9. Audiences: Attention, Retention, and How Hearts and Minds Work

About a dozen times in the past year I’ve stood in front of groups of executives or students and conducted a demonstration. One group was about 500 U.S. employees of a European bank. Another was about 20 people in the TV studio of a large U.S. insurance company, with another 200 watching remotely. Several groups were graduate students, some in NYU’s executive MBA program and some in NYU’s MS in PR/Corporate Communication program. And about half the groups were executives in different parts of a global pharmaceutical company, including one with several neuroscientists in attendance.

The demonstration comes about halfway through a three-hour workshop on persuasion and leadership communication skills, usually just after a break. I grasp a lemon between my thumb and middle finger, and hold it out to the audience. “What’s this?” “It’s a lemon.” “Right. A lemon. Now, please pay attention.” Then, with some flourish, I slice the lemon in half and hold the flesh side toward the audience. I then tuck the end of a towel into my collar, stab the lemon a few times with a fork, and hold the end of the towel away from me, to protect my suit. Then I aggressively and noisily shove the half lemon into my mouth, and chew the flesh vigorously while the juice runs down my cheeks and chin, through my beard, and onto the towel. The audience invariably shrieks, grunts, groans, or otherwise makes a fuss. Many look horrified. I then wipe my face, take a sip of water, grimace, and then smile. There’s complete silence in the room. And a sense of shock.

After a dramatic pause, I ask the audience, “What was happening to you as I was chewing the lemon?” I always get the same range of answers:

• “My mouth puckered.”

• “I tasted the lemon.”

• “I couldn’t stop my mouth from watering.”

• “I felt the juice run down my throat.”

• “I thought you were crazy. But I tasted the lemon.”

I then challenge those responses. “What are you talking about? How on earth could you have tasted my lemon? How could you have felt the juice go down your throat, when you know full well it was going down my throat?” Invariably, they smile, grasping the puzzle.

I then put them out of their misery. “Here’s how. I connected with you. You felt my lemon; you experienced the effect of my chewing on the lemon as if you were chewing on it. Even though you know that you weren’t. Why?”

The answer is mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are structures in the brain that allow people to experience someone else’s plight as if it’s their own. In watching me eat the lemon, my clients and students experienced empathy—from two Greek words, literally meaning to feel with someone.

Leaders need to understand mirror neurons and the many ways the human brain makes connection with others possible. If leaders need to meet people where they are, they need to understand how to meet them. But human connection is not merely a function of proximity. It’s a function also of biology.

I Second That Emotion

Humans are wired to connect with each other. To feel with others.

In The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, Jeremy Rifkin recounts the discovery of mirror neurons.¹ Mr. Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington and a senior lecturer in the executive education program at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania.

He tells how in 1992 in Parma, Italy, a team of neurophysiologists discovered an anomaly. They had implanted sensors into the brain of a macaque monkey to determine how its brain operated when the monkey did things, such as grab a peanut. But at one point a human entered the lab and reached for a peanut, and the scientists saw the same brain activity in the monkey as when the monkey reached for the peanut itself. They concluded that something must be wrong with their machine. But the more they looked into it, the more they realized that the machine was fine. Rather, the monkey’s brain reacted the same way regardless of whether the monkey grabbed the peanut or watched a human grab the peanut.²

The team, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, then tried this with humans, scanning humans’ brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging. They found the same phenomenon. They had discovered mirror neurons. Says Rifkin:

Mirror neurons allow humans—and other animals—to grasp the minds of others “as if” their thoughts and behavior were their own. The popular science press has begun to refer to mirror neurons as “empathy neurons.” What is most striking, says Rizzolatti, is that the “[m]irror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through directed stimulation. By feeling, not by thinking.”³

I Feel Your Pain

We connect with others by feeling, not by thinking. This simple discovery has profound implications. In the 20 years since mirror neurons were discovered, there has been a revolution in biology, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, neurophysiology, and other fields to figure out how humans actually work. There’s still a great deal to learn, and there has been some scientific push-back on the very idea of mirror neurons. But a consensus is emerging that historically we’ve given the human brain more credit for rationality than perhaps we should. All the new findings point to the primacy of emotion, even in our very developed societies.

This isn’t easy to swallow. From the time of Aristotle to the present, Western civilization has assumed that persuasion involves rational processes: logic, facts, argument. Granted, Aristotle also spoke about the need for Pathos and Ethos to accompany Logos. But for much of Western history, Pathos and Ethos have been shunted aside for the primacy of Logos. The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes famously named the essence of being human: “I think, therefore I am.” Especially since the Enlightenment, reason and logic have been seen to be the cornerstones of civilization and progress. They are certainly seen as what matters in business, and what is taught in business and professional schools. But however important reason may be, emotion is now increasingly recognized as the key to moving hearts and minds. And hearts and minds (metaphor!) exist in the brain.

