Mike Lehr's Blog

Intuitive approaches often work because we don’t believe they do. Advertising is an excellent example: it influences us because we often believe it doesn’t.

This extends to our complaints about politicians not answering the question. Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton researched this and were asked to “Defend Your Research” in “People Often Trust Eloquence More Than Honesty” appearing in the November 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review. They found:

People who dodge questions artfully are liked and trusted more than people who respond to questions truthfully but with less polish.

In fact, when answerers perform the dodge effectively, less than half of the people could remember the question accurately. The key rests in the answer’s first ten words by disrupting the cognitive link we have for the question and expected answer. In everyday life, we like to complain about the fast-talking salesperson; however, on a higher level, fast-talking becomes eloquence. It’s here that we increasingly trust and like eloquence more than honesty.

Even though I promote the practical understanding and application of intuition in business on this blog, people can use intuitive approaches for ill or good. For instance, my guest 12 Most post, lists ways to influence people intuitively to build morale; however, people can use these techniques for questionable purposes too.

How do we defend ourselves? There are two broad introductory ways:

1. Realize people can influence us intuitively and subconsciously even if we believe they can’t
2. Raise our awareness regarding intuitive approaches

In this way, we can begin accounting for these natural biases in our decision-making and actions. However, believing others can influence us without our knowledge is scary for many of us, especially if we believe in the supremacy of the conscious mind and free will.

The two aspects of every interpersonal interaction are thoughts and feelings. You can change people’s views of your ideas by changing how they feel about you; you don’t need to change your idea. This is because emotions are more powerful influencers than cognitive tools such as reason, logic and thoughts. However, we still need cognitive tools. They serve as the diversion, distraction and excuse allowing the emotional aspects of relationship building to work. This is because emotions can create discomfort for people especially in a business setting.

The right-hand diagram expresses this by showing the direct nature of thoughts (red arrow) and the indirect one of feelings (blue arrow). While thoughts become the overt focus of the interaction, the message’s real impact arrives through the back door on a deeper level in the form of impressions. Therefore, thoughts become excuses to build relationships.

For example, when a boy carries a girl’s books home, it’s not because he likes to carry books. He wants to interact with the girl. The visible, tangible acts are carrying books and conversing. The invisible, intangible ones involve developing a emotional connection.  If he were to overtly state his romantic intentions, he’d likely scare off the girl. Carrying the books serves as the boys excuse, diversion and distraction while feelings do their subliminal work.

Even though the emotional connection we develop with employees is not the same as the one in our example, we observe excuses to foster relationships every day in business as “face time” with the boss. From the perspective of the right-hand diagram, the feelings developed in this face time are more important than the actual exchange of ideas. Thus, we should evaluate every interaction’s potential for relationship building, not just for the objective communication of ideas.

Previously, I listed some unconscious biases we have in decision-making. What I witness is that people just don’t believe that known wrong information has any affect on them.

For example, research in “Before You Make That Big Decision” by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony* which appeared in the June 2011 Harvard Business Review showed that dice rolls “suggesting” sentencing decisions to judges did in fact influence their final decision even though they knew these decisions were made by dice.

Cognitively and psychologically, we call this “planting of a seed” in our minds as anchoring. We experience its negative side when someone is locked on a thought based on incorrect information that we tried to expose for them. As with the judges, this erroneous information assumes a frame of reference for their decision on a subconscious level.

As the writers indicate, anchoring’s real danger is “that people always believe they can disregard them” because the information is incorrect. They don’t believe it. However, it affects them in the same way that intuition affects our thought processes. However, since people don’t realize it, they will shop for rationales to attribute elsewhere this influence on their decisions.

Anchoring also affects our views of people and contributes to the unconscious pigeonholing of people. This can tremendously affect our ability to assess and develop talent. This is why the gossip and unfounded opinions of others will still influence us even though we “ignore” them to form our own opinion.

We need to raise our awareness concerning the influence this has on others, and more importantly to us. We can’t believe we are immune; we need to make conscious adjustments or else we will fall prey to the influence of known wrong information too.

