Following part one of our blog series “The Art and Science of Crafting Persuasive Messages”, Jamie discusses the concept of making the “right ask” to effectively persuade others to do something. He examines how asking someone for something small and easy to do, with no-brainer steps, can help them reach a goal over time, ensuring they stay engaged with minimal effort.
Suppose I asked you to sacrifice an entire day of your life each week, as well as your sleep, your mental health and your relationships with loved ones, in exchange for a device that allowed other people to contact you at all times of the day and night, and bombard you with images of people’s lunch and cat videos and every few minutes tempt you with advertisements for products you don’t need. Would you say “Yes”?
You think you’d say “No”, but in fact, you’ve already said “Yes” if you own a smartphone. Smartphones come at a great cost to our quality of life (some would argue the costs far outweigh the benefits they bring), yet we all still buy new ones every few years. And that’s because these high-tech companies have crafted a very sneaky ask.
All they ask you to do is pick it up and look at it.
The Right Ask?
Buzz, ping, flash, and without even thinking about it, your arm has reached out for it, grabbed it, pulled it to your face and now you’re sucked into this opioid-like device. And, a lot of the time, when you pick up your smartphone, you don’t know where it will end.
Think about it.
You pick it up to check an email, but then that email includes a link to a website, which then prompts you to watch a video. Whilst you’re doing so, a notification pops up from Facebook, which you jump to, only to see adverts for a new backpack you were thinking of buying, so you check it out on Amazon, and before you know it it’s now 2am and you can’t seem to drag yourself away. And it all started with just a buzz, a ping and a flash.
The thing that high-tech companies understand (at our peril) that most people don’t understand is that change is like a path, and all you’ve got to do is get people to take the first step. Once they’ve taken the first step, it’s easy to get them to take the next step, and then the next step and then the next step and so on.
Consider The Fogg Behaviour Model
Silicon Valley’s tech companies, responsible for these addictive devices and apps, took inspiration from The Fogg Behaviour Model, created by Stanford University Behaviour Scientist BJ Fogg.
Now, I doubt this model was created to get the world hooked on these apps – BJ Fogg has since gone on to show how we can use this model to empower ourselves by changing our habits in his book Tiny Habits. So, I do not want to come off as criticising BJ Fogg here, especially considering how much his work has influenced my thinking. Instead, think of this as an extremely powerful model that can be used for both good and bad, depending on what you want to use it for. And I believe the more people who know about it, the better.
The essence of his model is the formula B = MAP, which stands for Behaviour = Motivation + Ability + Prompt. This means that a behaviour will occur when there is something to prompt it, and the person has sufficient motivation and ability to carry out the behaviour, all at the same time.
For example, with your smartphone, the prompt is the buzz, ping and flash. The motivation is your curiosity about what you’re missing out on. And you have sufficient ability because all you need to do is grab it and look at it.
Now let’s change a few of these factors.
For example, we turn off the buzz, the ping and the flash by putting it in Do Not Disturb mode. We’ve now eliminated the prompt, so it’s no longer nudges us to look at it.
Or we are deeply engrossed in a significant sports match so much so that when our phone buzzes, pings and flashes, we are just more motivated to continue watching the sports match than to pick up our phone.
Or we left our phone downstairs, and we are now laying in bed upstairs after a long and exhausting day and ready to go to sleep. The phone buzzes, pings and flashes, and we are curious about what we’re missing out on, but we’re so exhausted that it would be too much physical effort to go down and check it, so we ignore it.
We get a completely different outcome with a simple tweak of the prompt, motivational factors, and ability.
How to Persuade Others: Motivation and Ability
So, how do we apply this to crafting persuasive messages? Well, I’ve created a modified version of this model for crafting a persuasive ask:
In essence, ask for something that requires little motivation and is very easy to do. