Afterword: Get better results, build better relationships, save the world
Most methods we use to persuade simply don’t work.
Even those methods backed by millions of pounds in contexts of the very highest importance don’t work. One systematic meta-analysis of 49 field experiments in political campaigning in US elections found their average effect in changing voters’ minds to be approximately zero.
So we need to do something different if we want to be more effective.
Deep Canvassing: Listening them into it
We started our book with the 2009 vote in Maine that went against LGBT rights and was to be reversed 3 years later. At about the same time, the LGBT community had a similar setback in California when Proposition 8 was voted in, which effectively prohibited same-sex marriage.
David Fleischer became director of the Los Angeles LGBT Center shortly afterwards and decided to find out why. He and his team took to the streets and knocked on doors, not to persuade (it was too late for that), but to listen. And in doing so, he found that listening was able to persuade far better than any other approach he had taken before. The Deep Canvassing technique was born.
Political scientists David Broockman (University of California, Berkeley) and Josh Kalla (Yale) have run a number of studies on Deep Canvassing and it turns out to be remarkably successful.1,2 They found in one study, in the context of the 2020 Trump/Biden election, that for every completed 100 conversations, 3.1 new votes for Biden were created. That might seem small but it was estimated at over 100 times more effective than a typical Presidential persuasion programme and would be enough to swing the result in nine different states in 2016.
What specifically does it involve? Well, instead of talking the voter into changing their mind, it works by listening them into it. The canvasser rapportfully and non-judgementally asks the voter their opinion on a topic and then asks lots of open questions around their experience on it, helping them reflect in an honest and analytical way. The canvasser will also share their own story.
So, by connecting through a common humanity, sharing stories and by allowing the voter to come to their own conclusion rather than be pressured into changing their mind, they get great success in changing people’s minds on some very tough subjects.
But if you have read this far in the book you wouldn’t be surprised by that at all.
Because Deep Canvassing really isn’t that much different to Motivational Interviewing, the approach that works so well with addicts and repeat offenders. Or Disciplined Listening or Forensic Interviewing, the approach that works in police interrogations. Or the Behavioural Change Stairway, the hostage negotiator’s go-to strategy. Each approach the same with a different name.
It really is remarkable that such different fields, each equally tough in their own way, have independently developed such similar strategies.
What has this got to do with tennis?
These are the techniques that work. These are the forehand and backhand of persuasion. Roger Federer (feel free to substitute Rafa Nadal, Novak Djokovic or Serena Williams if you prefer) has never invented any amazing new type of shot: he simply plays the forehand and the backhand – just the same as any other player.
Federer doesn’t win every game, of course, but when he does it’s with these shots and when he doesn’t it’s because he didn’t play these shots well enough.
It’s the same with changing someone’s mind. Knowing your outcome, doing your research, listening, projecting strength, co-creating the solution and putting the message across in the right way for the other person – these are the basic shots of the game: the forehand and the backhand. These are the shots that work and you can get better and better at them and become more and more adept at persuading in ever more difficult situations.
Hopefully, dear reader, your persuasion conversations will rarely be as extreme as persuading addicts, terrorists or hostage takers and so the means described in this book should be perfectly adequate. That doesn’t mean that you will always persuade everyone but, should you not, you just need to re-visit the methods and employ them better. Federer doesn’t invent a new shot if he loses a game, he just plays the forehand and backhand better.
This beautiful broken planet
In 2010, I sat outside a café in Damascus, Syria, enjoying the air of a beautiful historic city, watching the locals go about their daily lives. A thought passed my mind that nearby Baghdad would have been such a city only ten years earlier and now it had been bombed to smithereens: so many lives, families, businesses and buildings destroyed.
As I watched the Damascenes chat and laugh and do their thing, it occurred to me that Baghdad folk would have been very similar, just normal sweet people wanting to get on with their lives; the very last thing they wanted was the devastation of war. And it occurred to me, too, that the same could happen here in Damascus and what a tragedy that would be.
A year later it happened.
We need to change how we work.
Let’s do it now
And quickly.
We live in an accelerating world with technology begetting technology at an ever-faster rate. This is fantastic news. We have within our view a paradise on earth. We have the tools available to create a world of abundance for all; a world myths have been built on – Utopia, Eden, Arcadia, Shangri-La, however you want to call it. We can do it.
But it is dangerous news too. As the great biologist Edmund O. Wilson pointed out, we have Paleolithic brains, mediaeval institutions and god-like technology. This is not a healthy combination. Our power is enormous; we have to learn to use it better. We are such an amazing species that has done so many incredible things in our short history. But whether it is war, climate change, the catastrophic collapse of nature or winner-takes-all capitalism, we can be so destructive too.
We are the sub-species Homo sapiens sapiens – sapiens means wise and we are named it twice. Let’s live up to it for our own good.
The minds, they are a-changin’
Currently, outside of violence and coercion, there are three prevailing methods of persuasion:
- ■Shouting, as seen in social media
- ■Manipulation, as seen in online sales and advertising
- ■Lying, as seen in politics.
No wonder our planet is at breaking point.
The great news is that there is a method that works better and it is the method you have read about in these pages. These approaches will get people talking constructively, not destructively; they will get people to open up not close down; they will heal wounds, not deepen them; they will bridge divides, not widen them.
They can take us down the path we really want to go down.
But even if you don’t care about the rest of the world, even if you only care about that centre of the universe that is you, this approach will do you best. Because not only does it bring you better outcomes, but it also brings you better relationships.
Outcomes and relationships, this is your life.
This is your career, the house you live in, your holidays; this is your colleagues, your friends, the people around you; this is your loved ones, your children, your family.
This is your life.
You can change their mind, you can change many minds, and you will get better results and you will build better relationships as you do so. So in getting good at this, you get good at your life and help everyone around you get good at theirs too.
You may even save the world at the same time.