Mike Lehr's Blog

How do we change the impact of a message without changing anything about the message? In other words, as seen in the diagram, we don’t change the messenger, the receiver of the message, the message itself or the way it’s delivered . . . but, yet, we still change the message. Answer: we change how the person receiving the message feels about us because it alters how he interprets it.

Communication Map

Simply stated, if the person has a positive impression of us he will likely interpret what we say positively. Conversely, if he has a negative one, he’ll do so negatively. We most commonly see this when a commercial is pulled after the celebrity in it commits a crime or immoral act. That commercial is the same; it’s the same person in it, the same person viewing it, the same communication channel and the same message.  Nothing changes. However, because the viewer of the commercial now feels differently about the celebrity, she will have a different interpretation of the message delivered about the product or service.

This also applies to a whole range of emotions beyond those along on a positive-negative line. It can affect how much latitude people feel they have when we give them instructions. If they’re fearful of reprisals, they’ll be more inclined to follow them to the letter regardless if unforeseen situations arise. If they feel more confident about our relationship, they’ll be more likely to adjust.

What this means is that we can invest all our time in correcting “miscommunication” by learning to communicate better, but if we don’t solve the underlying relational problems, we are likely wasting our time. It’s the relational elements that affect how people feel about us, and in turn, interpretation of our messages.

We often anticipate and rationalize people’s decisions using a cost-benefit analysis. This perspective frequently leads to erroneous conclusions and restricts problem-solving capabilities. Consumer buying habits provide fertile fields for understanding this truth and the impact intuition has on people’s decisions. Pragmatically, these understandings can dramatically increase our range of low-cost solutions for our businesses.

A typical example of what grows from these fertile fields is a June 2009, Harvard Business Review (HBR) article by Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton titled How Concepts Affect Consumption (research document). The article explores the emotional aspects of competition, expectations, goal setting and rewards in encouraging people to alter consumptive decisions without experiencing changes in their physical requirements. Of course, this does not mean that people won’t find rationales to support emotionally based decisions, but their intuitions will drive their cognition to produce these rationales.

For example, the HBR article suggests that “keeping up with the Joneses” is an emotion driving a competitively based buying decision; we have a need to buy what everyone else is buying in order to be socially accepted (i.e. peer pressure). Expectations affect people’s product experiences; price is a major setter of expectations. People will tend to like higher-priced beverages over lower-priced alternatives even though the beverages are identical. People will tend to feel better, quicker from higher-priced drugs even though they are the same as lower-priced alternatives. This effect even shows up tangibly as increased activity in the brain’s reward domains.

All of these changes and more were achieved without changing people’s objective requirements. Thus, when we grasp emotional drivers and how they impact people’s decisions via their intuition, we open up a whole new world of solutions for everyday business problems.

Arbitrariness & First, Second, Third

Arbitrariness is a vital to intuitive problem solving because it’s related to subjectivity which is related to personality and its emotional drivers. Looking at the relationship between arbitrariness and conditionality will help us see this.

For instance, the concept of “first” does not need the existence of another number; however, the concept of “second” is dependent upon the condition that “first” exists, and the concept of “third” is dependent upon the condition that “first” and “second” exists.

House of Arbitrariness & Conditionality

Consider a house. Whereas someone can arbitrarily place the first stone of his house anywhere, the rest is built conditionally around that stone which is called the cornerstone. Ideas and knowledge are also built around cornerstones which we often experience as assumptions. Since knowledge influences how we identify, define and examine problems, our problems will have cornerstones too.

For instance, many of us consider the idea of democracy good. However, if such decision making is absolutely superb, why don’t companies and armies use it where more authoritarian styles dominate? This is because democracy’s cornerstone is placed in a governmental location. If we move that cornerstone to a corporate or military location, we will end up building a more authoritarian-style house.

In problem solving, moving the cornerstone to a new location will help us view our old location from a different perspective. But first, we must challenge ourselves to find the cornerstone of any set of conditions in which we find ourselves and the cornerstone of any set of ideas we are using to evaluate those conditions. That means avoiding an unquestioning, absolutist perspective and employing an inquisitive, arbitrary one.

