining can affect productivity, morale
It gives some good, concrete examples of just how deadly this type of communication can be for morale and productivity — as well as for an individual’s chances of professional advancement.
With an understanding of SAVI, we can make a couple of additional observations.
First: The word “complaint” can mean two completely different things:
Second: Complaints carry very important information.
If complaining is so damaging, the obvious solution is to simply stop doing it — to just (putting it bluntly) “suck it up and deal” with the circumstances you’re facing. While this may help you avoid some of the negative side effects of complaining, it’s only a partial solution. When we complain, there’s a reason for it. Merely stifling our complaints is not only difficult (just try going a whole day, or a whole week without complaining; for many of us this is a superhuman task!); it also fails to address the root cause.
What is the root cause of a complaint? Hidden beneath every complaint is a want. We complain because there is something we want that we aren’t getting, or something we don’t want that we feel stuck with. Often we don’t even know what it is that we want. In many circumstances, we may believe that we can’t get what we want — perhaps because we think that we don’t deserve it, that our workplace is unjust, or that other people are unfair. As a result we don’t take the step to clearly identify our wants, much less actively pursue them.
The solution? The most effective method we’ve found is to shift from passive complaining to more active, problem-solving forms of communication. Since the core issue is an underlying want, you can get to the heart of the matter by asking yourself two simple questions: 1) What do you really want? and 2) What can you do to help make that happen? Ask these questions at least three times, going a little bit deeper each time. Take as long as you need to seriously consider the answers.
The repetition is important; some coaches have their clients repeat the questions dozens of times. Typically the original complaint is just the tip of the iceberg, with deeper needs and concerns lying further under the surface. Consider an example. Say your colleague is complaining about some difficulties she’s having with a particular outdated computer program. Now the questions:
And we could keep on going. Just notice how a seemingly superficial gripe can be tied in to much deeper issues. Also notice the way in which asking questions can help a person who has been stuck in complaining to start moving toward active change.
Now a couple of questions for you: What aspects of your work or life do you tend to complain about the most? Would you consider asking these simple questions instead? You might be surprised by what you’ll discover!
Soft Skills at Work: Complaining can affect productivity, morale
It gives some good, concrete examples of just how deadly this type of communication can be for morale and productivity — as well as for an individual’s chances of professional advancement.
With an understanding of SAVI, we can make a couple of additional observations.
First: The word “complaint” can mean two completely different things:
- Discussing something you don’t like in a particular way — groaning, griping, or grumbling about it. This is the main type of complaining addressed in the “soft skills” article, and also the type of complaining we’re talking about in SAVI. Here’s the official SAVI definition: “Frustrated or whining narratives implying that circumstances or others are unfair or too much, not directly blaming the person being spoken to. Resentful description of the situation one is in.”
Voice tone makes all the difference. It almost doesn’t matter what words you say; if you’re saying them in a whiny tone of voice, they almost certainly qualify as a SAVI complaint. The whine communicates a sense of helplessness and passivity, presenting the situation as a burden to be borne rather than a problem to be solved.
- Simply drawing attention to something that is wrong or not working, without a strong emotional charge. In common usage, the term “customer complaint” often has this second meaning. Departments charged with handling customer complaints don’t focus only on customers who whine. This type of “complaint” is an entirely different form of communication, and its effect on a conversation will tend to be quite different from that of a SAVI complaint.
As the article states, “If there is a problem that needs to be addressed, bringing it to the attention of employers and suggesting possible remedies can be helpful. Using a professional tone while describing the difficulty is essential…” We agree. And when you do that, you’re not really complaining at all. Instead of whining about how bad things are, you’re contributing to the type of problem-solving that can help make things better.
Second: Complaints carry very important information.
If complaining is so damaging, the obvious solution is to simply stop doing it — to just (putting it bluntly) “suck it up and deal” with the circumstances you’re facing. While this may help you avoid some of the negative side effects of complaining, it’s only a partial solution. When we complain, there’s a reason for it. Merely stifling our complaints is not only difficult (just try going a whole day, or a whole week without complaining; for many of us this is a superhuman task!); it also fails to address the root cause.
What is the root cause of a complaint? Hidden beneath every complaint is a want. We complain because there is something we want that we aren’t getting, or something we don’t want that we feel stuck with. Often we don’t even know what it is that we want. In many circumstances, we may believe that we can’t get what we want — perhaps because we think that we don’t deserve it, that our workplace is unjust, or that other people are unfair. As a result we don’t take the step to clearly identify our wants, much less actively pursue them.
The solution? The most effective method we’ve found is to shift from passive complaining to more active, problem-solving forms of communication. Since the core issue is an underlying want, you can get to the heart of the matter by asking yourself two simple questions: 1) What do you really want? and 2) What can you do to help make that happen? Ask these questions at least three times, going a little bit deeper each time. Take as long as you need to seriously consider the answers.
The repetition is important; some coaches have their clients repeat the questions dozens of times. Typically the original complaint is just the tip of the iceberg, with deeper needs and concerns lying further under the surface. Consider an example. Say your colleague is complaining about some difficulties she’s having with a particular outdated computer program. Now the questions:
- What does she want? Different, more updated software.
What would help make that happen? Researching other software options and presenting a proposal to her boss for ordering something better.
- What does she really want? To have all the technology she uses for work be reliable, so she can do her job efficiently.
What would help make that happen? Setting a time to periodically review how well all the technology is working, and whether upgrades make sense.
- Underneath that, what does she want? The freedom to order new technology when she needs it.
What would help make that happen? Having a discussion with her boss about gaining that ability.
- And underneath that, what does she want? Greater autonomy and responsibility in her job.
What would help make that happen? Making a list of additional responsibilities she would like to take on, and discussing it at her annual performance review.
- Is there anything even deeper that she wants? Knowledge that she is trusted and respected as a competent, reliable professional.
What would help make that happen? Scheduling regular meetings with her boss outside the annual review to evaluate her performance and consider opportunities for future growth.
Now a couple of questions for you: What aspects of your work or life do you tend to complain about the most? Would you consider asking these simple questions instead? You might be surprised by what you’ll discover!
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