Communication Archives - Page 11 of 26 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Shane, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Shane Snow
I’m really happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk to you. One of your areas of deep expertise is storytelling. And I want to put you on the spot right up front, and say could you open us up by sharing one of the most compelling short stories you’ve ever heard and then tell us why it’s compelling?

Shane Snow
Oh, wow, one of the most compelling short stories I’ve ever heard. How about I tell the short version of one of the most compelling stories I’ve ever read?

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Shane Snow
So, Gene Weingarten is a Washington Post reporter who’s won the Pulitzer Prize twice and one of my favorite writers, and his best story, in my opinion, is the story of The Great Zucchini who is the premiere children’s entertainer in Washington, D.C. If you’re having a birthday party and your kid is under 11, then you invite The Great Zucchini to come and do his clown performance and his magic and tricks. And what the story of The Great Zucchini is that he was the most in-demand, most popular children’s entertainer in all of D.C. If you were a senator, your kid had to have him, and you would fight with the parents at the prep schools to get The Great Zucchini on your kid’s birthday.

And the story though is that The Great Zucchini was so great with kids not because his props were good or his act was particularly good, he was actually really sloppy and his stuff was all old, but he was so great with kids because it turns out that he had an incredibly messed up childhood and could relate to kids in a very deep way.

And what happened is this reporter followed The Great Zucchini around and discovered that in his apartment there is no bed, there’s just like a blanket on the floor, and there is a closet full of envelopes and bills and collectors’ notices and nothing else. And that on the weekends, The Great Zucchini goes to Atlantic City and gambles and blows all of his money and comes home hungover and depressed ready to go and entertain children.

And so, the story actually, which started out as, “Well, how is this guy so great? What are the makings of a great children’s entertainer that you want in birthday parties and that could entertain kids?” turned into a story of how a tragic childhood had created this person who kids love so much but who actually was deeply, deeply hurt and wounded and was having a terrible time himself.

And what the story points to is how, one, we never know what’s going on behind the scenes of someone who appears to be very successful, who we might be jealous of, other clowns hates this guy, by the way, because he was so popular and kids love him, but no one had any idea that this guy slept with a blanket on the floor and blow all his money on gambling and had like terrible anxiety. They just thought that he was really good at what he does and super successful.

And I think the other sort of lesson of this story is what happened afterwards, which is the story came out and The Great Zucchini, I forget his actual name, but he was so worried that the story would come out and it would ruin his career, that people wouldn’t want their kids having contact with him because he was a mess, and actually people kind of showed up for him after this story, and their hearts went out to him, and people helped him get his finances in order. Like, people volunteered to help this guy out basically when he thought that the opposite would happen that people would keep their kids away from him.

So, it speaks to, I think, humanity, how learning his story, and I’m telling this story on purpose because it’s meta, learning the story of this guy, flaws and all, actually caused people to care more about him. So often we worry that when people learn who we really are and our real stories that they won’t care about us because we’re flawed, but it turns out that the opposite is usually true with humans.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, we now have to go read it.

Shane Snow
It’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I mean, I’ve got so many follow-ups but we’re not talking about The Great Zucchini, we’re talking about storytelling. But, yeah, you’re right, it’s a great lesson right there in terms of we’re worried about sharing or revealing those things but it can really be warmly received. People can relate to you all the more in terms of, “Yes, I, too, have some stuff that’s messed up. You are like me,” and that’s vulnerable, relatable, and good stuff.

Well, let’s maybe talk a little bit about the why in terms of storytelling, I mean, it’s cool and fun for undercover and investigative journalists and Hollywood types. Can you make the case for why storytelling is a viable skill for your everyday professional?

Shane Snow
Absolutely. There’s a reason why stories work on us, why we get pulled in, and it’s actually built into our brains. The human brain is wired for a story and there’s a couple of reasons. Whether you’re taking the evolutionary biology approach, and saying, “Well, humans evolved to need certain skills that are useful,” or if you’re just looking at the phenomenon that we are pulled in by stories, either way you can come to two conclusions very quickly when you look at how human respond to stories.

One is that stories make us remember information better. So, historically, if you wanted to pass down knowledge to your tribe or to your family, you often did so using stories around the campfire. So, if I give you a statistic and show you a bunch of charts, you’ll remember them a lot worse, retain that information a lot worse than if I tell you a story that illustrates the statistics.

One great study that comes to mind is about research split-testing ads for charities. You can show some people an ad for charity and talk about all of the kids that get leukemia and how few of them survive and how horrible it is, or you can show them a story of a parent talking about their child that has leukemia. And in that kind of a split-test, always the story will get more donations and more percentage of people will donate. The story makes you care in addition to making you remember. So, those are kind of the two functions of storytelling that are built into just how our brains react.

Pete Mockaitis
We had Gret Glyer of DonorSee on the show who kind of does just that in terms of donation to impoverished areas, and you could see as a donor, DonorSee, what impact you’re making. And that was a lesson he learned early on is that the stories did a whole lot more than the statistics. And I think the Bill Gates documentary on Netflix, he says, “Hey, if you talk about like a thousand people dying of something, we should be a thousand times sad, but somehow we just don’t work that way.”

I don’t know if you happen to know the results of these split-tests, but can you give us a sense of order of magnitude to the stories outperform like, “Yeah, 5%, 10% better, they’re getting some statistical significance,” or they’re just like walloping the statistics?

Shane Snow
Yeah, off the top of my head for a particular study, I couldn’t say but it’s like double, like on that order.

Pete Mockaitis
In that ballpark of double. All right. That’s good enough for me.

Shane Snow
Yeah. And so, it gets at the question you’re asking is, “How can stories help us regular people if we’re not making movies or writing articles for newspapers?” And it’s those two things. If you want people to remember what you want them to remember, what you want them to know, you have something to say you want to be memorable, and if you want people to care about what you have to say, then storytelling is an incredibly powerful way to make both of those things happen.

So, if you’re a salesperson, you want people to care about your product, you want them to remember you and the things that it can do for you, if you are trying to build a relationship with someone, personally or professionally, stories, sharing stories, and specifically, stories with certain elements, which I’d love to talk about, will make them remember you and make them want to do business with you or want to form a relationship with you more than any other thing.

You go on a date with someone that you want to impress, talking about how much money you have or spending money on them is going to be less effective in making them want to be close to you than if you share stories about your life and things you care about.

Pete Mockaitis
And how much money you spent on your jet.

Shane Snow
If the story ends with, “And then I bought a jet, and if you want to go on it,” maybe there’s some adventure to that that’s intriguing. But what we do on dates when we get to know people is share stories. What we do around the dinner table when we’re bonding with our families is share the stories of what happened to us, or the stories that we’re watching. We bond around stories that aren’t even about us, and this brings humans together and makes them care about each other.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds like a lot of good things that I’d like going on both in life and in career. So, yeah, let’s dig into some of those components. What makes a story effective in these ways? I guess you could say we might call a story effective in the sense of it keeps you engaged and interested, so, I mean, that’s part of the game. I’m sure that’s probably part of what you’re going to tell us. But, I guess, I mean effective in the sense of it yields those benefits, it is memorable, it does draw people to be closer to you and form a bond and a respect for you. So, lay it on, what are the key principles?

Shane Snow
Yup. So, we can now actually watch people’s brains when they watch a TV commercial, or listen to an audio book, or have an interaction with their spouse, and we can measure certain effects that indicate whether memory encoding is going on, and whether they are immersed in the experience. Immersion in sort of the crude neuroscience term is like that thing that happens when you’re watching a James Bond movie and suddenly someone coughs, and you realize you’re watching a movie, you have forgotten where you are, you’ve forgotten that you’re sitting on a couch and you have people next to you because you’re so pulled into the movie or the story.

And so, we can actually measure how much of that immersion you have, we can measure the emotional effect that you’re having, and we can actually measure a couple of things, how deep of an emotional experience you’re having, not necessarily, we can’t do a brain scan or monitor your vital signs and tell that you’re sad versus happy necessarily but we can tell that you’re deeply emotionally affected in some direction. And then there are other cues that we can look at to see if you’re affected in a negative or positive way. So, are you crying because you’re happy or are you crying because you’re upset?

And when we look at these signals, while people watch movies, or listen to stories, or talk to each other, tell each other stories, there are some very clear things that achieve memory encoding and basically caring. Oxytocin is the neural chemical that people always talk about with storytelling. It’s the neurochemical that indicates that you care about something. It’s involved in emotion, and social bonding, and including people and excluding people. So, if you can detect that there’s more oxytocin being synthesized in someone’s brain, you can detect that they care when they’re having an empathetic experience one way or another.