Intuitive approaches require the identification of emotional drivers in influencing and problem solving. They generally work better than cognitive approaches because emotional drivers tend to impact behaviors, thoughts and decisions far more than logic, reasons and rationales. Therefore, if we want to effectively identify these drivers, we need techniques to help us. Our word choice is one such technique.

Generally speaking we can uncover feelings by simply asking, “How do you feel about . . .” If we ask, “What do you think about . . .” we’ll tend to receive a heady response rather than a heartfelt one. The word “believe” gives us more of a middle-of-the-road response. We need the mid-range approach because some people do not like to be asked how they feel about things. I once asked a woman how she felt about something, and she replied, “I hate it when you ask that question.” Therefore, we need a mid-range approach for these folks.

Furthermore, we can incorporate these words into our discussion, not just our questions. The more we use the word “feel” the more likely our discussion will hover on an emotional plane. Conversely, the more “think” is used the more likely it will hover on a logical one. In order to avoid redundancy we can incorporate more feeling words like emotions, empathy and sympathy. Thinking words would include reasons, rationale and logic and keep the discussion on a heady level.

If you will be teaching others how to use these words, you need to be aware that some people don’t like to even use the word “feel.” If so, they will have difficulty using this technique.

How many times have we heard, “Nothing breeds success like success?” In a study of the orbital launch vehicle industry by Peter M. Madsen and Vinit Desai the finding was that “organizations learn more effectively from failures than successes.” Their paper was published in the June 2010 edition of the Academy of Management Journal and reported by The Economist online in August.

While it seems logical that we can learn from our mistakes, what’s less clear is whether we learn more from our failures than our successes. However, from an intuitive perspective which accounts for the intense effect our emotions can have on our decision making, the fear of pain is much greater than the joy of gain. This is not only an anticipatory phenomenon but a historical one. In other words, we also learn more from feeling pain than from feeling gain. Moreover, Madsen and Desai found that the lesson learned through failure stayed with the organization longer than the one learned through success.

How do you maximize learning without having to experience a critical or fatal failure? Of the conclusions, one, which applies to intuitive approaches, is “greater flexibility towards meeting set goals.” This would allow employees to learn from smaller failures. They found that organizations which were “too tightly” focused on deadlines and profit margins gave their employees legitimate, implicit approval to discount, ignore or rationalize smaller failures containing valuable lessons.

Therefore, the next time everything goes according to plan, realize that something went wrong. Most likely it will be the failure to learn.

Word choice and phrasing (phraseology) are simple ways we can assess personalities. As I’ve said in previous postings, everything we think, do and say reflects on our personalities in some way. The challenge is determining what.

Understanding the two aspects of any word – definition and connotation – is a first step. Definitions trigger thoughts about words’ meanings while connotations trigger emotions about the impressions they create. Words can have similar definitions but vastly different connotations. A funny riddle expresses this:

Q: What is the difference between escargot and snails?

A: People don’t eat snails.

Phraseology works as an assessment approach because word choice is largely subjective. Yes, we need to consider the context of the conversation, but there is usually plenty of room for subjective inputs. This occurs because many times several words could suffice, but the final choice is intuitive and based upon the connotation the person prefers. For example, consider these pair of words:

• Determined – Stubborn
• Irrational – Passionate
• Focus – Restrict
• Organize – Standardize
• Fun – Undisciplined
• Rigid – Strong
• Stable – Stale
• House – Home
• Flexible – Soft
• Interesting – Fascinating

Many times we can simply discern from people’s phrasing whether they like something. We can also discern much deeper qualities of their personalities. For instance, they can tell us how they might approach a planning endeavor or collaborative effort. They can also tell us the degree to which they are influenced by qualitative or quantitative arguments or by logical or humanistic ones.

