When you set out to convince, you make the conversation into a battle to be won and lost. You bring force and, as Newton’s laws of motion tell us, force creates counter-force. You’re creating resistance before you’ve even finished your argument.
Winning means that in the end, we will just have one side (our own!). We want that unity of opinion, but we create opposition in the process.
How to get people to do exactly what you want, and make them want to do it
On live telly, decisions need to be made on the spot. Learn from Maz' years of experience producing everything from Big Brother to the US Apprentice (yes, with... him) and get ready to unlock the secrets of instant behaviour change. This interactive session will give you practical tools to influence behaviour in real-time, leaving you with a brain-bending understanding of how to not only get people to do exactly what you want, but enjoy doing it.
Maz Farrelly - Legendary TV producer with over 8 billion views.
If you've watched it, Maz probably made it. TV mastermind Maz Farrelly has created and produced some of the biggest shows globally, watched more than eight billion times; from 5 series of Big Brother, to The X Factor, to the US Apprentice (yes, with... him).
She's produced everyone from pop stars to politicians, Hollywood A-listers to Astronauts, Beyoncé to King Charles. Maz now uses their 'borrowed' intel to help global brands succeed in getting noticed and being successful. You could call it gaining the 'X Factor' - and Maz should know, she made the show.
But because the very act of providing an answer closes the loop. You've solved the riddle. The thrill of the chase is over. Now everyone else is just expected to take your precious answer and dutifully apply it – to products, campaigns, media plans – without having experienced the journey that got you there.
Edward L. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the founding father of concepts in Public Relations (PR), is known for linking Freudian psychoanalytic theories to influence consumer behaviour.
Believe it or not, analyzing seemingly unrelated data can reveal hidden truths. Take the Pentagon, the nerve center of the U.S. military. While classified briefings and high-level meetings happen behind closed doors, open-source data can offer clues about what might be brewing.
Here’s where things get interesting. We can use Google Trends data to track searches for “Pentagon pizza delivery” and nearby “gay bars.” Why pizza and bars? Increased late-night activity might indicate longer work hours for Pentagon staff, potentially signifying preparation for a major event.
In their landmark 1959 report often referenced in leadership theory, social psychologists John R. P. French and Bertram Raven pinpointed five bases of power:
Legitimate: when people perceive that your rank in a formal hierarchy—e.g., manager, CEO, or president—gives you the right to “prescribe” their behavior
Reward: when people perceive your ability to distribute rewards for completed tasks or met goals
Coercive: when people perceive your ability to distribute punishments and disincentives (the opposite of reward power)
Expert: when people perceive your special knowledge or expertise, which causes them to defer to your expertise
Referent: when people feel “oneness” with you or a desire to be like you, leading to their respect and admiration of you
Referent power is considered the most potent because it doesn’t require that a leader micromanage, use coercion, or reward to influence others. People follow a leader with referent power based on who the leader is and how they behave. According to French and Raven, referent power has the broadest range of influence of any power, allowing it to be leveraged on a large scale.
Start with the Quick 2+1™ to find your answer.
The next phase is to trust your intuition to Label™ and Mirror™ the circumstances or dynamics that may have led to the confrontation. Then use a little Dynamic Silence™ to allow room for a response from the other side. Once they respond, use mirrors and labels to encourage them to keep talking and gather the information you need to get to the heart of the matter.
If you’re trying to think and act more creatively and more critically, focus on asking better, more interesting questions of the briefs you’re tasked with answering. What we teach children can and should be applied to our own professional lives, too. A focus on problems and solutions first, promotes consistent, ‘safe’ answers, but won’t move the work on. Spending time on asking and answering better questions will help refine the understanding of a problem and will create the conditions for new, interesting and challenging solutions.
“We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model.”
So said Jason Collins in a recent blog, perhaps somewhat provocatively likening the use of biases as akin to the activity of ancient astronomers who were required to compile an exhaustive number of deviations to retain the broken model of the universe revolving around the earth. Collins challenge is whether the model at the heart of behavioural science is similarly broken.
Below, I’ll break down the three key steps to creating a compelling pitch for behavioral science. A bonus: you can put it all together in one minute or less to make a short—and sweet—sell on our amazing field.
Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive; a practice that, to distinguish itself from the quietly violent tradition from which it arises, might not be called “copyediting” at all; a practice that would not only “permit” but amplify the potential for linguistic invention and preservation in any written work?
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? According to digital storyteller, Brian Clark it doesn't! In this DIY conversation, Brian Clark applies the philosophical concept of phenomenology to art in the digital age.
Getting the question right is the most important component in information design, and it’s the most common point where information design goes wrong.
This is because information is always relative. Always. Before you can undertake any kind of visualization exercise, you need to know what question you want to answer, and for whom.
So I propose the beginnings of a theory of information relativity:
1. All information is relative, and it’s always relative: relative to the observer and the observer’s point of view; relative to the culture and its values; relative to the situation; relative to what has come before, and to what will come next.
2. The value of information is always relative because it is directly related to it’s usefulness, which depends on the user, the context and the situation.
3. Information design must therefore be driven by the context within which it will be experienced. Information design must serve the needs of real human beings doing real things. Information wants to be used.
You don't have to track calories every day to lose weight, new research suggests
Calorie counting with a smartphone app is a popular weight-loss strategy, and research shows it can work even if you don't track every bite.
Tracking your food can help you lose weight by keeping a calorie deficit, eating less than you burn.
But you don't need to monitor every meal — researchers found even part-time calorie tracking can help.
Consistency, rather than perfection, can add up to healthy changes over time, researchers said.
“One of the greatest gifts strategists can give themselves is the humility to appreciate that tactical ideas are neither their strength nor their responsibility. Setting up goals and scoring them are two very different things. To do one well you usually need to ignore the other.
...Strategy is not lesser than creativity, because it pre-empts and prepares it for victory. A brand must travel through the confusing forests of targeting, positioning and objectives before it can set up camp on the fertile field of creativity.“
To solve creative problems with TRIZ, there are three elements you need to know:
It’s been solved before.
There are consistent patterns of solutions.
Solving contradictions creates breakthrough innovation.
At times in life what might be described as a poor experience is actually a richer experience and makes life more interesting. This is my guilty service design secret.
“Availability” — short for “availability heuristic or availability bias, a pervasive mental shortcut whereby the perceived likelihood of any given event is tied to the ease with which its occurrence can be brought to mind”.
“Cascade” — short for “social cascades through which expressed perceptions trigger chains of individual responses that make these perceptions appear increasingly plausible through their rising availability in public discourse”.
An availability cascade is what happens when a social cascade rips through a population based on a more or less arbitrary topic — whatever topic happens to be in front of people when the cascade starts.
Hi, I'm Robert
I hope this concept card is useful for you and helps you add a new tool to your toolbox.
As someone who helps teams develop products, services and experiences, I did not see many open resources out there that combine behavioral science with other strategy and design processes, so I decided to take my experience and create frameworks and boards to share for free.
If you have questions on the framework you can connect with me on Linkedin or see my website.
