Seeing is Believing

The persuasion experience narrated below comes from Manojkumar Jha, a senior manager with a large cement company. Thank you, Manoj, for sharing this experience with us.

My Chief Executive (let’s call him Gupta), managing five cement plants in North India, wanted one of the plant heads (let’s call him Singh) to improve the work culture in the plant and raise productivity. We knew that there were several suggestions that had been made by various people – employees, auditors, consultants, etc – to various departments. But these were neither collated nor communicated to all the employees in a systematic way and so the implementation was slow and patchy.  Gupta wanted Singh and his people to launch a companywide exercise and implement the suggestions soon in a sustainable manner. But he did not want a lot of money and resources to be spent on the exercise. 

When prodded by Gupta, Singh said that his people were up to their neck in work and so it would be difficult to get anyone to coordinate such an exercise.  But he agreed to get back after checking with his colleagues.  He never did.  Gupta sensed that Singh was not convinced about the value of the idea but had pretended agreement. Perhaps he didn’t want to say no upfront. Perhaps he thought that when there was no action, Gupta would quietly drop the idea.

Then one day Gupta invited him to Delhi. When he arrived, Gupta said, “I’m going to a plant at ... Why don’t you join me?” Singh went along.

The plant they visited was run by one of the recently acquired group companies. Gupta had made enquiries and found that this particular plant had transformed its work culture and improved its productivity substantially because of an initiative like the one he was proposing. They had taken the help of an external consulting company for coordinating the change initiative.

Both Gupta and Singh were given full access to the plant, the records, and the people working there. After receiving a general introduction about the process from the plant head, Singh started interacting with the workers. He wanted to find out first-hand whether they understood and were enthusiastic about the changes being brought about. He was impressed by the answers they gave. That settled it.

As soon as he returned to his plant, Singh talked to his colleagues and confirmed to Gupta that his plant would go through the change process. The plant would raise money for hiring a consulting company to coordinate the process. As a result of this initiative, Singh’s plant became the best of the five plants in productivity.

We say a picture is worth a thousand words.  We can extend it and say that an example is worth a thousand pictures. When we try to persuade someone to attempt something new, he may have many apprehensions. One of them is cognitive dissonance. An example reassures him that some of his apprehensions are out of place. The power of examples is such that even if the example is a made-up story rather than a true story, it works. Some of the framing that persuaders do through metaphors belongs to this category.

What we see in Tunisia, Egypt and the Middle East is persuasion through the power of examples. One moment it appears that overthrowing a ruthless dictator well entrenched for years is impossible. Then one dictator is toppled. The powerless millions in other countries feel persuaded that they can topple their dictators too.

I am sure you have some instances of examples helping you persuade someone or helping you get persuaded. Why not share one with us? I look forward to hearing from you.