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Most of business is persuasion

 

“What they don’t teach you at business school” is one of the hackiest cliches to infest the self-improvement shelves. Between titles like The Work-From-Home Billionaire, Turbocharge Your Funnel, The Ten-Minute Actuary and Unf*ck Your Desktop.

And yet, I have been to business school and they never mentioned the most important, tricky and time-consuming bit: persuasion.

Running a business is largely the art of getting people to do things. Customers. Staff. Suppliers. Investors. Everything else is mostly different grades of admin.

All those people are reluctant to do what you want. They don’t listen to a word you say. Or so their complete lack of action suggests.

Customers and the people you work with will defy all logic on a daily basis. You’ll provide them with all the cold, hard, objective facts. Then they will make choices that seem to be, as the song goes, insane in the brain.

Early in your career, before you get wilier, it is exhausting and you get nowhere. Thanks to all your facts-based training.

Expertise can make you less persuasive

 

All of business life is a battle against confirmation bias. People believe what they want to believe. Their brains automatically scan the world for stories and data that supports what they reckon already.

Your PowerPoint show is not going to change a thing.

It’s the unstoppable force meets the immovable object. A combination of talking to people with fixed beliefs, and the certainty of most business people that everyone in the world is the same as them. That everyone thinks the same way, acts the same way, has the same motivations and interests.

The more expertise you have, the more you feel that everyone else should just believe it. You’ve done the hard work and you have the factual proof. So why would anyone not appreciate the awesome knowledge you’re bringing them?

 

One-topic obsessives would like you to share their fetish

 

Look elsewhere in your life and you’ll find lots of advice from one-topic obsessive experts. Who would like you to share their subject fetish.

My dermatologist, a professor of that subject, has a routine at every check-up. “Now you do wear a broad-brimmed hat outside at all times don’t you?” she says.

I do not do that, because I don’t want to look like a regional politician. Vanity beats health, sorry.

“And this ocean swimming you do, you must wear a full body suit every swim.”

What if I love the feeling of water, and that’s a major point of doing it?

I’ve had a couple of melanomas. I’m cautious about sun. But her rigid puritanism makes me want to go out at midday wearing only a Borat-style pouch and a glossy film of coconut oil.

To her, it’s the most important thing in the world. To me, it’s just one of a range of things trying to kill me and I don’t want her zero-risk approach to life.

Like the road safety enthusiasts who all want speed limits lowered to 20 kmh, to bring the road toll down to medieval cartage levels. Forget the benefits to society from people moving around at acceptable-risk speeds.

 

Is alcohol good for you? I’ll decide.

 

Then there’s the age-old battle between medical scientists and alcohol consumption, played out in the weekend media lifestyle sections.

As long as I’ve been alive it’s been an endless cycle of good/bad/good/bad for moderate drinking. As of last week, it’s all bad.

 

 

Am I going to change my behaviour? Fuck no. Because my confirmation bias is that scientists want to kill my fun, and they are prepared to set their experiment parameters to reach that conclusion.

I can picture those scientists going:

“Ha! At last empirical proof! Once people learn this, they’ll stop drinking! There’s no denying these findings.”

Meanwhile in the world of real human behaviour, remember the lockdown-era Twitter work of Prof Peter Doherty, a Nobel Laureate for his immunology work.

 

Deep down, I know I’m probably wrong. But I very much want moderate alcohol to be good for me. I’m prepared to keep on it while I wait for the scientific data that will confirm my view of the world.

Present a facts-based case that challenges what people believe, and they will find a way around your stupid facts.

 

Doubling down with more facts

 

In the case of one-subject enthusiasts, when they see their audience’s eyes glaze over, their usual response is to double down with more facts.

If you want to fully understand how to make a case to change behaviour, and the complexity of human thinking, it’s explained in Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman’s best-seller Thinking Fast and Slow.

 

 

Not by the actual words in the book, but in the experience of trying to read it.

I so wanted to like, understand and finish reading Thinking Fast and Slow.

But I didn’t have the attention span or intelligence to do any of those things. I pride myself on being a book-finisher, but Thinking Fast and Slow crushed my will to live.

The first fifty pages revealed those two kinds of thinking, which was interesting. Then another ten thousand pages – at least that’s how it felt – of repeating it in ever-deeper scientific and economic jargon.

RIP any hope of self-improvement from that book. My enthusiasm was fatally smothered under an avalanche of detail that Kahneman felt we all needed. My bookmark is still in it at the half-way camp, sticking up like a single frozen hand in the compressed snow. Entombed there since 2018.

If they’re not buying what you’re saying, you need fewer facts, not more. And more listening.

And if you want a book that explains why your spreadsheet thinking will always fail to explain human behaviour, read Rory Sutherland’s book Alchemy instead. I’ve read it a few times, it’s been enjoyable and illuminating each time.

 

More cognitive speedbumps

 

Confirmation bias isn’t the only sort of cognitive speedbump you’ll be navigating, particularly if you’re involved in sales. There’s also the magic of post-purchase rationalisation. Sometimes known as Sales Stockholm Syndrome.

I’ve always enjoyed hearing salespeople who lost a deal come back with: when they find out what that competitor is really like, that client will come back begging.

They literally use the word begging.

No client in the entire history of commerce has ever come back begging.

Because that would mean admitting they made the wrong choice. Even if the supplier they chose turns out to be actual criminals – that has happened in our industry – there will be no turning back, at least for a few years.

The power of post-purchase rationalisation will adjust their brains to suit.

They’ll downplay the disadvantages of their new incompetent and/or criminal supplier. And form unjustified negative feelings about the ones they didn’t choose. It’s their reality and if you bring it up they will just stop contact with you because it makes them uncomfortable.

Proving people wrong is unproductive

 

Business people love the idea of accountability. It has its uses, but if you like proving people wrong, you will get nowhere. In business or personally.

Particularly with clients. Honestly what is wrong with people who love being right so much that they’ll make a client look like a fool?

Even if that client has Certified Fool qualifications from the Royal London Fool Guild, you can’t improve the situation by pointing it out during their post-purchase bliss.

They likely know they’ve made a mistake. It’s like releasing an agitated animal from a cage. The only way out is past you, and you are likely to get bitten. You need to give them the space to escape the situation with dignity.

Likewise pointing out that anyone on your team has properly fucked up. It’s briefly satisfying. And it’s a basic adult skill to pass up brief satisfactions in the interests of the long game.

Unless you think they’re irredeemable, in which case get rid of them right away for an instant team morale boost. They’ve all been waiting for you to step up. But that’s another week’s story.

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