Therefore, the challenge is classifying various words according to such groupings as quantitative words versus qualitative ones, logical versus humanistic, individual versus collective, etc. Once we’ve made these classifications, we can correlate people’s personalities along these spectra by examining the dominance of certain words and phrasing.

The other day a colleague forwarded this link to the BNET blog speaking to intuition. Embedded in it was a link to an article that appeared in Psychology Today back in November 1, 2002. It provided early insight into the scientific advancements into the study of intuition.

Whenever I speak to people individually or collectively about interpersonal skills for disciplines such as sales, management, leadership and influencing, I emphasize that the most dramatic advancements we’ll see in the next 5-15 years will not be in areas such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, communications or even sensors but rather in how we understand ourselves, especially our decision making and knowledge acquisition abilities.

Increasingly, science is finding – as the Psychology Today article noted back in 2002 – that we make decisions and acquire knowledge before we are consciously aware of them. Yes, there are problems with trusting intuition unquestionably; however, there are problems with doing the same with the most well reasoned and supported scientific findings. You cannot make decisions by facts and figures alone. There will always be unknowns; intuition helps here.

The key is integrating both intuitive and cognitive functions. The danger we face now as the article implied is that we are generally living under the illusion that our decisions are largely conscious (cognitive) ones. We are prejudice in thinking our consciences are in control. Of course, this control calms our insecurities; control is often analogous to safety and security. In reality, many factors beneath our radar influence our feelings and thoughts. They encourage us to choose rationales to justify our wants.

Thus, every one of our decisions has emotions influencing it no matter how rationale and scientifically supported we believe they are.

The difference between cognitive and intuitive arguments can best be summarized as one between reason and belief. Just as the strength of someone’s reasons can persuade us so can the strength of his beliefs. However, this strength of belief can be used against us as well as for us. An August 19th, 2010 Economist article demonstrates this by reporting five cues bosses give when they lie, but they could apply to anyone.

They are from a study by David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and include:

• References to general knowledge (i.e. “as you know”) as opposed to specific knowledge
• Use of fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words” to describe information and situations (i.e. using more “greats” rather than “goods”)
• Avoidance of using “I” and employing more third person pronouns
• Use of fewer “hesitation words” or utterances (i.e. pauses, “um,” “er”)
• More frequent use of swear words

Along with the influence one’s strength of belief can have on us, the other important intuitive lesson we can glean from the article is that people’s patterns of speech can reflect their emotional states. For example, the emotion that is being satisfied by someone who is lying is the desire to have us believe him. Extended further we could apply the same cues to someone who intensely wants us to believe what he is telling us such as in a sales situation. His phrasing will satisfy his desire to “sell” us.

However, a better way to convey the influence strength of belief has on us is to describe it as confidence. Since people tend to have a prejudice toward those who are confident, people who wish to deceive others will tend to express themselves confidently in order to do so.

Here is a valuable problem-solving question:

How can a business maximize its profit every single minute of the day and still go out of business?

The answer is:

It can because it won’t be making any investments; those require expenditures and would prevent the maximization of profits every single minute.

The question has value as a problem-solving training exercise because it forces our attention on the relationship between profits and time:

If the maximization of profits every single minute causes a business to go out of business, what is the appropriate time frame to consider?

As we know, the financial markets like to scrutinize profits quarterly. However, is this really the best time frame? I once contracted for a private company that was positioning itself to be sold. The owner cut staff to the bone in order to beef up the financials and market value. He took a gamble that revenues could hold with the cutbacks at least for the near-term. If a sale did not materialize in the near term, he might have seen service quality suffer and eventually revenues. What did this bode for the acquirer? The implication here is that what we consider a “profitable company” is arguable depending upon the criteria we want to use. In other words, a profitable company could be as subjective as a work of art. Moreover, a costly investment in the near-term might be beneficial in the long term depending upon how we define the long term. Thus, the final question that all of this begs is this:

Over what time period should a business strive to maximize profits?

The mere fact we can debate the question suggests its arbitrariness and why a single business purchase could work for one person and not for the other.