Persuasion as a Journey
I was recently a guest on the excellent Leadership Enigma podcast for a client of my friends at Emeritus Business School – and I thought I would share one element of our conversation which is on the topic of persuasion and influence. This is applicable equally to courtroom lawyers or anyone seeking to influence a decision of another.
The idea that I would like to share is that you visualize or consider your attempt to persuade as a journey. In this journey, you are seeking to move another person from point A to point B. A represents the view they hold before you speak, and point B represents the other person agreeing with you.
If we use the analogy of a journey there are several benefits that we get that lead us to helpful techniques to make our persuasion successful.
The first benefit of this analogy is that it is easy to visualize a journey as having a starting point. If we take the journey together, well, we have to meet at the start of the journey. When you speak to influence or persuade, it can therefore be really helpful to reference and agree where we start from.
If you don’t know where the other person’s head is at, you don’t know their starting point, and you don’t know how far you need to go on your journey. That’s a big disadvantage.
So the first question is how you might learn their starting point. Lawyers in court might be able to tease out an indications from a judge or tribunal about how close or far that tribunal is from agreeing with you. But in other situations, such as a jury trial, there’s no chance to ask. In that case, you can only do your very best to read the room and to think with care and empathy what their point of view is likely to be.
If you get the starting point right, it allows you to recognise if the journey is short, or long. Longer journeys need more time and preparation, you need to honour the fact that you are asking more of the person you are seeking to persuade.
But the distance of the journey is not only defined by the starting point, it is defined also by the end point. And that can be fluid too.
This introduces us to the lovely notion of a tipping point. Your tipping point is the point at which the person you are trying to persuade flips from disagreeing with you and refusing your request, to deciding to agree with you, and to do as you ask.
Some people will be prepared to agree with you without needing much convincing. Maybe they trust you, or don’t really care, and are happy to authorise you without a big effort on your part.
Others will need to feel a higher degree of assurance that you are right, and won’t yield to your request without feeling almost certain.
In legal advocacy, the tipping points for tribunals are usually defined by law. We have many phrases that define tipping points, such as ‘reasonable prospect’ or ‘not frivolous or vexatious’ or ‘no reasonable prospect’. When it comes to a trial, the tipping points are famous. In civil law, the judge needs to feel that you are ‘more likely then not’ to be right. A criminal law jury can only act to convict if jurors feel SURE.
So a prosecutor must take a juror on a longer journey, to a higher tipping point than the defence lawyer. The defence lawyer wins once any reasonable doubt is established.
In the commercial world, it will be rare that an organisation defines for a CEO (for example) precisely where their tipping points will be for deciding when to agree or disagree with a proposal. So a good influencer will do well to discover what sort of burden is upon them, and how open, or resistant, the decision maker is, to acting in the way that you want.
If we know both the start point, and the tipping point, for the subject of our attempt to influence, we know the length of the journey that we need to go on.
Everyone wants to make decisions efficiently and economically. No one wants to hear a 2 hour speech seeking to persuade them of something they were going to do anyway. But similarly, you don’t want to take it for granted that you’ll get what you want, and undersell yourself. Only then to find that the decision maker made a decision against you.
There are ways to ensure that you give your decision maker opportunity to give you indications on whether you are nearing the tipping point, or if you are still woefully far away. These are teachable and can be practiced. Good advocates and influencers are constantly reading their audience, and adjusting the pitch and tone of what they say depending on whether they are nearly at their destination, or if they still have a way to go.
This brings us onto the final of the three points that we can take out of the journey analogy. The point is this. As you take steps along the journey, not every point that you make is a step of equal length.
You might have one really good point, which should be a huge leap forwards and move the listener a considerable distance in your favour. You may have host of other points, all of which might move the listener a little closer. It is like imagining your points as cards in a card game, or even units of currency. Not everything has the same value.
I have observed over decades, that SCRIPTED advocates find it almost impossible to vocally express any DIFFERENCES in the value of the points that they are making. They present all arguments as if the impact of each is equal. And that’s almost never actually the case. They undersell good points as a result, and they oversell lesser points too.
A really good presenter or advocate will use the voice and that intonation to convey the size of the step. Their voice will be firmer, stronger, more energized, imploring, and urgent when they are seeking to get the full value of the excellent point. They know that they need to move the listener a substantial distance. Without true vocal commitment, you might not move the decision-maker as far as the quality of your point deserves.
On the other hand, you must not claim you can move someone a long way with a less striking point. You need to be more careful and nuanced, when you have a point of value, but which plays more of a supporting role to the main points. It’s a real challenge to ensure that you still talk about the point in a positive sense, and you don’t sound apologetic about making your points. It is just that the points contribute their true worth, not less and not more.
Smaller points can move a decision maker over the tipping, so can be crucial. But how many of these points you might need will depend on whether you’ve already reached the tipping point, if you are very nearly there, or if you are still some way back.
So there we have it. Consider your attempt to influence as a journey, where you ensure that:
- you begin your journey together from an understanding of where the decision maker’s thoughts are at;
- know how far you have to take them to get them to a place where they will accept your idea, submission or proposal, and
- and tread each step according to its own merits – taking full value for good points and not overreaching with supporting points.
If you need to practice any speech, application, pitch or presentation, we can help you with feedback using these tools, and many many others.