All too often leaders assume that facts matter; that logic should prevail; that if only we let the facts speak for themselves, people will understand and agree with us. We also know from observation that this doesn’t necessarily work, but that leaders persist in pushing facts at people rather than connecting with them. They even continue to push facts after they realize that it isn’t working. Paradoxically, leaders sometimes double down when they aren’t connecting. They become even more determined to push data and facts rather than stopping and then trying a new approach. (Think of Netflix’s persistent attempts to justify its business decision in terms of the company’s operations, without any expression even of understanding that customers would be inconvenienced.) If leaders are to be effective, they need at least to appreciate, or better yet to understand, the role of emotion.

In the preceding chapter we noted what the Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff called the Myth of Objectivism: that facts and data are persuasive. That’s a conclusion based not merely on observation. There’s a biological basis for Lakoff’s insight.

George Washington University neurology professor Richard Restak argues, “We are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines who think.”⁴

It isn’t that reason and facts are unimportant. It isn’t that we don’t think. But rather that humans are unlikely to attend to the facts a speaker is presenting if there isn’t the right emotional connection. We are feeling machines who also think. We’ve known for years that if an audience is angry and the speaker merely speaks facts without expressing any emotion, the audience tends to get angrier. We saw that in the Home Depot annual meeting, when investors expressed their frustration and anger but CEO Robert Nardelli simply responded with, “The board recommends that you reject this proposal.” That turned investors’ frustration and anger into a passionate determination to oust the CEO. But we also know that if people are angry and the speaker acknowledges the anger and shares some emotional connection with the audience, the anger can dissipate.

The rule I’ve always used in coaching clients in a crisis is that you can’t meet emotion with logic. You have to meet it with emotion; once that emotional connection is made you can then move the audience to a conclusion with logic. Again, we are feeling machines, who think. But we need to feel first, and then to think.

If a stakeholder feels aggrieved, it’s important to acknowledge that emotional starting point by expressing regret, sorrow, contrition, or at least empathy. If a leader doesn’t start with some emotional connection, the rest seems hollow.

I’m often asked by clients why, in the aftermath of a tragic accident or incident, they need to say something like, “Our hearts go out to the family of those killed in the fire.” They ask, “Doesn’t that sound canned and insincere? Isn’t it better just to get to the point and tell people what we’re doing about it?” My response is, first, that it would be better if such a statement were not canned or insincere. But second, regardless of the sincerity, people in mourning need to hear an expression of sympathy before they will listen to anything else. And people who may not necessarily be in mourning but who empathize with those who are also need to hear an expression of sympathy. It may well be canned, but it is still necessary. Leaders who default to Logos in moments of emotional upheaval will likely fail to move stakeholders. But if they lead with Pathos, they are more likely to have the chance for Logos to prevail.

We Happy Few

In The Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin draws another conclusion from the emerging understanding of mirror neurons: Humans crave connection. He says:

We’ve long known that human beings and other mammalian specials are “social animals.” The discovery of mirror neurons, however, opens the door to exploring the biological mechanisms that make sociability possible.⁵

Rifkin challenges the historical Western assumption that human beings are by nature aggressive, materialistic, and self-interested. He argues from both a historical and a biological perspective that we’re actually wired for sociability, for attachment, for companionship, and for affection. He says that our first drive is to actually belong. That sense of belonging is deeply wired in our brains.

Evolutionary biology suggests that humans developed a strong us/them, friend/foe instinct that was useful in dealing with immediate, life-threatening situations. A sense of belonging, whether to a family, clan, community, nation, team, or workforce, is a powerful driver of behavior, and can often trump self-interest. Think of a parent’s selfless sacrifice for a child; a soldier’s throwing himself on a grenade to protect his comrades; a worker’s staying late to finish a project so as not to disappoint colleagues; or a fan, whose face is painted in a football team’s colors, sitting in a freezing stadium to show solidarity with his team.

Identifying as part of a group is a powerful emotional connection. So powerful that George Lakoff, in Don’t Think of an Elephant! says that in politics voters don’t necessarily behave in ways that maximize their self-interest. Rather, people tend to vote in ways that confirm their self-identity:

People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with. They may identify with their self-interest. That can happen. It is not that people never care about their self-interest. But they vote their identity. And if their identity fits their self-interest, they will vote for it. It is important to understand this point. It is a serious mistake to assume that people are simply always voting in their self-interest.⁶

Think of the emotional resonance in American politics in the following identities: Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Progressive, Soccer Mom, Tea Party, the 99 Percent, Union Member, National Rifle Association Member. Identifying with one of these groups is a stronger predictor of how someone will vote than many other kinds of demographics.

