A Tribe of Fear - Persuasion and feeding time at the zoo

Why am I always talking about persuasion and influence? What does it have to do with the zoo?

I have never worked at a zoo. But there are a lot of animals in the zoo we call business. The first time I decided to go down this path of persuasion was my first attempt at selling an idea to a couple of wild engineering critters at Northrop.

I lost a bid to replace about a million dollars of work with a 75 cent part. I was shot down hard by a couple of good 'o boy, about to retire, last hurrah engineers that were in charge of a 10 million dollar project to create a piece of test hardware to test the the test hardware of the guidance system of the MX (Peacekeeper) Missile. Yep you heard it right, a tester for the tester of a mulit-megaton, death from the sky, firecracker.

How could I fail? It was 75 cents verses a lot of money. I worked for 6 months to write software verses 75 cents (well really about $150 after labor costs). How can you loose an argument like that? But I lost.

I was not just humbled by it, I was slammed to the ground with little understanding of why. The 'why not' was even sillier. Quite simply there was no real counter argument worth writing about. Just a dismissive attitude. I was selling to people unwilling to save a million bucks at the cost of a question to the accuracy of their design.

Nothing better than failure to learn how to do it right the second time. That was the day I decided that no idea can stand on its own. You must sell ideas:

o Find the reason from the customer's viewpoint as to why they need to accept your idea.
o You can sell all day long, but the buyer has to want to buy.
o Sell need, desire, a reason, motivation, and a cause.
o Find the reasons for change, make it easy to change, and don't pull or push, use honey to attract the bees.
o Help the process with influence techniques like reciprocity, authority, liking, scarcity, exclusivity, etc.

Persuade! Influence!

Persuasion is not just what you say, but the context. To sell that 75 cent part successfully, I needed to understand that the engineers would have been embarrassed to no end by my wet behind the ears and thus unencumbered creative thinking. Why is it so bad? Because if they failed to see a million dollar mistake, then they have made a really big get-you-fired mistake.

Where there is one mistake, there may be more. Where there is a mistake, there is a reason to loose your job. This is basic stuff. No competence, no job, no food, no house. People and lions get all uppity and irrational when you get between them and their food.

I'd be doing worse than stealing their food in this case. These guys were close to retirement. I was stealing their early retirement to green pastures.

I should not have sold my idea as my idea or even mention the savings. It had to be their idea. It had to be based on other motivations. It had to be their win. It had to be a reason for the boss to put more food on their table. All the persuasion I could muster would just bounce off without defusing even the tiny notion of a mistake.

Good book to read on this area: Dinosaur Brains: Dealing with All THOSE Impossible People at Work. The premiss of the book is that small bit of brain associated with primal wants, needs, and desires is alive and kicking in the modern brain.

The workplace is filled with over-stressed animals. Every day you can see the grim nature of fight or flight as territory is defended and ideas and blame substitute for contributions to the heard.

Primal actions are destructive. Most of us just see anger and irrational behavior rather than the true motivators. You know it when you see it. Pull out the wild animal guidebook or watch the Discovery Channel to understand the key indicators.

For the record, before I could learn all of this great wisdom, I also submitted a design that would have saved about 8 million on the same project. I was again shot down in flames.

Funny though, the Air Force a couple years later said to loose 8 million in costs or cancel the project. Funny how the new design looked just like my unsavory proposal.

No reason to gloat over my design wining out in the end. The proposal was submitted two years before and could have saved even more of our tax dollars in a very over budget project.

Back to leading the tribe. Irrationality is everywhere. It usually comes from a fear of loosing food and shelter or membership in the tribe. Persuasion and influence is just as important to a sale as it is to keeping the tribe healthy. Do you want your tribe to make million dollar mistakes because they are being territorial animals acting on instinct rather than rational thought?

It might be time to teach your people how to set the animalistic fears and motivations aside. Especially in this economy. Imagine how dysfunctional the world is starting to get as people fear for their jobs.

I'll talk about removing fear in my next post. For now, what do you think, right now? Have you experience the animals in the workplace? Is it getting worse when the market dips? Let us know by posting a comment below.