The persuasive power of the unknown

I eagerly opened the envelope the postman brought home the other day. Out came a leaflet. It was the photocopy of what appeared to be an advertisement in a newspaper. The sender didn't identify himself or herself. The text, which was in Malayalam, fascinated me. Let me give you a rough translation.

There was a miracle at Vailankanni. [This, as you may know, is a coastal town in Tamil Nadu. St Mary's shrine there attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from different religions and regions every year.] One Sunday Mother Mary appeared in the form of a child to a devotee and said, “I will come back to earth shortly to do penance for [others’] sins. Inform everyone. Anyone who distributes 1000 copies of this announcement will have his wish fulfilled in fifteen days. Those who don't act on it immediately will suffer a great deal within twenty-two days.” Then she disappeared.

One Mumbai resident who heard about this got 1000 copies of this announcement printed and distributed. As a result, he got Rs 6.8 million. A rikshaw driver distributed 850 copies, and he got a small pot of gold. An unemployed youth distributed 500 copies of this leaflet and found a job in a few days. Another man tore up the leaflet he received saying it was humbug. Within three days his son died. […]

Therefore, please publicise this information by distributing leaflets so that everyone can get Mother Mary's blessings.

From a believer

I tossed it into the waste bin. Then I picked it up. I felt it deserved to be examined carefully for lessons in persuasion.

 Whoever sent it to me was persuaded to do so either because of fear of harm or of hope of good fortune or perhaps a combination of both. Or is someone playing it safe? Whatever it is, what is the basis of such a strong blend of emotions? Why would anyone believe stories like these? There are no names, no dates, no addresses if you want to check what happened (if anything happened at all). How can anyone accept a causal link between someone’s decision not to circulate an anonymous leaflet and a death in the family? Why, then, do people lose their common sense and circulate such ridiculous stuff? The persuasive power of the unknown is so strong that even a mention is enough for many of us to comply with its apparent wishes. If you are scared of snakes, even a paper snake can make you run.

Unlike forwarding an email to everyone in one's address book, making photocopies of an announcement, putting it in hundreds of envelopes, writing genuine addresses on these envelopes, sticking stamps and posting them cost a believer time and money. Why would he/she do it? How about the first person who started this chain? Was he/she a believer? A prankster? What did he/she get out of it?

For me, this is another instance of emotions firmly establishing their supremacy over reason. 

Photo credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velankanni_Town

God’s own Ponzi

If gods can cure your diseases, give you babies, and help you pass exams, why can’t they help you make money? This is the question Ashok Jadeja, a homeopathic doctor and a member of the Sansi community in Gujarat asked.

Once he got a clear answer, he decided to try it out. And what an incredible success it was! As a humble channel of this awesome supernatural power, he is reputed to have made about ten billion (yes, billion) rupees in a matter of six months when he was arrested in June 2009.

He dressed himself as a godman and sat outside Sansi community’s Vahanvati Shikotar Matadi Temple in Ahmedabad.  After a few days he let the devotees know that he had been blessed by Matadi who instructed him to work for the benefit of the members of the community through tripling their money. If they deposited money with him, Matadi would triple it by evening.

No one believed him. But then some women decided to try it out. They offered small amounts such as Rs 100 in the morning. When they returned in the evening, they couldn’t believe their eyes. The godman pulled out from Matadi’s box three times the amount they had offered in the morning.

Soon the news of Matadi’s running miracle spread throughout the community.  Now not just a few women devotees but men of all descriptions including lawyers and doctors approached him with cash offerings. Jadeja, who had by now been rechristened Ashok Maadi, gradually raised Matadi’s ‘processing’ time from eight hours to twenty-four hours, two days, three weeks, and finally a month. He and his associates encouraged the devotees to re-offer the money and triple it again while the going was good instead of taking back and spending it. This made sense. As a result, very little money that was offered once went back to the ‘devotees.’ Jadeja invested most of the money in gold and real estate in Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra.

Meanwhile, CDs on the wonderful boon given by Matadi to her chosen servant were developed and circulated widely. Within weeks news spread to neighbouring states. Apparently Matadi decided to help not only members of the Sansi community but also any devotees who approached her through her humble servant, Ashok Matadi.  Members of his family and a few members of the community helped him accept money by manning the crowded cash counters.

What we find here is a lethal combination of god and mammon.  Both attract deep-seated devotion that shuts out reasoning almost completely.

We have plenty to learn from Jadeja’s way of working. He started out with small confidence building measures to get people to believe his impossible promises. He involved nearly all members of his extended family and many members of his community in his scheme and shared his booty generously with them. Thus they all spoke in one voice about the magical power of Matadi so that the illusion could be maintained. Jadeja also exploited the persuasive power of example. When you find that your neighbour has got something wonderful, you don’t want to miss out. You brush aside any questions your mind might raise.

If this is the way people are persuaded to do even silly things, why is it that in the corporate world we attach so much importance to logic and reasoning?