So, the things that lead to these are actually pretty basic and they can go pretty deep but there’s four of them that I usually talk about as the biggest ones. Relatability. So, if you can relate to a character or a situation, then your brain perks up. You will encode, or at least start to encode into memory, and start to care. So, if there’s a story about something that you have never heard of and there’s nothing to hook onto, then it’s hard to relate to, then it’s hard to care and it’s hard to remember. But the flipside of that is novelty, that our brains are wired to pay extra attention to new things that could be useful or could be harmful.

So, it’s like the prehistoric version of this would be an object is moving towards you very quickly. Is it a threat or is it something that I can kill and eat? And so, our brains are programmed to pay attention to new things. And so, if something is a story that’s relatable, has characters that you might care about so you can relate to them, or remind you of people you know, or whatever it is, situations that are familiar, and there’s something new about it, then we really get hooked and we start to pay attention, our brains can start to encode memories.

Then you add in what I call fluency, which is basically making it easy to understand what’s going on. The easier something is to understand, the more you’ll encode it and…

Pete Mockaitis
There’s not like a lot of jargon, or quantum physics, or derivative trading financial stuff. Not those.

Shane Snow
Exactly, yeah. After I show the fourth one, I’ll actually tell you about a study that I conducted with one of my writing partners that illustrates these in action right now as it has to do with TV commercials. But the fourth element is I think the most important one for getting people to really care, and that’s tension. So, it’s establishing that there’s a big gap between what you want and what you have, or what is and what could be.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m sorry, I knew you were going to say tension, and I thought that you were going to like stringing me out a little bit to build to that.

Shane Snow
I forgot about it.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m with you again, thank you.

Shane Snow
Yeah. So, one of the best ways to set up tension is to establish characters want something and it’s going to be really hard to get it, or it seems impossible, or death is on the line. So, with the story of The Great Zucchini, it’s one of my favorites in part because it has all of those things and it’s easier for me to remember because it’s a great story, but it’s like, “Yeah, everyone has been a kid, everyone knows children’s parties, magicians and clowns,” like there’s something that you can kind of like hook on to and be intrigued by, but the novelty and the tension is that this guy is a mess, and, “Should kids be around him? And what’s going to happen to him? And his life is falling apart.” That tension makes you intrigued enough to want to keep going on with the story and find out what it is, even if the ending is not even that exciting. You stick it out to the end because at that point you do care.

So, the study that I recently ran with my co-author for the book The Storytelling Edge and one of my longtime collaborators, we ran a study a few months ago where we looked at campaign ads for Democratic primary contenders. So, whoever it is that’s going up against Donald Trump, what are the ads that they’re showing people and how effective is the storytelling?

And what we found, and this was at the time when everyone had written off Joe Biden that he’s definitely not going to win anymore, everyone had written him off, and we found that despite what people said in the surveys, the pre-survey before you watched these commercials and we interspersed the commercials between like bad television, like CSI, and in between you have these commercial breaks with these political ads, and we asked people, “What do you think of Joe Biden? What do you think of Elizabeth Warren? What do you think of Bernie Sanders? Who are you going to vote for? How left- or right-leaning are you?” all these things.

Even though so many people…Joe Biden did not win the poll essentially in this pre-survey. He overwhelmingly won the good feelings study from a neuroscience level. During his commercial, which was basically…and his approach is pretty consistent, he’s like, “You know, when I was growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania things were hard, but good people, they came together and they helped each other out. My whole life, I’ve been fighting for people. And the time that I ran for Senate and I achieved my dream to help people, but then my wife and son got killed in a car accident. Coming back from that was so hard but I realized that people were up against this sort of thing every day, and I have the opportunity since I’ve been in politics and I know how it works to help with people who have these kinds of problems. So, anyway, I’m on your side, and I’m Uncle Joe Biden. Vote for me.” Like, that’s basically his pitch in this commercial that we did, and that is largely how he presents himself.

And it’s like that story, even if you say you’re not planning on voting for him, that story has all of those elements. It’s like it’s got the relatability right away, like, “I grew up a normal person. There’s real-life problems that we’re all dealing with. Also, here are some things about me that are novel and you never knew necessarily. And things are hard but we’re going to get through it.” And the warmth there, people overwhelmingly just feel positive feelings. And even the people who said they don’t prefer him, their brains are saying that they believe him and care about what he’s saying.

Whereas, Bernie Sanders, among the Democrats who are part of this survey, he was the lead person in the survey beforehand, his ads didn’t have that fluency. First of all, he didn’t narrate his own ads, which I think was a downside already. It wasn’t as relatable and personal. But his ads were like all these clips of the narrator is saying things like, “The working class is getting a bad rap, and the people with all the money and the drug companies that are taking outsized share, and blah, blah, blah. And Bernie is a fighter, and he’s here to help reverse this bad situation,” or whatever it is.

But it’s showing clips of like welders, and taxi drivers, and nurses, and B-roll, and then it has interspersed some of his stories of him getting arrested in the ‘60s in protest for Civil Rights and stuff, which is actually supercool part of his story, but it’s just like this montage of these clips. And you watch people’s brains and it’s like they don’t get it, they’re like, “What am I seeing?” and they’re trying to piece it together and so they don’t remember it, and they don’t feel good. They actually feel kind of negative.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like those some fragrance ads back in the day, they’re just like, “What?” which is all of these things, like, “Something, something, by Calvin Klein.” Like, “What? Okay, I’ll smell good if I use it maybe. What are you saying to me?”

Shane Snow
Yeah. And so, it’s like a wasted opportunity. You’re spending all this money on advertising and people aren’t remembering you because they’re confused. Meanwhile, your competitor who’s not saying anything other than like, “Oh, shucks, I’m a great guy and I really care,” people are coming away from that and being like, “Hell, yeah, this guy cares,” even if what they’re saying in the poll doesn’t match that. And this speaks to with some similar studies with Clinton versus Trump in 2016. It showed that a lot of people, when they watched their ads, they would get very emotionally involved in Trump’s ads and they would kind of tune out in Clinton’s ads, and that makes a big difference. The story, regardless of what you think, how you feel tends to have an outsized impact on the decisions you make.

Research shows that we often decide things, we justify how we feel with logic rather than the other way around. We use logic to then determine how we feel. It’s actually usually the other way around, which is why stories are so powerful because they make us feel. to wrap up the monologue, the ultimate thing that causes people to remember and care is instilling emotion because you remember emotion, and emotion causes you to care one way or another.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so those are the elements that make all the difference. So, then in practice, let’s say I’m trying to make a point, advocate for a view, like, “We should do this, or we should not do this,” inside an organization. And so, I guess, data is going to be a part of it but, from your view, it seems like we’re going to need more than numbers and bar charts to make a compelling memorable emotional case. How would you recommend that we proceed in crafting and delivering a great story?

Shane Snow
Yeah. So, I will say that, ultimately, in problem solving, you want logic to stand on its own. You don’t want actually for your feelings really, to get in the way of making good decisions, so I wouldn’t advocate using storytelling to persuade people and get people to care about something that they shouldn’t do. However, it is really effective at getting attention for something that you believe is right or that should happen.

So, let’s say, to use kind of what you opened up. You have data that shows that a decision should be made, or that a certain thing needs to be raised, but like with the charity studies, you tell people a thousand people are dying and people don’t really register it or it doesn’t motivate them. So, you, finding a story that has those elements that people will hook onto, that has something new and surprising, that’s easy to get through and that has tension built in, and wrapping the data into that story is a great way to get people to remember and care and pay attention to spread whatever it is that you have to say.

So, you’re at work, you’re trying to make the case for something, people aren’t paying attention, it could be because you’re not using a story. When I write in my books, I deliberately use this structure where I will open up a chapter about something important with a story that I leave on a cliffhanger, and then I will get into the research, the data, the science, whatever it is, the medicine, because I know that people will want to know what the end of the story is. So, they slog through and I try to make it more entertaining than just to slog, but they get through the important part and then I wrap up the story, that cliffhanger, with lessons that that data explained.

So, in that way, you’re getting everything but the story is really going to help you remember it, and the story itself is going to help you care enough to get through it. So, I think that is a strategy, generally, whether we’re talking about making sales or making a case for something, I think is generally the framework that I like to use. And you could be obnoxious about this, like everything shouldn’t start with this intense story that ends on a cliffhanger or whatever, but something that’s important that you really do want to sink in, I think that’s an incredible framework.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And, boy, so much of this is clicking into place for me. I’m thinking about, well, one, Bob Cialdini, if you were peeping my shelf, Influence: Science and Practice and Pre-Suasion are some of my favorite all-time books, and that’s one of his things, is, I guess, the tension, you bring up a question that remains unresolved, like, “How could this be?” or, “What’s going to happen? How does it unfold?” And I guess you can use that anytime, like, “Hey, a customer was furious about this situation. They say dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” And then you just switch over to, “We’ve gotten 35,000 calls along…” and so you’re going through this, and they’re like, “Well, yeah, but what about the customer?” And then you say, “Hey, ultimately, we’re able to give him what he needed but it took way more effort than it should have, and here’s how it could be easier.”

