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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.

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Some studies claim to demonstrate that intuition is more reliable than evidence-based decision-making. Which makes me wonder, if a study presents evidence that intuition is superior to evidence, does it prove itself wrong?

And anyway, the preponderance of the evidence seems to favor evidence and logic after all (and is that circular reasoning?) … see, for example, “The Future of Decision Making: Less Intuition, More Evidence,” Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business Review, 1/7/2010.

Last week’s column proposed that while practitioners of the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) rely on evidence and logic and are trained in their use, we aren’t Spock-like logicians, immune from emotional influences. We’re as likely to rationalize as anyone else, and because of our analytical skills we’re better at it.

Some correspondents argued that, this being the case, there’s really no hope. As we can’t escape the control of our emotions we should all just stop worrying, be happy, and, I guess, embrace our inner monkeys.

Which means, I guess, that if you can’t achieve perfection you shouldn’t try to improve. Sounds like a rationalization to me.

Opinion: The better we are at being objective, the better off we are, if for no other reason than the protection it provides from the propagandists, marketers, and political consultants who use our emotions against us every day.

If we know their techniques we can watch out for them. So here’s an A-list of cognitive traps that are easy to fall into and hard to climb out of. If we’re alert to them, maybe we can avoid them.

Arguing: Arguments are about winning and losing. Discussions are about improving shared understanding and solving shared problems. If you find yourself trying to prove you’re right, you’re probably leading with your emotions, because the need to win is an emotional response.

If you’re arguing, stop, clarify where you and the other disputant disagree, and ask what evidence would settle the matter. Or, ask what problem you’re trying to solve together.

If you can’t get the other person to stop arguing, change the subject. You might as well. Your exchange of words is pointless.

Anecdotes: Marketers, sales professionals, and political consultants all know anecdotes are more persuasive than statistics. All they are, though, are statistics performed on a sample of one. Unless it’s fictional. Then, the sample size is zero.

Anecdotes illustrate a point. They prove something is possible. That’s about it.

Ad hominem arguments: In case you don’t know the term, an ad hominem argument goes like this: “You said 2 + 2 equals 4. You know who else said this? Hitler!”

Ad hominem arguments surround us. “Of course you think that way. You’re an engineer.” “Ignore him. He’s a bean counter.” Or if you’re in a Myers-Briggs situation, “It’s what you’d expect from an ENTJ.”

Tribalism is a special case of ad hominem argument, and a particularly dangerous one. It’s separating the world into us and them, creating a powerful emotional need to prove that we’re right and they’re wrong.

Anger: While an appeal to any of your emotions is, of course, an attempt to get you to decide something emotionally rather than on its merits, anger is the most dangerous of the bunch, for two reasons. First and foremost, anger makes you stupid. As does fear, but unlike fear, anger hangs around long after the stimulus has passed. It needs to be released. People who are angry aren’t always angry about anything in particular. But they’ll find something.

Anger is also unlike fear in that fear is ultimately about personal benefit — avoiding harm — so there’s some rationality to where it takes you.

If someone is trying to make you angry, you’re being played. I guarantee it.

Assertion: Argument by assertion replaces evidence with confidence. If you aren’t sure of the actual facts, and someone else makes a confident assertion, most of us, most of the time, are inclined to give the other person the benefit of the doubt.

“I don’t know the evidence, but I don’t accept what you’re telling me,” isn’t the most diplomatic statement you can make, after all.

Agreement: Far and away the most dangerous pitfall when it comes to avoiding emotion-driven decisions is hearing what you want to hear. Most of us, most of the time, accept “facts” that support what we want to be true without subjecting them to the slightest scrutiny.

Imagine you’ve avoided these traps. You’ve made a solid, evidence-based decision. Suddenly dispassion is counterproductive. To muster the energy and persistence you’ll need to make your decision real, you have to want it, and want it bad.

Deep down in your gut.

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