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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

If you want to be more persuasive, what’s the single most important technique you can master?

No, it isn’t knowing more about the subject than your colleagues. It isn’t even knowing more about the subject this week than you knew last week.

Nice tries, though. But evidence and logic are shaky persuaders under the best of circumstances. If, in place of evidence and logic your expertise becomes the lead story, your audience likely won’t even pay attention to your evidence and logic.

How about threats? If the behavior of our political leaders provides any guidance, threatening those who disagree with severe consequences … ranging from ostracism to physical violence … would seem to be a high-payoff strategy.

But no.

On the national stage, various forms of intimidation do seem to be effective ways to keep political kin in line on an issue-by-issue basis. And yes, intimidation can be just as effective in a business setting, so long as you remember the ROT principle from the KJR Manifesto: Relationships Outlive Transactions.

Which is to say you might win a battle … a transaction … but if you win it through intimidation you damage relationships you might need to rely on later on in your tenure, when you need allies and not just grudging followers.

So yes, intimidation might get people to parrot a particular position you want them to espouse, but you won’t have convinced them you’re right. You’ll just have convinced them you’re to be avoided whenever possible.

Or ganged up on at the first opportunity.

Maybe you should sign up for a debating society, to hone your argumentative skills.

Maybe, but I don’t think so. The point of debating is to decide who’s the best debater, not which side of an argument is more valid. I’m as happy to cede the Star Debater Award in a disagreement as I am to cede the Star Baker award in the Great British Baking Show to, well, to just about anyone.

Give up? (You might as well. I’m going to keep on writing without having heard whatever you were about to propose.)

Now this is just my opinion, mind you: One of the most effective ways to be persuasive is to be wrong.

Not wrong about the subject in question. Not wrong about any specific subject, for that matter.

See, what’s hardest about getting someone to change their mind about a subject is that when I decide what opinion to espouse on a subject, inside I invest my ego in it, while outside I stake my reputation. No matter what you say, my self-esteem is linked to my having decided well and my prestige is at stake.

Which is why the answer to this week’s challenge is to be publicly, visibly, and cheerfully wrong about something from time to time.

Change your mind about subject A and you’ll be more persuasive about subject B, not less. That’s because changing your mind without any noticeable grief establishes that it’s okay to be persuaded.

And because you’re known to change your mind in the face of new evidence and a different way of thinking about things, that also means that when you don’t change your mind about a different subject you’re more likely to be right than someone who never admits to being wrong.

Bob’s last word: The most persuasive argument isn’t “My major premise is A. My minor premise is B. My conclusion is C.” No, the most persuasive argument is, “I used to think A. Then B explained C to me, and it completely changed my thinking about this.”

Bob’s sales pitch: Looking for the perfect seasonal gift? Sorry. Can’t help you.

But if you’re looking for one of the most unusual to give someone with unusual tastes, or a way to make a statement (I’ll leave it to you to decide what statement this makes), give the gift that will make them wonder just what you mist think of them: Bob and Dave’s far-from-best-selling novel about the notorious Wisconsin Rapids elephant murder – The Moral Hazard of Lime Daiquiris.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Among the slices of my life I’m grateful for are the bits and pieces of wisdom KJR’s subscribers share with me that enrich my understanding of How Things Work.

This week, a tip o’the hat to Nelson Pardee for pointing me to a nice article by a gentleman named Morgan Housel titled “Common Causes of Very Bad Decisions.”

It’s so nice that this week I’m just going to share some snippets to whet your appetite, paraphrased into KJR-speak because I have to add some value somehow, after all:

  • Virtue is, for most people, negotiable. With a sizeable enough incentive we’re all capable of behavior we wouldn’t want headlined in the local newspaper. And for most of us, it’s the disincentive of being caught out that keeps us from succumbing, not our native integrity.
  • Mistakes are multiplicative, not additive. Imagine, that is, we’re manage to create a badness metric. Next imagine you have three colleagues who, on the badness scale, measure 2, 3, and 5. Their combined impact on overall organizational badness isn’t 10 (2+3+5). It’s 30 (2 x 3 x 5).
  • Probability is hard but accurate. Binary is easy but wrong. When our local meteorologist predicts a 70% chance of rain and rain doesn’t happen, we don’t review the last 100 rain forecasts to see if the meteorologist’s 70% chance of rain turned into actual rain in 70% of the forecasts. We gripe about the meteorologist being wrong.
  • Your opponents aren’t always playing to outscore you. Many are playing a different game than you are altogether. If you can’t figure out what game they’re playing you’ll never figure out why they do what they do, let alone what you should do about it.
  • The world is a jigsaw puzzle. It consists of a few million pieces. The information available to us and the knowledge we have about it constitute no more than a few hundred of those pieces. The moral of this story: No matter how much we think we know, we’re always mostly ignorant.
  • Success is more dangerous than failure. We can learn from failure. When we succeed we’re more likely to take credit for brilliance we don’t have than to understand that in a random world, winning the lottery isn’t a meritocratic outcome. This makes us vulnerable to overconfidence.
  • Learning from the successes of others is almost as fraught as learning from our own. Most people who succeed, most of the time, owe a lot of their success to dumb, random luck too. Sorting out what they did that actually factored into their success from everything else they did that had nothing at all to do with it is an unending challenge.

Bob’s last word: In KJR I’ve written a lot about the importance of creating a “culture of honest inquiry.” One aspect of this culture is insisting on evidence and logic and not just “trusting your gut.”

But just as importance is for each of us to recognize where our personal logic is vulnerable to sources of illogic, including but not limited to those so admirably summarized by Mr. Housel.

You might consider making a list and keeping it handy for those times you’re called on to make consequential decisions.

Bob’s sales pitch: This being the holiday season and all, what could make a better gift for those you’d like to enlighten than a book by yours truly? No, no, no, don’t answer that question. It’s rhetorical, not an actual inquiry!

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