Photo credits: www.columbia.edu (Vahanvati Shikotar Mata) & www.indianexpress.com (Ashok Jadeja)

The born-again Maharajah

The Maharajah of Air India Ltd has been AIL-ing for years. Quite like many of the erstwhile princes who had been stripped of their privy purses in 1971, Air India’s Maharaja has been shrinking into a shadow of his former glorious self. Many pundits have been predicting his death for years. The latest predictions came recently when the national carrier couldn’t even pay salaries to its employees on time. Air India has been a perfect example of a white elephant maintained with taxpayers’ money to give joy rides to politicians and bureaucrats and their acolytes.

Let me make a prediction in an entirely different direction.  This terminally ill loser is going to be born again.

I am no civil aviation expert. On what basis, then, can I make this prediction?

Well, an interesting news report in the Times of India of August 27. Entitled, ‘Air India’s new boss turns down Rs 70 lakh club membership,’ the report by Saurabh Sinha says that Rohit Nandan, the new chairman and managing director of Air India has decided not to renew his and his top aide’s membership (about USD 75,000 each annually) of the “ultra-prestigious” Willingdon Club of Mumbai. Air India’s top guns have nearly always been members of this club. 

Nandan is doing other crazy things too. On his first visit to Mumbai as the chairman and managing director of Air India, he chose to stay in a company-owned guesthouse rather than at a five-star hotel. The report also says that he has asked his office not to block a business class seat for him when he travels on business. He would travel in the economy class and move into the business class only if unsold seats were available.

Nandan is giving up some of the perks of office which his predecessors enjoyed as a matter of routine. No one would criticise him for enjoying the perks he is entitled to. But by voluntarily giving up some of these goodies because of the financial mess the company is in, he is clearly sending out a new and authentic message of change to several stakeholders. When he tries to persuade thousands of employees of this emaciated company to make sacrifices and to work differently, he will have Hazare-like credibility leading to tremendous persuasive power. If he can match his credibility with brilliant ideas, the Maharajah is bound to rule the skies again.

Giving up privileges in difficult times is not something that occurs to many leaders. It was, for example, widely reported in newspapers that on November 19, 2008 the CEOs of Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors (Robert L Nardelli, Alan R Mulally, and Rick Wagoner) flew into Washington, each in his own luxury corporate jet. Their mission was to beg the House Committee on Financial Services for an additional $25 billion to save their companies from bankruptcy. The members of the committee were furious although there was nothing irregular about CEOs of such global companies using corporate jets rather than commercial airlines. The three auto companies did get money from the House Committee not because those CEOs were persuasive but because their bankruptcy would have had serious consequences for American automobile industry.

Coming back to Air India, if there ever was a chance in recent years for the Maharajah to be born again, to get back the royal robes, the time is now. Rohit Nandan is shaping himself into a super persuader. If he can’t manage the transformation, let’s build a mausoleum for the best loved Maharajah. 

A Glove Story

In The Heart of Change, John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen reproduce a story (‘Gloves on the Boardroom Table’) told by Jon Stegner, most probably the CEO of his company. He was concerned about the wasteful purchase practices he had observed in his company with several plants in multiple locations in the US. He was convinced that reforming the purchase procedures would save something like $1 billion in five years. He was also certain that this would not happen unless a large number of people, especially those at the top of the organization, changed their mind set.

But he didn’t give up. Instead of making PowerPoint presentations about the wasteful purchase practices in the company, he quietly asked one of his summer interns to study how many different kinds of gloves the company was buying and how much it was paying for each. This was one item that all the company’s factories were using in large numbers.

The student did a thorough job. She found that all the factories put together were buying 424 different kinds of gloves. She collected a sample each and put on it a tag that displayed the price the factory was paying to its supplier for it. When the project was over, it was discovered that one factory would pay as little as $5 for a pair of gloves and another factory as much as $17 for the same kind of gloves.

One day, Stegner had the 424 pairs of gloves sorted by which factory they came from, and displayed along with the price tags in the company’s boardroom. Then he invited all the division presidents to visit the boardroom. They couldn’t believe their eyes. They walked around the large table shaking their heads. They looked again and again at the gloves from their own factory. They could see for themselves the wide variation in the prices they were paying for the same gloves.

Stegner adds that it’s one rare event when no one had anything to say. They just bought the idea that the purchase procedures in the company had to be revamped.

Stegner followed this up with the travelling roadshow featuring the display of these gloves. It was sent to every division and every plant. With this he persuaded a large number of managers in his company to rethink radically the way they were buying not just gloves but other things too.

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Words are no doubt powerful in the game of persuasion. Clever use of words can frame proposals in a way that overcomes the target’s resistance. But words can rarely match the power of action, of demonstration, to wow the target. We need to ask ourselves if don’t often take the easy route of talk rather than action and demonstration when we are faced with challenging persuasion tasks. If we try smart, we may be able to come up with something dramatic even in apparently hopeless situations.

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.