And, now, what I’m thinking about, the data versus story, I remember, boy, so right now, as we’re recording, coronavirus is a hot topic and, hopefully, in the months and years to follow, as people listen to this, they’d be like, “Oh, I remember that and it’s long gone.” But I remember I encounter a lot of statistics, news, and it’s like, “Okay, that’s happening.” And it’s like, “But, you know, is it really worse than the flu? Is it not worse than the flu?”

And then when I saw like a Facebook post from a friend of mine who said, “Hey, I’ve been doing some shifts as a nurse in the ICU, and I tell you what, when you see a few teens who had no health problems ever fight for their lives on the ventilator,” then it really puts some perspectives, “This is no joke. Stay home even if you’re an extrovert like me.” And I was very persuaded by that and that image because it was relatable, it’s like, “Oh, I’m a younger-ish person without preexisting health problems.” It was relatable because I know this person but it was new in terms of, “Oh, here’s this person who is engaged in this thing, I think, I heard a lot about, but here’s her take in experiencing it up close and personal.” More relatability, it was in the Chicago area, and then tension, “Uh-oh, I hope they make it.” And fluency, it was, well, very digestible bite-sized, it’s just like a Facebook post, maybe five sentences.

So, yeah, what a contrast right there in terms of looking at the tables of how many new infections and hospital admissions and deaths that had been versus, “Here’s someone I know who’s dealing with it head on.”

Shane Snow
Well, you bring up something that I think is an important subtlety is that many a compelling dataset has been just utterly dismissed by a good anecdote. And this is something that is not necessarily good, right? It happens all the time in business. Now, we did the research and it says that most of our customers are unhappy with this, and then the head of customer success is like, “Well, our biggest customer loves it, so your research sucks. Moving on.” So, there’s danger in that. However, within that is something that’s really powerful which is that if we’ve made up our minds about something, a story is much more powerful at helping us to reconsider the way that we think than just being barraged with statistics.

So, it can be used as a tool that can foil us so we need to be wary of that. However, it’s good for us to reassess what we’ve made up our minds up about. So, if we’re like, “Yeah, yeah, I’m young. Coronavirus isn’t going to get me. I’ve read the statistics. I had a lot of texts with friends.” Well, I’ve been that guy. “I mean, like, hey, we’re in our 30s, we’re going to be fine,” until I found out that people in my life might have autoimmune conditions, and they’re not going to be fine. And, suddenly, that individual story makes me rethink, “Well, how dangerous is this?”

And so, I think that’s healthy and it’s important just the change agent that it can be. Often, what we’re trying to do in business and life is get people to change, or get them to change their minds, change their behaviors, and it’s a lot harder to do that if you’re going to argue over stats and studies and this and that, than if you use a story to get people to open the door to changing their minds. And then, once again, we can weave in those studies. But we don’t often consider evidence because we’ve already made up our minds. Stories can help us to be in a place where we will consider new evidence.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s handy. Well, you gave us one particular approach in terms of set up a cliffhanger and then return to it. You’ve also got this CCO pattern. Can you share what is that and how do we do that in our careers?

Shane Snow
So, CCO is kind of the mnemonic for how to systematically tell consistent stories to build a brand, or a reputation, or a movement, or a case for something. And the CCO stands for create, connect, and optimize. So, really, the process of sort of the business of storytelling, when we’re talking about companies or just the business of me using stories to convince you or connect with you, is really you create the story then you get it to people, and then you see how it lands and make tweaks. So, the first time that you tell the story about whatever. Like, I’ve never, in an interview, tell the story of The Great Zucchini even though it’s one of my favorite stories.

Pete Mockaitis
I feel awesome as an interviewer just for what that’s for.

Shane Snow
A lot of people have read it. It’s not even my story. A lot of people have read it but it’s a good example but, probably, the next time I tell someone that story, I’ll probably tell it a little bit differently based on how it went this time, especially if I listened to the episode and I really analyzed how it went and your reactions, and I get feedback from you. But if you’re trying to use storytelling for marketing, say, then you create content, you put it out on Facebook or whatever your channels are, you connect to people, you email to people, you tell people about it, you see how it’s received and then you optimize it.

So, you change the headlines, you focus in on the parts that people really grab onto. This is where analytics really helps. But you figure out what it is that really is working and not working so you can emphasize those things the next time around, whether changing the story and putting it out there again, or just the next story that you’re telling, you can say, “Well, people really do seem to relate to this thing so I’m going to do more of that,” or, “This channel, this place is just really bad. People are not paying attention here so I’m going to try a new avenue for where to get my stories.” And we call this the flywheel because you go through this process over and over again. You create a story, you connect it with people, and then you optimize, do better next time.

And I will say, another subtlety, is this is not about embellishing and lying. This is not what I’m saying. Unless you’re a fiction writer, in which case, awesome, do that. But it’s about figuring out for your audience and for your goal what is the approach and the subset and the emphasis and the channel that is really going to make your story have the best chance of success.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, so then let’s talk about the connect bit there. I guess it sounds like much of it is just, “Hey, just get that in front of some people,” whether they’re in the seat in an auditorium or they are clicking it on their screens. I guess I’d like to get your take on how can we really know what folks want and will connect to? I guess you mentioned analytics so, sure, there’s that. We can look at the clickthrough rate, and the actions, and the cost per acquired customer, etc. And then I guess I’d love your take in terms of whether it’s sort of real-time observation, what should I be looking for from a human space? Or, maybe in advance research in terms of favorite questions to include in interviews or surveys, is how do you really know what’s likely to, you know, connect and resonate with folks?

Shane Snow
Yeah, I guess you can say that there are three ways to plan out your content or your story. You can look at past signals, so that’s where analytics, people always share stories about pumpkins around Halloween time, whatever. You look at the data and just do that, and this is where a lot of this stuff that I talk about with the neuroscience, it’s like, “Data shows that people really connect to emotional stories and you got to get them in the first few seconds with something that they can relate to and all of that.” That can give you guidelines or it can be really specific.

The second thing is you can predict what people might really connect to, and you can make educated guesses, and that can rely on data or pattern recognition, watching people, whatever it is. And then the third is, I think, the important one that a lot of people leave out, which is you can experiment. So, you never know what’s going to become the new best practice because everyone’s doing the best practice, everyone’s doing the thing that everyone is doing so you don’t know what’s going to be the thing that next goes viral or catches cold. You can maybe predict but often that thing, that next big thing, is a surprise, so I think you should reserve some amount of your effort for experimentation.

I like to use the example of comedy. So, for my first book, I spent a week with The Second City in Chicago, the comedy school. Yeah, a lot of great comedians, Stephen Colbert and Tina Fey and really great famous comedians have come from there, their training program. And I spent some time with them, and they do this really interesting club or thing, which is when they’re doing a review, which is like those shows where there’s lots of skits and it’s kind of like well-rehearsed and well-practiced. What they’ll often do is they’ll slip in test material into the reviews.

So, they have the show that they know everyone is going to laugh at, and they know that these things are going to hit, these jokes, these sketches, and then they’re going to put in these two things that they’re just going to see what happens. And if no one laughs, then they’ve collected data that that’s not going to work. If people laugh, then they keep iterating on it. And it’s kind of a version of that create, connect, optimize. The connect part is that people are already there in the theater. I guess that’s why it came to mind because you brought up auditorium. But they’re experimenting not based on what’s worked in the past but based on things that they are throwing out there that might be a killer thing that no one thought about.

So, I think that, with a content strategy, is really important. Don’t just do repeats of what’s worked in the past, and don’t just try to predict, but actually throw some random stuff, some experiments out there, and maybe this is a version of the predicting thing, like you’re using your intuition which is just your pattern recognition to try some things that might work. Sure. Either way I think that that’s really important. And so, you see that the best media companies often do a version of this. They do a lot of looking at people’s behavior and what resonates with them. They use that to kind of predict what will happen next. But then they also experiment with things some percentage of the time.

The analogy in the business world is 3M or Google. They let their engineers spend 20% of their time working on random stuff, whatever they want, in the off chance that one of those things will turn into Gmail, which is where Gmail came from, someone screwing around in their random 20% experimentation time. So, I think that that part is really important.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Shane, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Shane Snow
I would say the most powerful thing you can do, before you even want to get into the nitty-gritty of training in better storytelling is think about stories that you love. And I think movies and TV shows and books are a great place to do this. Think about stories that you love and watch them or read them again, and take notes, and actually break down how the story goes.

I’ve done this a lot as a writer, taking movies that I love, and just like taking notes, which is a really nerdy way to watch a movie, but take notes on how the story goes. Like, what are the scenes? Where is the tension being set up? Just being thoughtful about analyzing stories that you like will help you to build up the muscles of exercising those elements of stories in whatever context you’re doing. If you break down 10 action movies that you love, that can definitely meaningfully impact the way that you tell stories just to get to know people or as a salesperson or whatever, so I would recommend that.