The same applies beyond politics. Stakeholders don’t necessarily make judgments and choices based on their own interests. Rather, they make judgments and choices based on who they want to be, how they want to be seen, and what they want to be a part of. This applies to teams in the workplace, to customers of luxury goods, and even to cliques in high school. The sense of belonging drives behavior.

When Apple launched its iPhone in the summer of 2007, thousands of people waited in lines on city streets through the night to get a chance to be the first to own the phone. They didn’t need a new phone, and they certainly didn’t need to spend the night outdoors waiting for one. But it became an identity play: “I’m so cool that I waited outside all night to get the iPhone.” Millions of people crowd Times Square on New Year’s Eve, sometimes in subzero temperature, for a chance to be in the crowd when the ball drops. They could get a better view, certainly in more comfort, watching it at home. But they want to be part of the experience.

Leaders who appeal to self-interest alone will often fail to move their audiences. But leaders who appeal to identity—to being part of a team, a cause, an event, a mission—can move people to put aside their self-interest.

Perhaps the best example is found in Shakespeare’s Henry V. That play recounts the true story of the decisive moment in a war that put England on the map as a power to be reckoned with, the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. The English troops, far from home and beyond their supply lines, are being pursued by the French. The English are outnumbered, exhausted, sick, and in a desperate situation. The battle will commence shortly and the English prospects are very poor. King Henry V rallies the troops by appealing to their honor and their connection to each other—a band of brothers:

That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart...
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day...
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile.⁷

The speech is all Ethos and Pathos. Ethos in appealing to identity, a sense of belonging, of shared destiny: He today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother. And Pathos in predicting a sense of pride and honor: He will stand on tiptoe and remember with advantages the feats he did that day. Henry rallied his troops and secured a stunning upset victory. And the metaphor of a band of brothers has stayed with us, even becoming the title of an HBO miniseries about American troops in World War II.

While most leaders won’t necessarily have the same rhetorical flourishes as the Bard, they can intentionally focus on the emotional connection of identity: We’re in this together.

Baby, I Was Born This Way

The default to emotion is part of the human condition.

To better appreciate the role of emotion and what it allows an audience to do, we need to take a brief detour into evolutionary biology. The human brain can be understood as three separate brains working in tandem, if not completely integrated with each other. Because humans are still evolving, the three brains don’t work as well together as they might.

The oldest part of our brain, which we share with many other life-forms, emerged about 300 million years ago. Often called the “primitive brain” or “reptilian brain,” this structure sits at the base of our modern brain, and it controls the core autonomic functions of the body: breathing, digestion, excretion, and so on. It’s the basic operating system of an animal, keeping us alive simply by keeping things working in the body.

About 200 million years ago mammals developed a second structure, called the limbic brain. This is where emotions originate, where memories are stored, and where unconscious moral judgments are made.

Only about 65 million years ago did primates and other mammals such as dolphins develop what we now think of as the distinctly thinking brain: the prefrontal cortex where reasoning takes place. Humans have the largest prefrontal cortex relative to the rest of the brain of any species. It takes up about two-thirds of the human brain’s mass. It is this part of the brain that we think of as distinctly human: It is this part that governs language and abstract thinking, where understanding arises. It is where logic and facts are processed, where planning takes place, where decisions are considered and made.

In humans there’s a pretty constant interplay between the prefrontal cortex and the older structures of the brain. Historically, we’ve seen this as a tug of war between reason and emotion. Plato said that we can understand the human struggle between reason and emotion by thinking of a chariot pulled by two horses: one well trained and obedient, and the other wild and untamed. The charioteer has to constantly balance the two horses, who are working at cross purposes to each other. Neuroscience now shows us that Plato was onto something. It explains how that tug of war works.

The primitive brain and the limbic brain collectively make up the limbic system, which governs emotion. The limbic system is where emotions arise, where we associate things as either pleasurable or repugnant, where fear, anger, joy, anxiety, and other emotions are triggered. The limbic system also controls the endocrine system, where hormones and other chemicals are released into the bloodstream. The limbic system is where our fight-or-flight impulses arise, where any perceived threat immediately triggers the release of chemicals into our bloodstream that creates a heightened sense of arousal and facilitates our ability to respond quickly. Evolutionarily, that response often took the form of confronting the threat or fleeing from it. Even though most threats these days are abstract rather than physical, we’re still engineered to have powerful physical responses to any threatening stimulus. Also to any pleasurable stimulus.

Within the limbic system there is a structure called the amygdala, which leaders need to understand. The amygdala is the center for triggering emotions such as fear, anger, sexual arousal, and joy. When faced with a stimulus, the amygdala turns our emotions on. It does so instantaneously, without our having to think about it. We find ourselves responding to a threat even before we’re consciously aware of it. Think of jumping back when we see a sudden movement in front of us, or being startled by the sound of a loud bang. We also respond instantaneously to positive stimulus without thinking about it: Note how we tend to smile back when someone smiles at us; how we are immediately distracted when something we consider beautiful enters our line of sight.

