Archive for February, 2007
Since Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, it has become almost a given in marketing, and to some degree in communications, that if you want to influence some audience or target group, you only need to influence the influencers, that small group of ‘connectors,” “mavens,” and “salesmen” who will in turn influence everyone else. Seems compelling, and makes sense. But is it true?
Not according to Duncan Watts, a sociologist and expert in social networks. Writing a brief note in the article “Breakthrough Ideas for 2007” in this month’s Harvard Business Review, (www.hbr.org) Watts alludes to research he has done that suggests greater complexity to the process of social influence. In fact, he goes as far as saying that:
“I have found that influentials [read connectors, mavens and salesmen] have far less impact on social epidemics than is generally supposed. In fact, they don’t seem to be required at all.”
The key to success, according to Watts, lies as much with the context and audience as with the influencer. For Watts, no matter how many connectors, mavens or salesmen you have working with you, if the group you’re trying to influence and persuade doesn’t have “a critical mass of easily influenced people”, forget it. Success is independent of the influencers, “…just as the size of a forest fire has little to do with the spark that started it and lots to do with the state of the forest.”
Does this suggest abandoning the search for and work with influencers? Not at all. But it does suggest that like all persuasive communications, understanding the audience and context is a necessity for success, no matter how many influencers you can bring to bear.
As part of my 2007 reading regimen I’m working through Gary Klein’s Sources of Power, which is a fantastic if slightly academic text on how people make decisions—especially in time-compressed, high-risk situations. In the book I came across something that strikes me as a practical and powerful tool to use as you prepare for important communication events (be they an important speech, presentation to the board, or a face-to-face with the CEO). Klein calls it a “Pre-Mortem” strategy, and it’s a means of identifying assumptions and mitigating risk. The original approach comes from Choen, Freeman, and Thompson’s “Crystal Ball” method (PDF), which the US military uses in war game exercises. The Crystal Ball method goes like this:
- Select a critical assessment, no matter how confident you are that it is true (e.g., that the enemy will cross the river at point X).
- Imagine that a perfect intelligence source, such as a crystal ball, tells you that this assessment is wrong.
- Explain how this assessment could be wrong.
- The crystal ball now tells you that your explanation is wrong and sends you back to step 3.
The Pre-Mortem is a slight variation on this: After laying out a plan, look several months into the future and assume the plan has failed. The task is to explain why. The idea is to break the emotional attachment to the plan, and turn your creativity and experience toward identifying its flaws and opportunities for breakdown. These are contingencies to revise the plan against, making the plan as a whole stronger (and your or your team’s view of the plan more realistic).
Here’s why it’s important: The research shows that people tend to “fall in love” with their own plans. We lend them more credibility than they deserve, especially if we are not highly experienced in the area and do not have a good sense of what’s typical. As a result, we tend to underestimate risks and be under-prepared for contingencies.
In our work with leaders and communication professionals we’ve taken a similar approach for years, building what we call a “Risk Mitigation Checklist” for any significant communication event. It’s the list of all the things we know can introduce significant risk into a communication, all other things being equal. A small example might be “Test the TelePrompTer equipment” before a speech; a more significant example might be “Brief the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors about any change to the capital budget” for a multi-million dollar technology initiative.
We arrive at the items for the Risk Mitigation Checklist through our experience. The issue is that with the communication opportunities or problems you face day-to-day, you don’t (and shouldn’t) have us by your side to identify problems in the plan and craft contingencies. So here’s what you should do: Before your next important communication, project several months into the future and assume the thing failed—miserably. Then explain why it failed, and come up with as many explanations for failure as you can. Then work alone or with your communication staff to resolve those failure points in the design of the message and plan.
We have an adage at CRA that is one of the first things we tell a new employee, regardless of their level or experience: “Plan for the worst, expect the best. Find the worst thing that can happen, and eliminate it. Repeat.” It’s served us well for years, and I think the Crystal Ball / Post-Mortem method is a great little tactic to keep in your back pocket while you communicate as a leader.
At a recent lunch with corporate learning & development leaders in the Philadelphia area, I was struck by how the conversation kept coming round to, well, conversation. For example, those dealing with an aging workforce found that the necessary succession planning discussions were just not happening. The challenge in this case was to arm senior managers with the means for conversation that transfers knowledge and coordinates new action.
To a large extent, leaders and managers today are paid to talk–and we believe that modern corporations are largely “networks of conversation.” So, it stands to reason that conversation is the primary vehicle for getting things done. Then, why don’t we take the time to get better at it?
A common myth says that as budgets go through ever greater scrutiny, the bulk of L&D investment will be focused on job specific, technical training. Granted, there will always be some need for this. But as the L&D leaders gathered at our lunch clearly testified, a shift is abreast–a shift in spending from traditional training programs which seldom work (see David Maister’s “Why (Most) Training is Useless”) –towards programs that build conversational and relational effectiveness.
In trying to catch up on my journal reading I’ve just been through the August 2006 edition (Vol. 34 No. 3) of JACR, which is a special section on “Best Practices in Risk and Crisis Communication.” The basis of the review is the NCFPD’s list of ten best practices, which are a result of an extensive synthesis of the body of risk and crisis communication scholarship. The best practices are:
- Process approaches and policy approaches (meaning, have formal processes for this stuff and have the communicator at the policy formulation table)
- Pre-event planning
- Partnerships with the public
- Listen to the public’s concerns and understand the audience
- Honesty, candor, and openness
- Collaborate and coordinate with credible sources
- Meet the needs of the media and remain accessible
- Communicate with compassion, concern, and empathy
- Accept uncertainty and ambiguity
- Messages of self-efficacy
Straightforward enough, and a good list. More interesting, though, was the response by Peter Sandman (HTML, PDF). First, he provides an interesting frame on the topic, noting there are important differences between when people are not worried enough about a serious hazard, too worried about a small hazard, and rightly worried about a serious hazard. Second, he notes:
My final comment on the best practices may be the most important. In an article as short as this, with only a few paragraphs on each of the best practices, they come out sounding pretty abstract but also pretty obvious–so obvious, in fact, that the reader may fail to notice that they are extremely difficult to implement and very seldom accomplished. They’re not so much best practices as they are aspirational goals. Any reader whose overall response is, ‘‘Yeah, we do most of that,’’ has been ill-served by the article. Odds are you don’t. Almost nobody does.
The best practices wisely concede that candor and openness are tougher goals than honesty (#5). But in fact, all ten of these recommendations are tough. They fly in the face of organizational culture, of individual ego, of technical hubris.
This sounded like the clear-eyed perspective of someone who’s done the thing and not just studied it. Ultimately, the matter one must solve for–in particular, that the leader must solve for–is execution. Strong communicative practice is tough stuff, made tougher by the fact that most approaches to communication problems are relatively unsophisticated and grounded in historical precedence and a journalistic tradition. The ultimate best practice is getting things done.
I’m posting this a bit late, but one may find a set of significant speeches by Martin Luther King online, courtesy American Rhetoric. King has several speeches ranked by a group of scholars in the top 100 American Speeches:
There is full text and audio for each. Well worth the time.