Training stuff is great and I’d love people to check out my site, but actually be a nerd and break down stories that you love and see what the patterns are there. And chances are, those are the kinds of stories that will be more comfortable for you to emulate or use pieces of yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. Well, now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Shane Snow
So, lately, my new favorite quote has been “When you know better, you do better.” This is an Oprah and Maya Angelou one. But I think it’s really true, when you know better, you do better. It’s the best excuse for continually learning and for that thing that I mentioned earlier, being willing to reassess what you think and reassess your conclusions because if you know better, then you’re going to do better even if it’s a little bit painful to realize that you’ve been wrong about something.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Shane Snow
Most recent favorite study is about kids and trust. So, I’ve been doing a lot of writing around teamwork and innovation, and trust is a really big factor in those things. And I think it also plays into stories can help us to build trust if the stories are empathetic and help you get to know people. But there’s a really interesting study about kids and trust. Basically, researchers put a bunch of kids in a room, and then made it clear that something was wrong, that something was going wrong, and then they would have an adult, authority figure, come in, and tell the kids that everything was fine, and everything was going to be fine. And what they found was that the kids’ stress levels spiked more at the part when they were told things were going to be fine. And they were more stressed out upon realizing that an authority figure and an adult was lying to them or sugarcoating to them than they were about the bad thing.

And I like this study because it does speak to human nature, that kids are perceptive. Adults are perceptive too. I think in, many ways, we should be way more perceptive but we are way worse off when someone tries to sugarcoat the truth, or shade the truth, or push away the bad news, than we are with the bad news. And so, I think I like this study because it gives a little bit more of a reason to be honest and to not try to make things easy on people because, actually, sometimes making things easy on people is actually going to make things harder on them. It creates more stress and it erodes your trust. So, I like that study of late.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Shane Snow
The book I’ve recommended the most to people the last couple of years is called A Book About Love by Jonah Lehrer. It’s about the neuroscience and psychology of love, not just romantic love but friendship and love of self-compassion. And it’s also kind of a redemption story, a story about learning to forgive yourself after you’ve done something wrong. One of the most insightful life-changing books that I’ve read in a long time, I bought it for like 30 people at this point, so A Book About Love.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Shane Snow
The tool I use the most is Evernote. I like it for the flexibility of being able to clip stuff from the internet. I like it for helping me to get over FOMO when I might be distracted by an article. It’s similar to Pocket where you have an article up, and you can save it for later rather than having to read it now, so Evernote has a clip where you can do that. Because if I’m working, I’m trying to focus on something, and someone sends me something interesting, or I come across a side tangent, I worry that if I don’t read it now I’m going to miss it, or I’m just going, by having it, get sucked in. But saving it for later, clipping it down, eases that anxiety or that FOMO or curiosity because I know I’ll get to it later, and I can stay focused and not get distracted. So, that’s one that’s really been useful.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit?

Shane Snow
Well, I like to think of, actually, a ritual that I have for my writing. A way for me to get into my own personal flow or zone when I want to write is I have…I’ll show you. The listeners won’t be able to see it. But I have this little coyote figurine that a friend of mine gave.

And what I do is when I’m getting ready to buckle down and write, which is often hard to do, you procrastinate, you do all those things, and you feel blocked, I have a specific routine that I go through, and it culminates with me putting the little coyote on my laptop. And when the coyote is there, then I’m in writing mode. There’s actually some science to this, that superstitious routines and rituals, they’re not magic but they do work because they can help your brain calm down and get into sort of a place of focus. So, when baseball players do like all the crazy moves before they get up to bat, that’s actually helping them to calm down and get into a place where they can focus on their performance. So, I do that with my little ritual with my coffee and my baby coyote figurine.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And is there a particular nugget you share that you’re known for, it’s quoted back to you often?

Shane Snow
Probably the most common quote I see tweeted or people react to is, I think it’s cheesy just because I think a lot of quotes are cheesy, but I think it’s absolutely true, is that “Genius is less about the size of your mind than about how open it is.” So, history shows that really, really smart people are often outperformed or out-clevered by open-minded and flexible people who are willing to do things not just really smart in one direction but are willing to consider lots of options.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Shane Snow
Just my website ShaneSnow.com. It has everything: articles, books, training courses, and my social media.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Shane Snow
So, relevant to right now, but I think people listen to this after the quarantine is over, there’s a tool that I made. It’s a free tool, it’s called the workstyle quiz. The challenge would be either use this tool or spend a few minutes doing this, which is figure out your unique way of working, and share that with the people you collaborate with most. So, my workstyle quiz asks a bunch of questions that seem small and insignificant but they add up, that when people are more aware of how you work best, including yourself, then people will work better with you.

So, things like, “Do you do your clearest thinking in the morning, in the middle of the day, at night? When and how are you best able to get into a flow when you probably don’t want to be distracted? What’s the best way to get a hold of you in an emergency? What’s the best way to get a hold of you with something that can wait a little bit but is important?” Spelling those out, taking a little quiz, or thinking through those things to spell those out for the people you collaborate with makes a huge difference so that people will contact you, communicate with you in ways that help you to work better because they know it’ll help them to work better.

And, also, if you do make an effort to accommodate people’s different work situations and styles, then that builds trust which will then, hopefully, be reflected on you and help you get your work done too.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Shane, this has been a treat. Thank you and good luck in all the stories you’re telling.

Shane Snow
I appreciate it. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Jonah, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Jonah Berger
Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m really excited to dig into your wisdom. You’ve been on the list for a long time so it’s so good to have you here.

Jonah Berger
Oh, thanks. I appreciate that.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to just kick us off by so you’ve been doing a lot of research in influence and change. Can you maybe tell us what’s some of like the most common things that people want change that comes up again and again, it’s almost like trite for you by now?

Jonah Berger
I think everyone has something they want to change. Employees always seem to want to change their boss’ mind, leaders want to transform organizations, marketing and sales want to change the customer or the clients’ mind, startups want to change industries, nonprofits want to change the world. I think we all have something that we want to change. People talk about changing their spouse’s mind or their kids’ behavior, so I think these things come up again and again.

What I found most interesting is that we tend to take a particular approach that often doesn’t work. So, when we did some of our own research, for example, we asked people to write down, “What’s something you want to change? And what have you tried to do to change it?” Almost 100% of the time, 99% of the time, they write down some version of what I call pushing, and that is kind of adding more pressure, more reasons, more information.

If it’s the boss, “Oh, let me just send one more email.” If it’s the client, “Let me make one more phone call.” If it’s my spouse, “Let me just tell them one more time why I think what I’m suggesting is the right way to go.” And it’s clear why we think this is a good approach, right? In the physical world, if we want to move something, we push it, right? If you’re sitting in a room and there’s a chair, and you want the chair to go somewhere, you push the chair in the direction you want it to go.

But the problem with people is they aren’t physical objects. Unlike objects that move when we push them, when we push people, they push back. And so, the question, really, of this new book that I’ve been working on is, “Well, is there a different way? Is there a better way to change minds and organizations?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, do tell, what is the better way?

Jonah Berger
Yeah, so I think there’s a need analogy to be made with chemistry. And so, in chemistry there’s sort of this special set of substances that make change happen faster and easier, they’re called catalysts, but they work in a very particular way. They don’t add temperature, they don’t add pressure, which is usually what things in chemistry do to change things, they remove the barriers to change. They basically make the same amount of change happen with less work.

And so, that’s really what I find quite interesting about the social world as well. Too often, we say, “What could I do to get someone to change?” rather than taking a very subtle but important shift, and saying, “Why hasn’t that person changed already? What’s preventing them? What are the barriers that are mitigating or hindering change,” that friction as you said, “and how can I remove those barriers?” And so, that’s what the book is really all about. It’s about finding those barriers, those things that are getting in the way and how to get rid of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. And so then, let’s hear in terms of frequent examples of resistance, friction, barriers, obstacles. What’s the kind of stuff that gets in the way for professionals looking to make a change at work, either in themselves, or with their boss, or colleague? What are some of those repeated obstacles?

Jonah Berger
Yeah. And I love to think about these obstacles as parking brakes. The reason why, when we get in our car, we often have this problem. We get in our car, we’re sitting on an incline, or whatever, we want to get it to go, we turn the key ignition, put our foot on the gas. If it doesn’t go, we think we need more gas. We, rarely though, until we think about it, end up checking that parking brake. So, sometimes it’s the parking brake that’s along the way. So, what are those parking brakes or obstacles?

And so, in the book I talk about five. I talk about reactance, endowment, distance, uncertainty, and corroborating evidence. Those, I found across my research, are some of the five most common benefits and they have the nice side benefit of when you put them in order, they actually spell a word, which is REDUCE.

Pete Mockaitis
It was no accident, Jonah, I’m sure.