The amygdala is the key to understanding an audience’s emotional response, and to connecting with an audience.

In the interplay between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, the rational part often tries to control, contain, or even turn off the emotional part. But it’s not a fair fight. New York University neuroscience professor Joseph Ledoux told the PBS documentary program This Emotional Life how the wiring of the brain affects our ability to manage our emotions:

The prefrontal cortex has no connectivity with the amygdala. The amygdala has superhighways to talk to the cortex, but the prefrontal cortex has only back roads and side streets to get to the amygdala.⁸

In other words, emotions can easily overcome reason. The connection from the emotion-triggering part of the brain to the rational part is direct and powerful. When the amygdala talks, the prefrontal cortex listens and follows instructions. The amygdala can shut down reasoning, at least for a while. Because the amygdala acts instantaneously and pumps stress hormones into our bloodstream, it can take a while for the chemicals in our blood to dissipate and for reasoning to catch up. We may see something that looks menacing—a snake!—and jump back. It may take a few moments for our prefrontal cortex to catch up to the amygdala and conclude that there was no snake, just a stick that looked like a snake. But all the while we’ll feel the change in our bodies: If we had been sleepy, we’re now wide awake; if we had been hungry, we no longer feel the hunger. The amygdala makes us focus on the immediate threat and ignore everything else. And after the threat dissipates, it takes a while for the chemicals that heightened our state of arousal to clear our bodies. It takes time for us literally to calm down.

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, explains how the amygdala works:

The amygdala is the brain’s sentinel. It has a privileged position in perception. Everything we see in every moment goes mostly to the sensory cortex but a small part of it goes to the amygdala...which scans it to see “is this a threat?” That’s a constant question in evolution: “Is this a threat?” Or more generally, the amygdala has presumably been the structure that answers the one critical question for survival, “Do I eat it or does it eat me?”... The amygdala is a hair trigger. In other words it would rather be safe than sorry. It gets a very fuzzy picture of what’s going on. But if it thinks it has a match it has the ability to trigger...a rush of stress hormones. It changes the entire way the brain prioritizes information.⁹

But it’s much harder for reason to control emotion. There are no direct connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. Rather, signals from the rational part of the brain can reach the emotional part only indirectly and inefficiently. The prefrontal cortex may talk, but the amygdala may not hear what it is saying. It is possible to train the brain to control emotion—we see this with firefighters, fighter pilots, the military, and others who need to overcome fear. The brain soft-wires connections among neurons through repetition, making it easier for particular threats to be managed. But it’s still much easier for emotions to overcome reason than the other way around. And the more upset people are, the more primitive they become: the more the amygdala takes over and makes reasoning almost impossible.

Leaders need to appreciate the role of the amygdala, both to avoid succumbing to the amygdala’s attempt to shut down thinking in critical moments, and to appreciate what audiences are even capable of.

Keep Calm and Carry On

Tony Hayward was tired, frustrated, and feeling besieged. And he said something counterproductive: “I’d like my life back.” President Obama felt empathy for a friend who had been mistreated by the police. So he said something that derailed his attempt to control the healthcare debate: “The Cambridge police acted stupidly.” And the HP board, according to a board member, was so tired, beleaguered, and weary of infighting that it hired a CEO without even meeting him or the two other candidates that the four-person nominating committee had brought forward.

An observer could rightly ask, in each of those situations, what were they thinking? The short answer is, they weren’t. They were momentarily unable to think clearly because the amygdala had seized control.

Neuroscientists speak of an amygdala hijacking, in which the body’s survival mechanisms take over and shut down thinking. Emotional Intelligence author Daniel Goleman explains:

[When the amygdala perceives that] something is urgent, it creates what is called an amygdala hijack, the signs of which are three: you have a very strong emotional response, it’s very sudden and intense, and you do something or say something, or send an email, that when the dust settles you really regret. That is the sign of an amygdala hijack and it happens to really intelligent people because we get really dumb when the amygdala takes us over. Because we are being run by our fears and our anger, by emotional repertoires that were learned unconsciously in childhood. We become very childlike.¹⁰

Just as firefighters and fighter pilots can condition themselves to be less vulnerable to an amygdala hijacking—to keep calm and carry on even in the face of serious threats—leaders need to recognize in themselves the signs that their amygdala may be taking control, and to resist the temptation to let the amygdala govern. In the Casablanca anecdote that opened Chapter 8, “Content: Word Choice, Framing, and Meaning,” we saw just this self-awareness when Rick warned Ilsa not to mention Paris: He knew that just hearing her speak the word would cause his amygdala to take over.

