Rhetoric
The Greeks invented the science of persuasion – they called it rhetoric. The posts in this category give a brief overview.
Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Metaphors: What Companies Really Believe
It’s a metaphor.
Most companies pay a lot of attention to their formal messages. They’ll work for hours writing and re-writing slogans. They’ll spend days trying to perfect their mission statement. They’ll work hard to get their press release just right.
Metaphors, on the other hand, attract very little formal attention or review. Ask an employee what it’s like to work for a company and they’ll often use metaphors in their response. These metaphors typically are not carefully crafted. They occur naturally, without forethought or guile. Precisely for this reason, they provide an excellent window into what the company really thinks.
If you’re thinking of buying from or working for a company, pay particular attention to the metaphors that employees use. The metaphors will give you insights into the company that you’ll never glean from the formal messages.
If you’re an executive of the company, you also need to pay attention. Your employees may use metaphors that undercut the company’s position. Worse, they may have acquired those metaphors from you. Listen to the metaphors and decide whether you need to change them. If you do, you’ll need some new stories.
Learn more in the video.
Moderating the Extremes
It’s complicated.
Your friend, Mary, avidly and vocally supports a national flat tax. Or maybe she’s convinced that free trade is the only sensible way to stimulate the world economy. Or maybe she actively supports more government programs to ensure equality of opportunity.
Let’s also assume that you disagree with Mary. You’d like her to see your side. But she’s so convinced that she’s right — and everybody else is wrong — that it’s difficult to have a conversation with her. Your attempts at dialogue just devolve into long-winded diatribes.
So how do you move Mary? Here are two different communication strategies:
- Ask Mary why she thinks her position is correct.
- Ask Mary how her ideas would work in the real world.
If you pursue Strategy 1, Mary will simply launch into her “pre-recorded” sound bites and positions. Strategy 1 does not require Mary to think. It merely requires her to repeat. She continues to convince herself. As a result, Mary’s position will likely become even more extreme.
Strategy 2, on the other hand, requires Mary to think through a variety of complicated, real-world issues. A common feature of extreme political positions is that they’re over-simplified. By requiring Mary to think through complicated issues, Strategy 2 often reveals weaknesses in the logic. It’s not so simple as it seemed. As a result, Mary’s position often becomes more moderate and more nuanced.
The effectiveness of Strategy 2 derives from the “illusion of explanatory depth”. In their article on the phenomenon (click here), Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil explain that, “People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth.” When you ask people how their ideas would actually work, they start to bump into the limits of their illusion. They don’t understand it nearly as well as they thought. As their explanation falters, so does the certitude of their position.
In this final week of the presidential campaign, many people are stating extreme positions. If you want to have a substantive discussion with another person — as opposed to a battle of sound bites — don’t ask why they believe something. Rather, ask them how it works.
Persuasion: Ten Years and A Bag of Bagels
Still fresh after ten years.
As you prepare your persuasive presentations, you’ll probably use a lot of facts and data. You’ll want to marshall your evidence and create a powerful, logical, irrefutable argument. The trouble is, your audience will almost certainly forget your facts and data soon after you finish your presentation. What they’ll remember is the emotion.
Emotion is the basis of trust and trust is the basis of persuasion. If your audience trusts you, your arguments will be more persuasive. People remember their emotions much longer than they remember facts and data. If they trust you, they’ll probably continue to trust you. If they don’t trust you, they won’t change their minds unless you make a significant (and highly visible) change.
In the Persuasive Communication series, I focus mainly on what happens during your persuasive presentation. But what happens before and after can be equally important. Long before your presentation, you can build a sense of trust with your audience that will make your presentation much more persuasive. In fact, as you’ll see in the video, you can start the process years ahead of time. All it takes is a bag of bagels.
Redundancy Is Not a Sin
I talked to a CEO recently who was working on changing his company’s culture to make it more open to new ideas. I asked him how his communication campaign was going. He said, “Well, I met with all our managers last week and told them how important this is.” I congratulated him and asked what the next steps would be. He said he wasn’t sure but he assumed that the managers would deliver the message to their employees and then “we can get on with it”. (I’m oversimplifying here — but not by much).
When you fix a broken pipe, you assume that it will stay fixed — at least for a while. We often assume the same is true about delivering a message. “I told them what they need to do so I assume that they’re fixing the problem.” Unfortunately, it’s not so easy. The message could get garbled along the way. It could be misunderstood. It could meet with resistance. “Don’t pay attention to that. They’ll change their mind before long”.
To ensure that your message gets through, you’ll need to repeat it. Keep the message consistent — though you may want to change the words from time to time to keep it fresh. Repetition is important in all situations but it’s critical when your organization is under stress. By repeating your message, you’ll ensure that it gets through and you’ll let employees know that you’re not about to change your mind.
Consider how often you tell your spouse that you love him or her. Consider how many ways you express that love — the message remains the same though the words may differ. You need to do something similar for your colleagues and employees. Now watch the video for a good joke.
Barry and Mitt: Body Language
Read my hips.
I spend a lot of time studying rhetoric and the logic of giving a persuasive presentation. Many of my posts on this website deal with the content and organization of a good speech. I’ve written a bit about body language (here) and I can usually help a speaker feel comfortable in front of an audience. (That’s well over half the battle).
Today, however, let’s learn from the experts: Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The New York Times has an excellent article, including interactive graphics, on gestures and movements that these orators make to emphasize points and to gain agreement with the audience. They both appear to be masters of the art — so take a peek here.
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