The Three Steps of Influence
Sometimes, you need to hear a message more than once before you pay attention to it.
And after I heard two of the world's leading behavioural scientists give the same answer to similar questions - to read a book written 90 years ago - I thought I'd better give it a look.
It wasn't the first time I'd heard of the book, but when first Jonathan Haidt and then Cass Sunstein recommended reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, in the end I read it.
I saw Haidt - who literally wrote the book on why people fall out about politics and religion - give a talk entitled Capitalism and Morality: Beyond Left and Right at the RSA in 2016. The idea of the talk was that people on either side of the political spectrum tell very clear but very different stories about capitalism, and that looking for a third story which integrates the truth in what each has to say gets us closer to an accurate picture of what is going on. In the Q&A, I asked Haidt how to approach this topic with friends who had very strong views one way or the other. He said, 'Read How to Win Friends and Influence People and do what it says.' Essentially, he explained, find the common ground and go from there.
It was 2019 when I saw Cass Sunstein speak, famous for writing the book Nudge and now for working for not one but two US presidents. There it wasn't my question, but someone else's, about how she could use what he knew to help her in the work she did to encourage people to give their children vaccinations. Topical for the world today, right?
Sunstein went further than Haidt. He explained that Dale Carnegie, in How to Win Friends and Influence people, seemed to have predicted everything behavioural science had found in the subsequent decades despite writing the book before any of that work took place. He explained to the woman asking the question that the key was to find out what they wanted that you also wanted: to find the common ground and then move from there. In this case, the people they were discussing care deeply about the health of their children, so deeply in fact that they would refuse vaccines. That is the place to start from if you want them to vaccinate.
And that brings us to the lessons of that book, to the secrets of influence as explained by Dale Carnegie in that amazingly practical and now quite old book. It's cheap to buy, and I really recommend it, especially if you find yourself having to influence people in your work regularly. It is practical, punchy and easy to read. And there is really one idea in it, retold skilfully and with lots of different textures by Carnegie.
This, then, is how you influence people:
Understand what they want.
Work out how what you want them to do gets them what they want.
Explain that to them clearly so they understand that if they do what you want them to do, they'll get what they want.
Voila - they now want to do what you want them to do.
In one of the other most famous books on influence, Influence by Robert Cialdini, the author goes to pains to explain that the things he has found in his research should be used for ethical means, presumably out of the fear that his work would be used for ill, not good. What I love about Carnegie's approach - those three steps above - is that they are almost by default ethical. Because you aren't changing anyone's mind. You're simply showing them why doing what you want will help them. It is an act of service.
And if there is no good reason why what you want them to do will be good for them, getting them what they want, they're probably not going to do it.
The first stage, though, of influence is the same as the first stage of changing people's minds. In James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian's book, How to Have Impossible Conversations, the findings of which (and research on which it is based) I've also seen referenced elsewhere, the first part of the process is simple. We have to listen. We have to listen deeply and with curiosity to the other person's point of view even if we disagree completely.
That, it turns out - hearing yourself speak - is one of the biggest contributing factors to people changing their minds.
It is also fundamental if you want to really understand what someone else wants so that you can work out how what you want gets them what they want.
So, first. Listen.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
The first 12-Minute Method Book - How to Start When You're Stuck - is out now!