Jonah Berger
Yeah, it was no accident. And, honestly, actually, if I could I’d change the order around. I’d end up with like the EURDC framework which doesn’t spell anything. So, it would just be confusing if we did it that way but I think it’s a nice way to organize that information, and that’s what catalysts do, right? They don’t push harder; they reduce those barriers. They figure out what those obstacles are and how to mitigate them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so let’s dig into each of them. Can you maybe define the five of them and then we’ll sort of dig into each one?

Jonah Berger
Yeah, let’s pick one to start. So, let’s say reactance, and I think this is something that everyone listening has experienced in one way, shape or form, whether it’s in their professional or personal life. And the idea here, very simply, is when we try to get people to do something, when we try to persuade, they push back.

A bunch of very nice research shows that people essentially have an ingrained anti-persuasion system, almost like an anti-missile defense system, or radar, that is going around, that says, “Hey, when I sense that someone is trying to convince me of something, someone’s trying to change my mind, my defense system goes up.”

Pete Mockaitis
Even if it’s for our good or it would be fun.

Jonah Berger
You’re exactly right, yeah. And I find this most funny with exactly what you said. Even if it’s something I already want to do, this happens a lot in our personal lives, right? Our spouse, for example, might say, “Well, I think we should do this,” and even if it’s something we already wanted to do, we have to stop ourselves from saying no because we want to feel like we made the choice.

And that’s exactly what reactance is about. We want to feel like we’re in control, we’re in the driver seat, and so if we don’t feel like we’re in control, or we don’t feel like we’re in the driver seat, we push back against that message. That radar goes up and we either avoid, or ignore something, or, even worse, we counterargue. And I think counterarguing is the worst because you don’t know when someone is counterarguing. Often, they’re sitting there, they’re listening to you but they’re not actually listening. They’re sitting there thinking about all the reasons why they don’t want to do what you suggested.

And so, in terms of how to solve this challenge, there are a few different ways but one I often like to talk about is to do something called providing a menu. And the notion, the intuition here is very simple. When we give people one thing that we’re recommending, they, as we just talked about, often sit there thinking about all the reasons why it’s a bad idea. So, if our spouse, for example, says, “Hey, why do you want to do this weekend?” And you say, “Oh, let’s go watch a movie.” They go, “Oh, but it’s such a nice day outside,” or, “Oh, we went to the movies last week,” or, “Oh,” whatever it is. They think about all the reasons why it’s a bad idea.

And so, what good consultants often do is they provide what’s called a menu, essentially multiple options rather than just one. And what that really cleverly does is that shifts the job of the listener. Let’s say a consultant is presenting a solution and they’re presenting it to a client. If they just present one option, the client sits there going, thinking about all the reasons why it won’t work, “It’ll be too expensive.” “It’ll be hard to implement.” “My staff won’t like it, blah, blah, blah, blah.” All the reasons why it won’t work.

If, instead, you present two options, at least two or three, maybe even a couple more, it shifts the role of the listener, because rather than thinking about all the reasons they don’t like what you’re suggesting, they’re instead sitting there thinking which of them they like the best. Which of these two options do they like the best? Which is going to lead them, not surprisingly, to be much more likely to pick one at the end of the day.

And so, I like calling it providing a menu because you’re not giving infinite choices, you’re giving a limited set, and you’re guiding that decision.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s so funny because it takes so much work to go off the menu. I’m thinking, this is triggering all sorts of things. So, I’ve got a two-year old at home, and so sometimes he doesn’t want to put a shirt on after he wakes up, and so I was like, “Hey, do you want the blue one or the purple one.” And he says, “Purple.” Or I was at a hotel with a continental breakfast this weekend, and I just wasn’t thrilled with the options. So, I was hoping for those little egg things but they weren’t there. There’s about all carbs, no protein, but I had like six options. And so, I just sort of stood there displeased for like three minutes. The people are probably wondering what I was doing, I was like, “No, no, no,” and then I finally just said, “Okay, I guess I want to do this because I don’t want to truck it out in this snowy weather. I’ll eat what’s here.”

Jonah Berger
Yeah, but talking about kids, I mean, it’s the same idea. I have a young one at home myself and it’s the same thing. When you ask kids to do something, they go, “No.” “Put this away.” “No.” “Do you want to wear this?” “No.” They’re like so used to saying no, but if you give them two options, suddenly they got a chance to choose. And notice you’re not giving them 15 options. If you gave them 15 options, they wouldn’t make a choice. They’d feel overwhelmed, they’d go something else.

When you walk into a restaurant, so you go to a Chinese restaurant, they don’t say, “Okay, which of the 60 options of world cuisines would you like?” They say, no, “Here’s the small set of options that are available but you get to pick.” And I think that same thing is used for whether you’re trying to convince a client or whether you’re trying to convince a boss. If you want that boss to do something, don’t say, “Hey, boss, I think we should do this.” Say, “Hey, boss, I think these are two really great options for us. Which do you like better?” Now, the boss may not pick either, but because they felt like they’re in control, they’re more likely to pick one than they would’ve been otherwise.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s particularly excellent when it’s sort of like the “Help me prioritize” conversation. Like, “You’ve made 40 requests of me and it’s, in fact, impossible for all of those things to happen within the timeline you’d like them to happen. So, what do you think of, on this list, is the most important?” And so, that goes across, I think, a lot better while on the receiving end of this than, “No, not going to do that,” or, “I can’t do that.” It’s like, “Well, what?” It’s like, “No, no, you pick which of these things?”

Jonah Berger
You pick, yeah. But, as you’re pointing out, and that’s actually another thing I talk about a little bit in this chapter, is what that does is it gets the boss to commit to the conclusion. When you make statements, if someone gets a sit, they’re going, “Okay, do I agree with that statement or not?” When you ask questions, suddenly, again, it shifts their role. They’re saying what they think is the most important. They’re saying which of the things you should prioritize. They’ve put a stake in the ground. And so, if you come back later and you do that thing, it’s hard for them to disagree.

Somebody was talking about this in the context of a startup they were working at where the boss wanted everyone to work the weekend. No one wants to work the weekend, right? So, instead, in the meeting, the boss said, “Okay, what kind of company do you want to be? Do you want to be a good company or a great company?” Now, we all know how everyone answers that question, they don’t say, “Oh, we want to be a good company.” They say, “We want to be a great company.” And after everyone says that, they put that stake in the ground, they’ve committed to the conclusion. Then the boss says, “Okay. Well, to be a great company, we got to put in some long hours.” But because people have committed to it, because you asked them a question rather than telling them what to do, they’re much more likely to do the work to reach that conclusion.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Lovely. So, then that covers the reactance, I guess, we automatically react to, “I don’t care to be persuaded but I do care to make some choices.” So, then how about the endowment?

Jonah Berger
Sure, yeah. I think endowment, the best way to talk about endowment is to share the common intuition we often have, which is we tend to become attached to things we’re already doing. So, unlike if you’re trying to get someone who’s never done something to do something, when you’re trying to get people to switch to go from one thing to something else, they’re not only about how much they value that new thing and how much they want to do it, but how reticent they are to give up the old one.

So, some research on home buying, for example, shows that the longer someone’s lived in a home, the more they value that place above market price. They’ve spent a long time in it, they have their memories attached to it, they’re unwilling to get rid of it. Same thing if you’re asking people to buy something. So, they do great research, for example, on what’s called the endowment effect, where the name of the chapter comes from, where they asked people, “Hey, imagine I give you this mug.” They’re checking out this mug, it can hold coffee or tea, “You like it, great. How much would you be willing to sell it for?”

And they asked another set of people, they say, “Hey, here’s this wonderful mug, it holds coffee and tea, etc. How much would you be willing to buy it from someone else for?” And those prices, those amounts should be exactly the same whether you’re buying that coffee mug or selling that coffee mug, the value of it should be the same. But people’s valuation of it changes based on whether they own it or not. If it’s your mug, if it’s yours, you’re less willing to let it go. You have two times, often, will have higher valuation than people that don’t have it already because it’s yours. Obviously, this is a problem because you’re not only asking people when you ask them to change to do something new, you’re asking them to give up something old that they probably value very highly.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. This also reminds me of the cognitive bias, the IKEA effect in terms of, “I poured my time into assembling this piece of furniture therefore, if I were to sell it, it needs to fetch a hefty rate because I’m invested into that.” And to others, “No, it’s just kind of a cheap piece of furniture. You’re not going to get a hefty rate. It’s not world-class craftsmanship or anything.” Okay, so there we go. That’s endowment, it’s there. What do we do with it?

Jonah Berger
Yeah, and so I think the thing there, I found, is that we have to make people realize that doing nothing isn’t costless. So, I think we have this notion that, “What I’m doing already is free.” The cost of doing a new thing, the switching cost, which hopefully we’ll get to in a couple minutes, but we think the existing thing is, in some sense, free, “It’s not going to cost me anything to keep doing the same thing I’m doing.” But that often isn’t the case. There often are costs to doing something that we don’t realize.

