Like a kind of secret agent, I once infiltrated the training programmes of a broad range of professions dedicated to getting us to say "yes". For almost three years, I recorded the lessons taught to aspiring automobile salespeople, direct marketers, TV advertisers, front-line managers, charity fundraisers, public relation specialists and corporate recruiters. I'd expected that the aces of these professions would spend more time than the inferior performers developing their requests for change: the clarity, logic and desirable features of them. That's not what I found.
The highest achievers spent more time crafting what they did and said before making a request. They set about their mission as skilled gardeners who know that even the finest seeds will not take root in stony soil or bear fullest fruit in poorly prepared ground. They spent much of their time toiling in the fields of influence, thinking about and engaging in cultivation - ensuring that the situations they were facing had been pre-treated and readied for growth. Of course, the best performers also considered and cared about what, specifically, they would be offering in those situations.
But much more than their less-effective colleagues, they didn't rely on the legitimate merits of an offer to get it accepted; they recognised that the psychological frame in which an appeal is first placed can carry equal or even greater weight. Besides, they were frequently in no position to tinker with the merits of what they had to offer; someone else in the organisation had created the product, programme or plan they were recommending, often in fixed form. Their responsibility was to present it most productively. To accomplish that, they did something that gave them a singular kind of persuasive traction: before introducing their message, they arranged to make their audience sympathetic to it.
There's a critical insight in all this for those of us who want to learn to be more influential. The best persuaders become the best through "pre-suasion" - the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it. To persuade optimally, then, it's necessary to pre-suade optimally. But how?
In part, the answer involves an essential but poorly appreciated tenet in all communication: what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next. It can be exposure to a number, the length of a line or a piece of music; it can be a brief burst of attention to any of a variety of selected psychological concepts. These are things that enhance persuasion, the concepts that most elevate the likelihood of assent.
It's important here to take note of my choice of the word likelihood, which reflects an inescapable reality of operating in the realm of human behaviour - claims of certainties in that province are laughable. No persuasive practice is going to work for sure whenever it is applied. Yet there are approaches that can consistently heighten the probability of agreement. And that is enough. A meaningful increase in those odds is enough to gain a decisive advantage.
In the home, it's enough to give us the means to get greater compliance with our wishes - even from that most resistant of all audiences: our children. In business, it's enough to give organisations that implement these approaches the means to outpace their rivals - even rivals with equally good cases to make. It's also enough to give those who know how to employ these approaches the means to become better, even the best, performers within an organisation.
Researchers have been applying a rigorous scientific approach to the question of which messages lead people to concede, comply and change. They have documented the sometimes staggering impact of making a request in a standard way versus making the identical request in a better-informed fashion. Besides the sheer impact of the obtained effects, there is another noteworthy aspect of the results: the process of persuasion is governed by psychological laws, which means that similar procedures can produce similar results over a wide range of situations.
And, if persuasion is lawful, it is - unlike artistic inspiration - learnable. Whether possessed of an inherent talent for influence or not, insightful about the methods or not, a gifted artisan of the language or not, it is possible to learn scientifically established techniques that allow any of us to be more influential.
Importantly different from my previous book, Influence, is the science-based evidence of not just what best to say to persuade, but when best to say it. From that evidence, it is possible to learn how to recognise and monitor the natural emergence of opportune moments of influence. It is also possible (but more perilous, ethically) to learn how to create those moments. Whether operating as a moment monitor or a moment maker, the individual who knows how to time a request, recommendation, or proposal properly will do exceedingly well.
Robert Cialdini is the author ofPre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade (Random House Books)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