*Olivier Sibony is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office.

Long ago I sat in on the reprimand of an employee by a manager. The manager concluded his discussion by asking the employee, “Do you understand what I’m saying?” The employee responded, “Yes.” It suddenly occurred to me how biased we are in thinking that education alone will correct behavior. In other words, we assume that if someone understands our argument and reasons they will adopt our point of view.

In this above situation, there was no follow up by the manager to explore whether the employee agreed with the manager’s alternative action or whether the employee was moved to act accordingly in future situations. Yes, he was aware of the consequences, but we tend to forget that sometimes people are willing to pay those consequences.

I refer to making this false assumption about “Do you understand?” as a cognitive bias; we tend to believe that reasons, logic and rationales are enough to win the day. This bias will tend to make us wrongly believe that we’ve done “our best.”

I also experience this in non-disciplinary situations in which anyone is trying to influence another person. This cognitive bias happens frequently with instructors trying to move participants to take action in such settings as business training. They will ask participants, “Do you understand what I’ve shown (said, did, etc.)?”

Therefore, in summary, I find four basic hurdles, represented by the following questions, that we need to negotiate and verify before we can have significant confidence that we’ve persuaded someone:

1. Do you hear me?
2. Do you understand me?
3. Do you agree with me?
4. Are you moved to take the recommended action (to act on this idea)?

A recent BNET post by Thomas A. Stewart talked about nurturing dissent and provided some valuable links. Rationally, it makes sense that if you want to drive your business forward you have to ensure that everyone is on the same page. However, evidence suggests the opposite.

Brooke Harrington, a professor at Copenhagen Business School has studied investment clubs and found that “the more dissent there was among investors, the better the financial returns.” Charlan Nemeth of Cornell University takes this even further by stating, “in general, we find that dissent stimulates thought that is broader, that takes in more information and that, on balance, leads to better decisions and more creative solutions.”

One of my favorite movies is the The Bridge on the River Kwai. In the commentary that came with the DVD, it’s reported that the producer, Sam Spiegel, liked to see conflict between the director and the lead actors. He found that it tended to produce better movies than when they were agreeable. In this movie, there was tension and arguments between the director, David Lean, and the lead actor, Alec Guinness; it won seven academy awards.

In everyday practice, we tend to prefer people who think along the same lines as we do. Conflict and controversy is something we tend to avoid. Those who dissent are often considered negative. Our natural tendencies are toward peace and harmony especially when urgent business priorities are upon us. However, subconsciously, as these studies show, dissent improves our cognition and creativity.

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.

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.

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.

Frequently, I’m asked about the difference between instinct and intuition. The question is difficult because everyday conversation has a gender bias. Men tend to prefer the word “instinct” over “intuition” to describe their emotional processes while women tend to prefer the reverse. So, listening skills are important.

Analogously, instinct is to intuition what an accented note is to a song. Just as an accent adds a particular emphasis to a specific note in the song, instinct adds a particular emphasis to an emotion in the intuitive process. Very simply, there are three types of instincts: survival, paternal and maternal. Survival protects our well being through fight or flight. It accentuates emotions such as guardedness or avoidance. Paternal extends our dominance and control, accentuating emotions such as aggressiveness and competitiveness. Maternal protects and nurtures others, accentuating emotions such as protectiveness and sacrifice.

While instincts can serve us well in urgent, severe situations, they can lead us astray and allow us to be easily manipulated in modern life’s intricacies. For instance, instinctively lashing out at someone for a threatening act could have consequences in the workplace. Intuition would help us balance the emotions accentuated by that threat with the ones fearing the consequences to arrive at a pragmatic alternative fitting our context.

Returning to our musical analogy, this means that rather than reacting to the one accented note we are waiting to hear the whole song before we think and act. It also means that while there isn’t much to creating a single note, creating a song is more involved. Therefore, just as it takes practice to develop cognitive skills it also takes practice to develop intuitive ones. Instincts are innate and thus our default. As such they require very little, if any, development.