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Adopt an unusual vantage point.
Another method is to put the audience in
the shoes of someone with a relevant view on the topic. Peter’s
vox pop
videos did that by giving his client the perspective of the average layperson.
Greg sometimes invites his audience to see the process of funding new cancer
drugs from the perspective of a cancer cell. “It’s a very different way for the
audience to think about the topic. As a cancer cell, I tell them, ‘I want as
much time as possible to grow before I’m noticed. So when a clinical trial
takes months to recruit volunteers, I like that; when it takes years for the trial
to disseminate its findings, that’s also great for me.’ It’s easy to show that our
current approach to running clinical trials protects that little cancer cell,
because it takes so long. And it really grabs them.” Which means they’re
listening closely when Greg goes on to explain why there should be nimbler
approaches to funding medical research.
EMPHASIZE THE HUMAN ANGLE
Emma is a sparky, irreverent high school English teacher, and she’s another
person who has thought hard about how to get her ideas across—in her case, to
her teaching colleagues. Her school’s principal had hired Emma not only to
teach, but also to help the school shift its teaching style from “chalk and talk”—
where kids listen and absorb—to one that helps kids become independent
learners, capable of working things out for themselves. “When I started talking
to the other teachers about this new approach,” Emma recalls, “I could tell they
were thinking, ‘She’s young and enthusiastic, and she’ll learn to pipe down.’
They weren’t unfriendly, but they just weren’t that interested in what I had to
say.”
She knew she couldn’t get their attention by promising immediate benefits.
“We’re so focused on tracking short-term measures of success in education, like
test scores. I had to be honest that the old teaching methods do just fine in
getting students to read
Jane Eyre
and pass an English exam. The real benefits of
a more modern approach come through in the long term, by equipping students
better to handle a fast-changing world.” Emma needed to talk about
that
if she
was to have any hope of engaging her colleagues. “So I asked them to put
themselves in the shoes of a child at our school, and imagine what they’d be able
to do differently in thirty years’ time, having learned to think independently as a
fifteen-year-old. Then I asked my colleagues: ‘Did we get into teaching to help
kids get high scores, or to help them get access to the world?’ I could see them
smiling and nodding—later, one said it really rallied them by reminding them of
what teaching was all about.”
Emma’s approach was a masterstroke of communication, for several reasons.
First, we achieve more impact with our message if it sparks some kind of
emotion in our reader or listener.
3
People’s brains form stronger associations
around a new piece of information when it includes emotion as well as facts;
there’s more material for the brain to get its teeth into, so to speak.
Does it matter whether you use negative or positive emotion? Yes, actually.
Negative emotions get our attention very quickly of course—just yell “Fire!”
and you’re guaranteed to have people at least glance in your direction. But there
are some downsides to using negative emotion in business communication. First,
remember that we generally seek to avoid threats, so we tend to prefer
propositions that are framed positively. For example, in one study where people
were told that there was a 90 percent survival rate for patients undergoing a
specific type of surgery, they were far more likely to choose to have the surgery
than if they were told that there was a 10 percent chance of dying.
4
Second,
scientists have found that people don’t recall details very well when a message is
suffused with negative emotion.
5
Given all this, it won’t surprise you to hear that
researchers have found time and again that positive content gets shared on the
Internet more often than negative content.
6
So Emma was wise to reconnect her colleagues to their deep personal sense of
purpose as teachers, since it sparked some powerful positive emotions that
helped her message get heard and remembered. And rather than saying “How
can we stop our students being passive consumers of what we teach them?”
Emma asked: “How can we create lifelong learners who’ll be equipped to deal
with life’s ups and downs?” The same question, essentially, but framed to draw
teachers’ attention toward a positive prize.
Emma also talked about the likely effect of her new teaching methods on
named kids at their school, and also asked the teachers to put themselves in those
kids’ shoes fifteen years from now. That was smart, too, because we all
remember information more readily when it’s “socially encoded”—that is, if it’s
linked to stories about real people’s motivations and feelings.
7
As I mentioned in
Chapter 13
, it’s easier for most of us to recall a gossipy story than to remember a
list of twenty things, even though the gossip probably includes far more than
twenty bits of information. And research shows very clearly that charities raise
more money when their communications highlight an identifiable person whose
life will change as a result of donors’ generosity. For example, one fundraising
campaign that talked about a specific hungry seven-year-old girl named Rokia
was more successful than one talking about broader statistics of her whole
country’s struggle with starvation.
8
So human interest—people plus (positive) emotion—is an ingredient that
makes it easier to engage our audience. That’s why professional communicators
tend to start speeches with an anecdote, and why media headlines are so often
written with a prominent human angle. It’s a recipe that leads people to click,
read, follow, and share online articles. It’s not just celebrity news websites we’re
talking about here, either. An analysis of the internal communications website at
my old firm, McKinsey, showed that its staffers clicked most often on content
that was personal, especially if it was also surprising and made them smile—
precisely the factors I’ve talked about in this chapter.
9
And yet, do we use this knowledge in everyday professional communication?
You have to be kidding! (Dash of emotion judiciously placed there.) We
mumble about not wanting to seem unprofessional, and push on with our dry
reports and presentations and charts. But it’s possible, and entirely professional,
to put characters before concepts, just as Emma did. Lead with the human stuff,
and you have a better chance of getting people to pay attention to any logical
stuff—arguments, data, bullet points galore—that you want to present after that.
Here are some approaches to try:
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