So, there’s a nice study, for example, that talks about which hurts people more, which causes more pain, a minor injury or a major one. And everybody, when they think about it, will go, “Oh, of course, a major injury causes more pain.” So, if I break my elbow, it’s going to hurt me a lot more than a sprain. A headache is not going to hurt as much as a heart attack, for example. But what people don’t realize is when something really bad happens, we often take measures to fix that bad thing.

Something that’s terrible, when we break our arm, for example, we’re not just going to sit around. We’re going to go to the hospital, we’re going to get it set, we’re going to get it fixed. Whereas, for a minor sprain, we often don’t fix it. And so, we often don’t address those things and they end up causing more pain over the lifespan overall because they don’t go above our threshold.

And so, the challenge, that is for change agents, is make people realize it’s not costless, that doing what you’ve done before isn’t costless. There’s a great person from IT that I talk about, I talked to in the book, they did a version of what I call burning the ships. So, there’s this old famous story where an explorer wants to get his men to travel inland to do this dangerous thing in Mexico, they don’t want to go. So, what he does, he takes the old option off the table. He basically says, “Look, if the ships are still around, they can still go home so I’m going to burn the ships. Once the ships are gone, once the status quo has disappeared, they’ve got to go with me. They’ve got to change and do the new thing.”

And so, that may seem really drastic, burning the ships, but this IT guy did a version of it. He was trying to get everyone to upgrade, so upgrade to a new software version.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you’ve got to. Those hackers are after you.

Jonah Berger
Oh, they do, right?

Pete Mockaitis
They’re after you.

Jonah Berger
Yeah, you’re still using Windows 7, or whatever it is, it’s dangerous for the network.

Pete Mockaitis
Can’t have that.

Jonah Berger
Or someone’s on that old version of their PC they don’t want to get rid of because they’ve got that status quo bias, it’s theirs. And so, what he did was interesting. So, rather than saying, “Hey, let me tell you how great the new thing is,” he surfaced the costs of inaction. He made people realize more that doing nothing isn’t free. He sent out this note to people who weren’t upgrading to a new system, so he sent out this note, he said, “Look, you don’t have to upgrade. But just so you know, we can’t support the old system anymore. It’s dangerous to the network. It takes too much time. You can keep using it but, after a certain point, if you have a problem, we’re not going to fix it.”

He didn’t say, “Hey, look, you have to switch,” but he didn’t allow that costs of inaction to remain dormant. He really surfaced it. He allowed people to see it. And so, in some sense, he didn’t take the old option off the table, he didn’t throw their PC out the window, he didn’t truly burn the ships. He just made people realize that sticking with those old way of doing things might be more costly than they might think, which encouraged them to be more willing to do something new.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I really dig that, and I’ve recently applied that in terms of there’s all these little tasks that, you know, I’m big on outsourcing and I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it. But there are some like three-minute tasks that’s just like, “Ahh, it’s probably a lot of effort to train folks on how to do that so I’ll just keep doing that.” But then when I really hunker down, it’s like, “Okay, so what is this going to amount to over the next five years of doing these three minutes?” And I think about all those hours, and it’s like, “Okay, well, that’s a few vacation days, so maybe it’s worth taking an hour to share, ‘Hey, this is how you make invoices,’” or whatever the thing may be so that I can get that going, as you show that the cost of doing nothing is significant.

Jonah Berger
Yeah. And I love that example that you shared because the cost is significant over time but it’s not initially. Like, you’re sitting there, going, “But it’s only three minutes.” But, as you said, three minutes over time adds up to vacation days. But there’s always an initial cost of action. To train that person requires a couple hours, and if the cost seems bigger than the immediate benefit, we don’t do it. And so, really encouraging people to say, “Look, over time, that sprain, that elbow sprain is going to hurt a lot. You might want to go see a doctor and get it fixed.” Really adding it up over time forces people to realize that it’s not actually costless.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Well, let’s keep it going. Tell us about distance. Tell us about distance, Jonah.

Jonah Berger
Sure. So, distance is the notion that if we ask for too much, if we ask for something or even give people information, it’s too far from where they are at the moment, they tend to ignore us or they tend to sort of push back against what we’re suggesting. And so, this might sound a little bit like reactance, but in reactance we’re really trying to persuade someone, even if we just give people information, sometimes they don’t listen.

And so, a great domain to think about this is politics.

Jonah Berger
It’s the new reality show, it’s called America – What’s Happening in Politics. But people don’t get along with the other side, and many people have talked about filter bubbles, and you get access to biased information, and all these different things. But one solution is, “Hey, if we just learned about the other side, if we just connected with people on the other side, then we’d be more moderate, we’d come around.”

And so, sociologists from Duke actually tested this, they said, “Look, I’m going to take people on Twitter, I’m going to pay them a little bit of money to follow a bot for a month, and that bot is going to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum as them.” It’s exactly what all the commentators and pundits have said, “Look, if we just reach across the aisle, just talk to a couple Republicans, if you’re a Democrat, vice versa if you’re a Republican, that’ll make everybody more moderate.” They said, “Look, if we just give people information, we’re not trying to convince anyone, just give them information about what the other side thinks, hopefully, that’ll make them more moderate.”

And you can think about this in a variety of other contexts as well, right? If I just give that boss more information about what I want, if I give the client more information, they should listen. And the hope was simply that information about the other side would move people to the middle but that’s not, unfortunately, what he found. It wasn’t that it moved people to the middle, and it wasn’t even that it had no effect. Giving people information about what the other side thought actually pushed them in the opposite direction. It backfired.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Those jerks,” villainized them more for how wrong they are.

Jonah Berger
In some sense, right, they made Republicans become more conservative, and the Liberals move in the opposite direction as well. And, essentially, why? It was too far from where people are at the moment. Research shows that we have a sort of a latitude acceptance or zone of acceptance around our beliefs or our attitudes. Sure, we believe a certain thing, but we’re willing to move a few yards in another direction.

Think about a football field, right, we move five or ten yards in one direction, maybe five or ten in another, but we won’t go completely on the other side of the field because on the other side of the field is that region of rejection. It’s that set of opinions, or information, or beliefs that we are unwilling even to consider. We’re unwilling to pay attention to them, and this is sort of ideas of the confirmation bias. And even when we do pay attention to them, we discount it or we don’t believe it because it’s too far from where we are.

And so, the question really is, “How can we shrink that distance, make it not seem so far away from where people are at the moment?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, okay, so let’s get an example here. Boy, what’s something that people can really…hey, how about abortion, right? There is some distance. So, one side could say, “Hey, this is a human life and you’re murdering it or him or her, that’s not cool.” And the other side would say, “No, you’re enslaving women. You’re trying to bring them back to the dark ages in which they’re subservient to men. This is unjust.” Okay, so we got a whole lot of distance. I’m throwing you in the deep end, Jonah.

Jonah Berger
You are.

Pete Mockaitis
If one side or the other is trying to gain some ground, how might we present things to have less distance?

Jonah Berger
Yeah, so I’m going to cheat here. I’m going to take an easy out at the beginning and then we’ll work our way back around abortion.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Jonah Berger
So, I would say a first place to start is to do what I call asking for less. And so, I think an easy way to think about this is a doctor that I was talking to. So, often, when we want people to change, we ask for too much. The information is too far away. In the abortion case, for example, we want someone to go from pro-choice to pro-life right away. We want people to switch sides, one to the other right away. We want big change to happen right away.

And the doctor was actually dealing with something similar. She had this truck driver she was working with that was morbidly obese, so he was like 100 pounds or more overweight, part of the reason why, he was drinking three liters of Mountain Dew a day.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, man.

Jonah Berger
He was drinking in that truck hub all day long. He’d buy Mountain Dew.

Pete Mockaitis
Got to stay awake.

Jonah Berger
Yeah, got to stay awake, got to have something to drink, so he was drinking three liters of Mountain Dew. And so, what’s our knee-jerk reaction in that situation?

Pete Mockaitis
“That’s disgusting. You have to stop that now.”

Jonah Berger
Yeah, “Don’t drink anymore Mountain Dew,” right? If we want someone to exercise, “You exercise every day.” We want someone to switch from one side of the field to the other, which is great for us but it’s probably not going to work for them. If you’re talking to a guy that’s drinking three liters of Mountain Dew a day, telling him to quit cold turkey is probably going to fail.

And so, she tried something else instead. Rather than asking him to quit cold turkey, she said, “Hey, you’re drinking three liters of Mountain Dew a day. You can keep drinking some Mountain Dew, but drink two instead of three, and take one of those empty bottles and fill it up with water.” He grumbled, he didn’t want to do it obviously, he wasn’t interested in moving at all, but he was willing to try. He lost a little weight. He came back next time. She said, “Okay, great. Now you’re at two, move to one.” Came back a few months later, had made it to one, then she said, “Great.” Eventually moved to zero.