The Amygdala and Audience Engagement

The amygdala is also key to other elements of audience engagement. For example, it plays an important role in salience, what grabs and keeps our attention. In other words, attention is an emotion-driven phenomenon. If we want to get and hold an audience’s attention, we need to trigger the amygdala to our advantage. Only when we have an audience’s attention can we then move them to rational argument.

I have become somewhat notorious in the programs I teach in at NYU for the way I start each class. I teach all-day sessions on Saturdays, and as the 9 AM start time approaches, most students are still milling about, getting settled, and chatting with each other. At precisely 9 AM I touch a button on my remote mouse and play a sudden blast of very loud rock music. Most of the time it’s the chorus of “Let’s Get It Started” by the Black Eyed Peas, but to keep the element of surprise I sometimes vary the selection. After a 10-second burst of very loud music, I have every student’s undivided attention. I then lock in the connection: I smile, welcome them, thank them for investing a full Saturday in developing their careers. Only then do I begin the class. I have hijacked their amygdalas. Note also that in the anecdote with which I opened this chapter I had the audience’s complete attention once I had shocked them with my lemon-chewing demonstration. There was complete silence and full attention by the time I began to explain mirror neurons. We need audiences to feel first, and then to think.

Note also that in Chapter 7, “Performance: The Physicality of Audience Engagement,” I described eye contact as consisting of both looking into an audience member’s eyes and smiling. It’s the smile that makes the connection, causing the audience member to unconsciously smile back and pay attention. The amygdala in action.

The amygdala also plays an important role in how audiences pay attention once we have their attention. Whenever people are under stress, there’s a likelihood of their having only a limited or selective attention. When someone is afraid, angry, anxious, insulted, tired, and so on, he or she is likely to engage in cognitive tunneling, focusing completely on the thing that is the threat and ignoring everything else.

Emotional Intelligence author Daniel Goleman describes why:

The problem is that the amygdala functions today the way it always has. And we don’t operate in a world now that has actual physical threats. We operate in a complex symbolic reality where what we face are complex symbolic threats: He’s not treating me fairly; she’s dissing me. Whatever it may be. These threats today trigger the [release of stress hormones]. So when we are caught in the grip of a distressing emotion it means that attention narrows, and fixates, and we get into a state that is suboptimal for most of life.¹¹

This selective attention is the case even when the threat is simply the need to focus on a challenging task. Several years ago two psychologists at Harvard University conducted an experiment. Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris showed a video of six people, three in white T-shirts, and three in black T-shirts, passing basketballs to each other in front of a bank of elevators in what appears to be a business office. They instructed their subjects to watch the 90-second video and keep a silent count of how often the basketball is passed from someone in a white T-shirt to someone else in a white T-shirt. In the video, while the players are passing the ball, someone in a gorilla suit walks into the scrum, looks at the camera and thumps its chest, and then walks away. When the film ended, the psychologists asked their subjects how many times the ball had been passed among white-shirted people. But of course, that wasn’t the point of the exercise. They then asked, “But did you see the gorilla?” More than half of the people who watched the video missed the gorilla.¹²

I have shown the video to graduate students and clients (in the same session in which I suck the lemon), and far more than half the people in the room said they didn’t see the gorilla. Several argued strenuously that there wasn’t a gorilla. They were then somewhat shaken up when I played the tape again, and they indeed saw the gorilla. Some told me that they had seen the gorilla walk on, but had assumed that it was a trick to get them to miscount the basketball passes, so they ignored it. Most of these didn’t see the gorilla pound its chest and were very surprised to see that it did.

In The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, Simons and Chabris explain that people think they see the world as it is, but they miss a lot.¹³

This is particularly the case with what is commonly called multitasking: the process of apparently doing several things at once. Increasing scientific study shows that what we think of as multitasking is in fact micro-attention tasking. We aren’t simultaneously doing several things. Rather, we are doing one thing at a time, briefly. And while doing the one thing, we aren’t doing the other thing. This is why texting while driving or other forms of distracted driving are such a problem. When texting (as when counting the basketball passes), we don’t see what’s on the road ahead (as we don’t see the gorilla). But in corporate environments, with the prevalence of smartphones, iPads, and distracting technologies, it’s common for audiences to be multitasking while a leader is engaging them. And as a result, members of the audience may miss important elements of what the leader is saying.

Audiences’ actual capacity to pay attention is something many leaders miss. Especially when audiences are under stress, either task-focused or multitasking or emotionally upset in some way, it is much harder to get and keep their attention.

When people are under stress, they also have difficulty hearing, listening, and remembering. For example, when doctors talk to patients about their medical conditions, patients typically remember only 50 percent of what they’re told; depending on the circumstances, 40 to 80 percent may be forgotten immediately, according to Robert H. Margolis, a University of Minnesota professor.¹⁴ More important, when patients do recall information, they remember about half of it incorrectly. So, according to Dr. Margolis, half of what patients hear about their medical condition is forgotten immediately, and half of what is remembered is wrong.

