Engineering doesn’t begin as a profession or credentials, but as a perspective:
- Seeing the world as a collection of problems and opportunities.
- Relying on evidence and logic to validate that a problem or opportunity is real.
- Needing to understand how things work … the dynamics of the situation, not just the symptoms.
- Enjoying the process of developing solutions that don’t just work, but that are elegant in their construction, their operation, and how they solve the problem or exploit the opportunity.
There are plenty of other ways to look at the world, and they enrich us all … engineers and non-engineers alike. There’s more to life than problems and their solutions.
But when what you want is progress, you’ll get it from the science/engineering worldview more reliably than from any other.
Except … nestled among the problems and opportunities that constitute the engineering worldview is a thorny sub-set made up of all the ways we pesky human beings avoid clear understanding and elegant solutions, like anecdotes, tribal membership, and the genius even mediocre intellects display when rationalizing their … our … pre-existing biases.
Which brings us to a special class of engineers — marketers, sales professionals, political consultants, and other practitioners of the persuasion trades.
Like all other engineers, persuaders see the world as a collection of problems and opportunities. The ones they’re most interested in are about acquiring, maintaining, and using power … about getting us to do what they want us to do, without our ever realizing why it is we’ve made the decisions we’ve made.
What for us are enriching ways of experiencing the world are, for them, buttons to push and levers to pull to manipulate us.
Did I say them? Depending entirely on the situation, we are often they, because persuasion is one of the most important of leadership skills (see Leading IT: (Still) the Toughest Job in the World, Chapter 9 for more).
Which leads to two awkward ethical questions:
- If and how persuasion differs from manipulation.
- Whether using tools other than evidence and logic for persuasion is, or at least can be ethical.
Understand, I lack access to any universal, unquestioned truths (just like everyone else; otherwise the world would have only one holy book, creed, moral code, and operating system … I did say “unquestioned”). So I can’t prescribe answers to these two questions.
What I can do is give you the answers I’ve arrived at, and how I’ve arrived at them. It’s up to you to develop answers that work for you.
Question #1: The difference between persuasion and manipulation
So far as I can tell, the only difference between persuasion and manipulation is intent, the same as the difference between killing an enemy combatant and murder.
If your goal is an external good, you’re convinced your position is sound, and you’re communicating in order to enlighten, you’re persuading.
But if your goal is personal benefit, what you’re trying to persuade someone of is, to your own knowledge, false or a bad idea, and the result will be to your target’s personal detriment, you’re manipulating.
Question #2: The ethics of using tools other than evidence and logic to persuade
There’s a school of thought, popular among technical professionals, that says our responsibility is limited to providing the evidence and logic of a situation, after which it’s up to the recipient to arrive at the proper conclusions. (Yes, “the evidence and logic of a situation,” is, of course, infinite. Figure there’s a point of diminishing returns and leave it at that.)
At the other extreme is the proposition that what matters is the outcome — that whatever is necessary to cause the other party to reach the “right” conclusion is just fine and dandy, because caveat emptor anyway. My job is to win.
Just my opinion: Information dumping abdicates responsibility, while winning no matter what, no matter how important the cause, ignores the collateral damage that occurs every time someone creates more disrespect for honest inquiry.
Some tools will, I think, always do more harm than good. Take tribalism — dividing the world into us and them and demonizing “them.” I doubt it ever does enough good to justify its side-effects.
Other tools of persuasion, though, have both legitimate and illegitimate uses. Anecdotes and analogies, for example, are perfect for illustrating a point, and for establishing why a topic is important.
If I’m helping someone understand my position, why I’ve taken it, and why it matters, then I haven’t crossed the line.
If they also conclude that anyone who disagrees with me is a disgraceful waste of protein … that’s even better.
One related point is something I’ve learned over the years:
The reasons someone gives to defend a position are often not the REAL reasons.
By “REAL reasons”, I mean the reasons that motivate someone to hold to the position they are taking. This can prove extremely frustrating to those of us with an engineer’s perspective, since we generally try to raise those issues directly (since “In the end, reality always wins.”).
Sometimes the person making those arguments isn’t even aware of the reason(s) he or she is holding a given position; other times that person is quite aware of those reasons, but either uses other reasons that he or she thinks are more persuasive to their audience, or is afraid that the real reasons won’t be sufficiently persuasive. Finally, in some cases the real reasons are selfish, and benefit the person making these other arguments even if the result is less beneficial to the whole.
This can be detected when, after addressing such points, the person making them simply returns with additional points, often repeatedly.
The best strategy I’ve found for dealing with this is to identify the “elephant in the middle of the room.” Note that there appears to be some unstated reason (or reasons) for the person holding the position, and offer to help identify and address that reason. In many cases this will break the logjam and allow a real solution to be achieved; in other cases this will at least identify that there may be a “hidden agenda”, not only to yourself, but to others as well — without having to confront the person holding it directly.
Finally, it is important, when a participant in such a negotiation to turn this around and address yourself with the same criteria. Ask yourself, “Am *I* making my case with the arguments that I feel are most accurate? Do *I* have some additional agenda that I’m not stating, and if so, should I state it or back off?” If you do need to back off, be open and admit the fact that you have identified bias of your own, and that it is affecting your objectivity. Finally, if you find that your position is in error, and the arguments you are hearing are, in fact, legitimate, admit it, and your own error as well. Nothing builds credibility in people as much as freely admitting their own errors when they discover them.
There are many fuzzy answers to the question. There is, though, one that to me is as close to an absolute as there can be.
I understand that human beings will use their emotions when making a decision. That’s unavoidable (otherwise we would just run everything through a computer in the first place). But the instant I sense that you’re trying to play on my emotions, you lose all — and I mean ALL — credibility. Explaining results, giving examples, using anecdotes are all valid approaches, as long as the idea is to give me *useful* information. And there truly are some business decisions where emotions should come into play (layoffs are necessary — do you stick to 100% logic and dump the employee who’s been with you 55 years and is two months short of retirement?), but I don’t want you to be dictating how I should feel about something.
Naturally, I’m talking about business decisions, which is what this column is about. Dealing with others on an interpersonal level is all about emotions to start with, so my comments don’t apply there.
Let’s strip things down a bit.
The goal of persuasion is to obtain agreement. The goal of manipulation is to obtain control.
In my experience “dumping the data” is not persuasion, it’s either a display of superiority, cluelessness, or an attempt (consciously or unconsciously) to impose a position. The “win at any cost” is not persuasion, it’s manipulation.
Logic and evidence are the tools of persuasion because, nominally, they are not targeted at the ego of the audience. Ethical or not, these won’t come back to haunt you whereas using emotionally based arguments can and often do.