And by using this sort of step-wise function, not asking for all at once, but asking for less and then asking for more, she was able to get him to change. And so, asking for less isn’t about saying, “Hey, I’m only going to ask for less,” it’s about starting with less and then asking for more. Moving people five yards down the field, and then moving them another five yards.

If you talk to product designers, they often call this something like stepping stones. If you’re introducing a new version of a product or a new version of a service, I, a few years ago, was working with Facebook to introduce a new hardware project, and they were dealing with exactly this. They’re saying, “Okay, we’re going to introduce something. It’s very different from what people are used to. How can we introduce this new thing? If it’s too different, they’re going to say no, they don’t want to do it.”

And so, what we ended up doing instead is rather than going for the full thing right away, asking people to move to a completely new thing, let’s pick something that’s just a little bit from where they are currently, introduce that version. Then, once people have gotten used to it, move to the next version, and move to the next one. And so, in some sense, it’s almost like called stepping stones because it’s like a river. When you ask someone to change, it’s like a big river, they don’t want to cross from one side to the other, “It’s to far. I’m going to get wet. I don’t want to do it.”

So, instead, you say, “Okay, well, just jump to this little stone, and then jump to this next stone, then jump to this next stone. And you jump a few times and you’re across to the other side.” And so, rather than asking for too much right away, start by asking for less, chunk that change and then ask for more.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s handy. And so then, in the challenging example I threw your way with abortion, it might be just a matter of a stepping stone might be not so much changing your view but just accepting that the other side is not evil and trying to commit these atrocities against women or tiny babies, but rather that they are mistaken or they have a different perspective, and that’s some distance that you’ve reduced. You’re still quite a distance away but it’s something.

Jonah Berger
Yeah. There’s a great Heineken ad that does something exactly like what you’re suggesting where they take the people that completely disagree and they have them have a conversation. So, they take, for example, a feminist and someone who hates feminism. They take someone who hates transgender people and someone who is a transgender, and so on, people that really disagree. And what they do is they have them essentially build a bar. They get together, they go through a variety of activities, they build a bar, and at the end, they showed them a video of the other person, and the other person saying all the things that they believe.

So, the feminist says, “Oh, women are important,” and the feminist hater says, “Oh, women’s job is at the home,” and they see what the other person is, and then they say, “Okay, now that you know who this person is, do you still want to be friends with them?” And I think what that does, it’s slightly different than asking for less. What it does is it switches the field. Rather than starting with something like abortion where two sides are dug in on opposite sides of the field and they’re unlikely to agree and move, it switches the field to a dimension where they’re more similar in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
We both like drinking beer.

Jonah Berger
We both like drinking beer, right? We both hang out. We both care about our families. We both care about America being a great country. Or in an organizational context, right? Sure, you might not want to do what I want but we both want the company to succeed. I think a good way to think about it, imagine you’re sitting in front of graph paper. You can draw that field on the X-axis, there’s one end zone, there’s another end zone, you can make the tick marks along the way. But at the 50-yard line, you draw a vertical line, there’s a Y-axis which is another dimension where you might actually have a lot in common, that even if you’re on different ends of the X-axis, you’re actually at the same point on the Y-axis, you’re exactly in the middle.

And so, by switching that field by starting with common ground, starting with something we have in common, a place where we don’t disagree, and using that to then eventually build around to that place where there’s more disagreement, we’re going to be more successful because now you humanized the person. You’re not just, “Oh, this faceless person who believes something I don’t believe. We have a little bit in common. We both care about our families. We realize we have emotional connections to the things we love. I’m going to see you more as a human. You’re going to see me more as a human. And then we’re more likely to be persuaded at the end of the day.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’m digging it. So, Jonah, let’s just keep it going. Uncertainty, lay it on.

Jonah Berger
So, we talked a little bit about switching costs before, but just to make that really concrete, if I’m asking an organization to change company culture, there’s some costs to doing that. There’s an incentive structure that was, and now there’s a new one. When I ask a customer to buy a new project, they have to spend money or time or energy to install that new thing or get that new thing. And those are costs that often prevent change from happening. The old thing seems cheap, the new thing seems costly.

But the other problem with new things is that they have more uncertainty associated with them. Think about a new phone, for example. Not only do you have to pay more money to get that new phone. But when do you have to pay the cost and when do you get the benefit? The costs are up front, pay the money for that phone. Now, I have to go to AT&T and Verizon and switch my thing, and do this, and do that, and get all my information switched over. So, the costs are now and the benefits are later. Yes, it might be faster and lighter and have a better camera but I’m not going to get those until later, and those benefits are also uncertain.

Sure, this new way of doing company culture might be better, sure, this new project you’re suggesting might make us more money, but I don’t know if it’s going to. And if I don’t know, why am I going to be willing to switch? And that’s what I call the cost-benefit timing gap. Costs are certain and they’re upfront. Benefits are uncertain and they’re later, and people don’t like uncertainty. Think about the last time you were wondering if you’re going to be late for a meeting, for example. So, your flight is late or you’re stuck in a car in traffic, and you’re worried about missing this meeting. You’re so anxious you don’t know what you’re going to do. You feel terrible. You hate this concern about missing the meeting.

What’s interesting is the worst thing that can happen is missing the meeting. And so, if you know that you’re going to miss that meeting, you should feel what? You should feel worse because that’s the worst thing that can happen. But often, notice what happens, we figure out we’re going to miss that meeting, and then what ends up happening?

Pete Mockaitis
You’re relieved.

Jonah Berger
You actually feel good. Relief. You feel better.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Okay, what am I going to do now? I’ll communicate something to somebody and make it up somehow.”

Jonah Berger
Yeah, now that I know, I’m going to solve it. And so, in some sense, it’s not just missing the meeting that’s bad, it’s that uncertainly. And so, in a product context, in a sales context, in organizational context, uncertainty often leads us to hit the pause button. We don’t know whether the new thing is going to be better or worse. And given we don’t know, it’s safest to do nothing, which is great for the status quo, which is great for what we’re doing already, but it’s terrible for new things. And so, to really then get people to overcome that uncertainty, that anxiety, we have to make it easier for them to experience the value of that new thing.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m with you. And I think this connects so much in terms of I’m thinking about how people try to sell me something, and it’s just like, “All I really need to know is that it’s really going to do the thing that you say it’s going to do. And so, maybe you can alleviate that with a demo or…” usually I want hard data that they can never give me in terms of, “Oh, you have a marketing service. Well, can you tell me the cost per acquired customer for a population of people who are selling something very similar to what I’m selling?” Like, “No, we can’t.”

So, anyways, maybe I’m jumping the gun. I think, “Hey, demos, data,” but you tell me, what are the best ways to address and reduce uncertainty?

Jonah Berger
Yeah, demos and data are close. And so, I think I love to start with an idea that many of us may have heard of before, and that is the notion of freemium. So, take a company like Dropbox, which many of your listeners are probably familiar with, a storage place for files and so on. When Dropbox came out, they had a great technology, but the challenge is people were scared of it. They didn’t know whether it would be better than what they’d done already. They were used to doing things a particular way. “Where is that cloud? Where are my files going to be? If I’ve worked hours on this Word document, I don’t want to lose it.” And so, they were unwilling to make the change.

And so, Dropbox could’ve done advertising, they could’ve bought Google search words, but what they did instead is they gave it away for free. And you might be sitting there going, “What do you mean? Give it away for free?” Any kid who’s ever run a lemonade stand, to the most seasoned business executive, knows that giving away something for free is not a way to build a business, yet Dropbox has built a billion-dollar business giving away things for free. How did they do that?

And so, what they did is they didn’t give away everything for free. They gave away a version for free and then created a premium version and encouraged people to upgrade to it. So, in Dropbox’s case, for example, they gave away 2GB, or something like that, of storage for free. They said, “Look, sure there’s switching costs, you have your files on your computer, it’s going to take time and effort to upload them, but let’s at least try to mitigate that monetary costs by making the upfront costs free.” So, you can put files on Dropbox until you get to 2GB. Once you get to 2GB though, you’re faced with a choice, “Do I upgrade to premium version or not? Do I want more space, more features or not?”

And what’s really nice about something like freemium is rather than Dropbox telling you how great it is, just like that marketing service that you were talking to, of course they’re going to say it’s great. No marketing service is going to say, “Oh, yeah, you know, well, we’re not so great.” So, you can’t really believe them. But in Dropbox’s case, you have to believe because you’re the one who’s been using it. You’re the one that’s uploaded all your files to it. And so, when they come around and they say, “Hey, can you throw us a couple bucks to get more space,” you say, “Well, I know it’s good. I’ve resolved that uncertainty myself. I’ve convinced myself.”