So cognitive tunneling makes people focus on a threat and ignore other things. Selective attention in general allows them to miss what might otherwise be directly in front of them but that isn’t part of the threat or task. And because they’re under stress, they have trouble hearing, listening, or remembering.

There are several other amygdala-related challenges. The first is what is known as the Primacy Effect: People tend to remember the first thing they hear, but not what follows immediately thereafter. Hence, the need for frames to precede facts. The second is known as the Recency Effect: People tend to remember the last thing they hear. The third is the Rule of Threes. As general principle, people under stress can hold no more than three ideas, thoughts, or topics in their minds simultaneously. They can remember no more than three things. And they generally respond well to things spoken in groups of threes. (Note also that in the history of rhetoric for thousands of years we’ve known that audiences tend to pay more attention and remember more when content is grouped in threes. Now we know why. This is often referred to as the Rule of Threes.)

Adapting to the Amygdala: Five Strategies for Audience Engagement

There are a number of ways to overcome these challenges. When leaders are speaking to audiences that are under stress—even if the audience is merely tired or distracted—the leader can take the amygdala into account in determining how the content is structured and how the audience is engaged. Here are five ways to engage effectively:

1. Establish connection before saying anything substantive. And remember that the connection is physical. Techniques to connect include asking for the audience’s attention, if only with a powerful and warm greeting, followed by silence and eye contact. The key is to make sure the audience isn’t doing something else so that they pay attention. (Think of the leader as the gorilla, and the audience’s distraction as counting basketballs. You need to get the audience to stop counting and to pay attention to the gorilla.)

2. Take the Primacy Effect seriously. Say the most important thing first once you have their attention. The most important thing should be a powerful framing statement that will control the meaning of all that follows. Remember that frames have to precede facts.

3. Take the Recency Effect seriously. Close with a recapitulation of the powerful framing statement that opened the presentation.

4. Make it easy to remember. Keep in mind how hard it is for people to listen, hear, and remember. One way is to repeat key points. I often hear from clients, “But I’ve already said this. I don’t need to say it again.” Or, “I don’t want to say it again.” Or, “If I have to say this again, I’ll throw up. I’m tired of repeating myself.” But leaders need to constantly repeat the key themes, within any given presentation, and in general as a matter of organizational strategy. It doesn’t matter if they’re bored with saying it. The audience needs to hear it, again and again. And again. As a general principle, people need to hear things three times if they are to even pay attention to it. And because any given audience member at any time may be distracted or inattentive, he or she is unlikely to hear or attend to everything that is said. So leaders need to repeat key points far more than three times to be sure that everyone has heard it at least three times. One of the burdens of leadership is to have a very high tolerance for repetition.

5. Follow the Rule of Threes: Have three main points. But no more than three main points; no more than three topics; no more than three examples per topic. Group thoughts in threes; words in threes; actions in threes. (See how I just used the Rule of Threes in that sentence?) Think of Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address: “We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.”

General Electric’s chief executive officer spoke about the power of the Rule of Threes and the need to have a high tolerance for repetition soon after he succeeded Jack Welch at GE’s helm. Asked by Fast Company magazine the top leadership lesson he had learned from Mr. Welch, Jeff Immelt said, “Every leader needs to clearly explain the top three things the organization is doing. If you can’t, you’re not leading well.”¹⁵

The Primacy of the Visual: The Eyes Have It

Several years ago the leadership team of one of my clients was presenting to an investment conference in New York. After the formal presentation, the team was fielding questions, and one investor asked for an update on the company’s quality initiative. The CEO handed off the question to the president of the manufacturing division, the part of the company that actually made the things that the company sold: “Quality is part of manufacturing, and I’ll let Jim, who heads manufacturing, take your question.”

Jim stood up and confidently said the following: “Our quality initiative is well underway. And quality continues to improve every single quarter.” Then he rattled off a bunch of statistics.

The framing was right, and it was true: Quality was improving. There was just one problem. As he said it, he held his hand out in front of his body, at shoulder level. As he spoke, the hand moved down diagonally in front of his body. It was the gesture of something in decline. But his words were of something improving. No one on the stage noticed the anomaly. But the audience did.

After the investment conference, analysts posted negative references to the company, expressing concerns about the quality of the company’s products. When the investor relations department called the analysts to understand their views, they said their concerns arose from the division president’s remarks.

I was asked to meet with the division president and I reviewed the videotape of his comments with him. As he watched it, he saw no problem. I asked him what the downward diagonal sweep of his hand meant. He said, “It means quality is improving.” I said, “No, it doesn’t.” He challenged me: “Of course it does.” I asked him, “What do you mean when you say ‘quality’?” He replied, “You know, quality. The number of defects per thousand units of production.”

Then we both burst out laughing, as we recognized the miscommunication. He had fallen prey to the Curse of Knowledge, where a technical expert cannot conceive that someone without his technical expertise doesn’t know what he knows. It’s all too common in specialized fields such as medicine, law, finance, and manufacturing. To Jim, an engineer by training, quality was a frame about things that didn’t work well. The goal of the quality initiative was to reduce the number of defects, to minimize customer complaints, to reduce the number of replacements under warranty. And the other executives who were at the conference, who were similarly cursed with that knowledge, didn’t notice anything unusual about what he said and how he said it. But for investors there was a completely different frame: Quality was something positive. The goal of a quality initiative was to do something better, to make something more effective, to build customer loyalty. In other words, for things to go up.

But Jim’s gaffe also pointed to something about the human brain. When there’s inconsistency between what the ears hear and what the eyes see, the eyes tend to prevail. When investors saw the downward swoop of his gesture as he spoke about quality, the visual overtook the verbal, and investors were left with a false but powerful impression: Quality was declining. The framing came not from the word “improving” but from the combination of the word “quality” and the downward gesture. That triggered the worldview. The statistics didn’t matter. The audience had already reached an impression. The facts bounced off.

We see the same kind of disconnect when leaders express pride in the company achieving a milestone, but do so without any facial expression. Or when they say they’re pleased to announce something without a trace of a smile on their faces.

In 1976 two professors at the University of Surrey in Great Britain published in the journal Nature the result of their study into multimodal perception—what happens when two sensory systems are working at the same time. Harry McGurk and John MacDonald concluded that although most verbal communication occurs in settings where the listener can see the speaker, speech perception is still normally regarded as a purely auditory process. They demonstrated the “previously unrecognized influence of vision upon speech perception.”¹⁶

The McGurk Effect, outlined in that paper, is based on showing people a video in which a speaker repeats a certain sound, such as ba-ba-ba, again and again. But in some parts of the video, the speaker is seen to mouth the sound ba-ba-ba; in others, the speaker is seen to mouth the sound fa-fa-fa or ga-ga-ga or da-da-da. But the sound never changes. Ask the viewer what the speaker is saying, and the viewer will say, alternately, ba-ba-ba or fa-fa-fa or ga-ga-ga or da-da-da, depending on what the mouth seems to be doing. But ask the viewer to listen to the same tape, with eyes closed, and the viewer will hear only ba-ba-ba. When I do this with students and clients, they don’t believe what’s happening. Even closing their eyes and hearing only ba-ba-ba isn’t convincing. I need to play the tape multiple times, as they close their eyes on the second or third fa. Eventually they come to terms with the fact that they had mistakenly believed they had heard something that they didn’t actually hear. It is always disconcerting.

Lawrence Rosenblum, a professor of psychology at the University of California Riverside, and author of See What I’m Saying: The Extraordinary Power of Our Five Senses, explained the McGurk Effect on the BBC’s Horizon television program:

In the illusion what we see overrides what we hear. So the mouth movements we see when we look at a face can actually influence what we believe we’re hearing. If we close our eyes, we actually hear the sound as it is. If we open our eyes, we actually see how the mouth movements can influence what we’re hearing. The effect works no matter how much you know about the effect.¹⁷

In the 1933 Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, the Groucho character famously asks, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”¹⁸ Embedded in that joke is the comedian’s understanding that people actually believe their own eyes rather than what they may hear. When what audiences hear conflicts with what audiences see, the eyes have it. (In fact, the Marx Brothers’ quote itself is an example of the phenomenon it describes. Although widely attributed to Groucho Marx, the quote was actually spoken by Chico, but while he was impersonating Groucho. The eyes have it even in puns about the primacy of the visual.)

The McGurk effect—the visual overriding the verbal—has significant consequences to effective leadership communication. Leaders need to worry not only about what they say and how they say it, but also about how they look when they say it.

Air Thin

Words matter. So do visuals. The combination can be unbeatable.

This book began with Steve Jobs introducing the iPod in 2001. Mr. Jobs captured people’s imagination with his introduction to the very idea of an iPod: 1,000 songs in your pocket.