And so, there are dozens, if not hundreds of other businesses that have leveraged this notion of freemium, creating a free version of a product or service, and then encouraging people to upgrade to the premium. If you think about Pandora, there’s an ad-free version. If you think about Skype, there’s a premium version. Think about LinkedIn, there’s a premium version. And so, what all these things have done is they’ve lowered that upfront costs to allow people to experience whether something is good or not, and then if they like it, they encourage you to upgrade to the premium. So, you have to figure out the right way to leverage freemium, I think that’s at least one idea to lower that barrier of trial and reduce uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that does make a lot of sense to me. And anyway, I guess, you can give people a taste of things, like whether you make a good sketch, or a model, or a prototype, or a 3D world so they can put on the headset and see, “Oh, that’s what you mean,” so that uncertainty diminishes as it becomes more real and a part of something that they’ve experienced.

Jonah Berger
Yeah. I mean, think about test drives, for example. So, I often talk about freemium with clients of mine, and I’ll talk to somebody who’s an online software as a service company, they say, “Great. Freemium. I got it. Let’s do it.” But then I’ll talk to somebody that sells offline goods. So, maybe they’re a fleet management company, or maybe they’re a doctor, or maybe they’re a hospital and they say, “Freemium is great, but if I’m selling a physical thing, I can’t do freemium.” The idea of freemium though is a lot larger than freemium. The idea is, just as you said, “How can I make it easier for people to experience the offering?”

So, think about something like test drives for cars. There’s a not a free in a freemium. You get to test drive a car. It doesn’t make the price of the car any cheaper. The amount of money that’s going to cost to buy that Acura is still the same. All the test drive does, it allows you to figure out whether the value of it is actually worth paying the money. It allows you to experience some sense of what it’s like even though it’s not freemium.

And so, what that chapter talks all about is, “How can we lower the upfront costs by using things like test drives, or freemium, or other ways? How can we lower the backend costs, making things reversible?” Free returns, in the case of online buying. Lawyers often say, “Hey, we only get paid if you win,” so, again, reducing that uncertainty that it’s going to work, or even things like drive and discovery where you bring the trial to people so they experience it themselves even if they don’t think they’re interested, bringing it to them and allowing them to see how good it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool.

So, Jonah, if you could maybe give us an example that brings this all together, or maybe just even a few of the elements together in terms of there’s a professional, they’re looking to make a change, and they astutely utilized multiple levers in their appeal and made magic happen. Can you lay one on us?

Jonah Berger
There are many examples in the book that touch on individual aspects of this. I think, since we’re talking about uncertainty, I’ll just give one more about uncertainty specifically that I think is a fun one, and this is what I put under the sort of drive discovery bucket.

And that is sometimes people don’t know that they like what you’re offering. So, sometimes you’re trying to get them to do something but they don’t know you exist or they don’t think they like you, they’re going to be unwilling to change. So, if your boss, for example, has never heard of a certain thing, or you’re a challenger brand in the space, a client doesn’t know you exist, they’re going to be unlikely to change their mind, and so, I think this can be a great way to solve the problem.

There was this guy, his name was Jacek, he’s Polish, he works for Santander Bank, and, essentially, he wants to get his boss to buy into customer service or the customer experience. So, in the United States, we know all about surprise and delight. We have our best customers, we surprise them, we greet them by name. You check into our hotel; we give you your own pillow. You call customer service; we know it’s you. But it hasn’t been applied in banking as much and hadn’t made its way to Europe.

And so, Jacek would sit there going, “Look, this could be great in banking. Customers like us but they don’t love us. I’m sure we’re smiling at them when they walk in the door but we need to build that deeper connection. And so, he tells his boss, “Look, we got to do this,” and his boss says, “Ahh, no, thanks.” He says, “Look, boss, all these people are doing it.” And the boss says, “No, look, we’re banking. We’re not hotels, we’re not online retailers. People in banking care only about the rates.” So, Jacek brings a consultant, they make presentations after presentations, his boss still isn’t convinced.

So, he’s sitting there, going, “Okay, I can’t push my boss. If I tell my boss what to do, he’s not going to listen.” And so, he’s like, “Well, how can I help my boss experience the value of what I’m offering? How can I put him in the situation and the management team in the situation of what I’m trying to get them to do?” And so, he ends up doing slightly different. Rather than having another meeting where he talks about the value of customer experience, he instead collects a bunch of information from his boss and the management team. So, he finds out their birthday, their anniversary, how many days they’ve been with the company, when they’re going on trips, and so on.

And then what he does over the next couple months is he celebrates these things. So, if someone’s anniversary, he sends them a nice note. If it’s their two years of working with the company, they get a wonderful card signed by everyone saying how great it is that they’ve been with the organization. Someone goes hiking, somebody knits them a hat. Someone’s child gets in a car accident, they raise them money. And so, all these things are basically putting the management team in the shoes of what it’s like to be part of a customer experience initiative.

Then the next time they have a meeting, Jacek is sort of tentative to bring it up, but he says, “Hey, what do you guys think?” And nobody says, “Hey, I don’t think it’ll work,” because they’ve all experienced it. They all know what it’s like to be cared about as a customer because they’ve been sitting through it. And that’s an example of what I put under uncertainty of drive and discovery. Rather than forcing people to come to you and take that test drive, how can you bring the test drive to them? How can you put them in a situation of what you want them to do so they experience the value themselves and they can’t help but say yes because they’ve seen it for themselves and they’re the best ones to judge whether they’re going to like something or not?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that a lot. Thank you. So, I assume that they accepted his proposal after all of that.

Jonah Berger
Oh, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Jonah Berger
You know, it’s funny they not only accepted his proposal, they’ve promoted him to be director of customer experience for a large number of banks, and it has lived on not only in that location but a number of others. He’s really helped bring that approach to a whole industry that hadn’t seen it before.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s awesome. Well, Jonah, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Jonah Berger
I think that’s it. We covered many of the barriers in the book. I think, to me, the main takeaway in the book is really start to notice those roadblocks, those obstacles, figure out how to mitigate them, and then those five are at least a place to start for some of them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jonah Berger
“Do what you love and love what you do.” And I found it quite motivating to remember both that you want to love what you’re doing, but also sometimes it takes a little bit of work, and you’ve got to be willing to put that work in to love whatever it is that you’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Jonah Berger
I’ll tell you an example of a recent favorite. They looked at the visual similarity between paintings to figure out how novel and how influential certain paintings are, and to figure out how correlated those are with the value of painting.

So, they do things like looking at what someone paints, what style they paint, and how similar or different it is from prior folks, to look at what drives value. And so, a lot of the research I’m doing at the moment is really natural language, or image processing, pulling behavioral insight from textual image-based data. And I thought this study was just amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
Huh. And so, they found something, I imagine, or otherwise it wouldn’t be…

Jonah Berger
They did, yeah. They’re looking at sort of how novelty or similarity is related to value. We actually did something similar in songs. We looked at how similar songs are to their genres, to how similar a given song is to other songs. In that genre, we found that songs that are more atypical that sing about things that are more differentiated from their genre are more successful. So, country songs, not surprisingly, sing a lot about girls and cars, but country songs that sing about different themes than usual end up being higher on the Billboard Charts.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Jonah Berger
Oh, it would be a copout to say The Catalyst which is my new one, so I’ll say a different favorite book, which is a book called A Matter of Taste. It’s all about baby names and how we can use baby names to understand culture. It’s an amazing, not only a fun read, but just an interesting lens on the world itself.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Jonah Berger
I would just say research. It’s a broad Swiss Army knife of a tool. But I would say no particular technology, just research in general, being curious about the world and trying to quantify it.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit, something you do that helps you to be awesome at your job?

Jonah Berger
God, I think, scheduling is so important. You talked to this a little bit earlier about sort of outsourcing things. To me, it’s really about finding time for the big stuff, making sure that you know when something is a pebble and a boulder, not only doing the pebbles first because they’re easy, but making sure you make time for the big things, otherwise they’ll never get done.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they repeat it back to you often?

Jonah Berger
I can’t say that that’s true. I would hope that something from one of the books, whether it’s word of mouth, only 7% of it is online, or hopefully some day soon, one thing from the book The Catalyst.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Jonah Berger
So, a great place to find me online is my website, just JonahBerger.com. I’m also on LinkedIn and on Twitter @j1berger.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jonah Berger
Yeah, I think if I’ve learned anything from this new book, it’s that we are almost oblivious to these barriers. We’re blind to these obstacles. And so, I think my challenge would be to figure out why something hasn’t changed. Whatever it is you want to change, whether it’s a person, whether it’s an organization, whatever it might be, start looking for those obstacles. Don’t be blind to the barriers. Start to see them. And if not, ask about them, and use that to drive change. If you don’t understand why change is happening or not, if you can’t find the root, it’s going to be really hard to change minds in action.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Jonah, this has been lots of fun. I wish you a bunch of luck with The Catalyst and all your adventures.

Jonah Berger
Thanks so much.