We close with Steve Jobs again, in January 2008. He was about to launch the newest Apple computer, the MacBook Air. He teased the Macworld Conference audience: “There’s something in the air.” Then he framed what was to follow:

As you know, Apple makes the best notebooks on the planet: the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. These are the standards in the industry by which competitive products are judged. Well, today we’re introducing a third kind of notebook. It’s called the MacBook Air. Now, what is the MacBook Air? In a sentence, it’s the world’s thinnest notebook.¹⁹

He then showed examples of competitors’ slim notebooks. He showed a visual of the side profile of the best-selling competitor’s notebook and of the MacBook Air, and noted how the thickest part of the MacBook Air was still thinner than the thinnest part of the competitor’s computer. He then talked about how, unlike the competitor, the MacBook Air would have a full-size screen and keyboard, and full memory capacity:

So, it’s so thin that it even fits inside one of these envelopes that we’ve all seen floating around the office. And so let me show it to you now.²⁰

As he spoke, the screen behind him showed a yellow 9” x 12” interoffice envelope. Jobs walked to a lectern and pulled out just such an envelope. He held up the envelope. It was flat. It looked empty. He dramatically unscrolled the red string that held the envelope closed. Then he slid from the envelope a new MacBook Air. There was hushed silence in the audience, accompanied by the occasional “wooo.” He held it flat to show how thin it is. Then he opened it to show the full-size display and keyboard.

Then he said, “But the real magic is in the electronics.” Behind him appeared a photograph of the guts inside the computer. “This is a complete Mac on a board. You think, okay, what’s so special about that?”²¹

Then a plain number 2 pencil appeared next to the circuitry. The two were the same size. “It’s really tiny. And to fit a whole Mac on this thing was an amazing feat of engineering.”²²

Those two images—the new computer coming out of a flat interoffice envelope, and the guts of a full-power computer no longer than a regular pencil—told the entire story. Jobs’s presentation was masterful: Complete command of the physicality of his engagement with audiences—the right words, conveyed in the right order, with the right images—provoked an emotional connection.

Steve Jobs showed us how to use communication as a leadership tool.

The burden of leadership is to create a package: a presence that combines posture, gesture, bearing, with the sounds that are made as the leader speaks, with content that works, and powerful visual imagery, all the while connecting with audiences. It isn’t easy. But it is a critical element of building trust, inspiring confidence, and leading effectively.

Recap: Best Practices from This Chapter

Lessons for Leaders and Communicators

Human connection is not merely a function of proximity. It’s also a function of biology. Taking audiences seriously requires leaders to understand what audiences are capable of, how humans actually work. And that requires understanding the human brain, where hearts and minds reside.

Humans are wired to connect with each other. Mirror neurons allow people to actually experience sensory perception from afar. When we watch a skier twist a knee, we feel our own knees hurt. When we watch someone chewing on a lemon, our mouths water and we taste the lemon. Or think we do. Humans are empathic. We feel with other people. Mirror neurons are a powerful connection mechanism, and effective leaders connect with audiences not merely intellectually and emotionally, but also physically.

Mirror neurons also provide a biological explanation for why humans are social creatures. Identity drives behavior, because our first drive is to belong. So leaders need to connect by showing that they and their followers have something in common.

Leaders too often assume that facts matter, that logic prevails, and that if only they let the facts speak for themselves stakeholders will understand and agree. But humans aren’t wired that way. They are emotional creatures before they’re rational creatures. There is a constant interplay between our limbic system and our prefrontal cortex, between emotion and reason.

The default to emotion is part of the human condition. The amygdala governs the fight-or-flight impulse, the triggering of powerful emotions, and the release of chemicals that put humans in a heightened state of arousal. There’s a superhighway from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex, which governs reasoning, logic, facts, planning, and decision making. The amygdala can shut down reasoning. But there are only side roads and back channels from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala. So it’s much harder for the prefrontal cortex to get emotions under control. While it’s possible to soft-wire more efficient connections through repetition, it’s easier for emotion to control reason than the other way around.

Humans are not thinking machines. We’re feeling machines who also think. We feel first, and then we think. As a result, leaders need to meet emotion with emotion before they can move audiences with reason.

The amygdala also plays important roles in what an audience can pay attention to and how. When people feel threatened, cognitive tunneling takes place, making it difficult to focus on anything beyond the threat. And as people become more and more upset, they become more and more primitive: They use the older, more emotional parts of their brains.

Even when people aren’t immediately threatened, selective attention causes people under stress to ignore everything outside the scope of their immediate point of focus. People tasked with counting something don’t notice a gorilla walking in front of them, just as drivers who are texting don’t notice an obstacle in the road.

When people are under stress, they have difficulty hearing, listening, and remembering. Primacy means they remember what they hear first. Recency means they remember what they hear last. And the Rule of Threes means they can’t remember more than three things. This places a premium on keeping things simple and repeating key points.

These are the five strategies for adapting to the amygdala when engaging audiences:

1. Establish connection before saying anything substantive.

2. Take the Primacy Effect seriously: Frames have to precede facts.

3. Take the Recency Effect seriously: Repeat the frame at the end.

4. Make it easy to remember: Repeat. And repeat again. And again.

5. Follow the Rule of Threes.

Verbal engagement is not merely an auditory process, but also a visual one. When there’s an inconsistency between what the eyes see and what the ears hear, the eyes tend to prevail. So leaders need to align what they say with how the body portrays it.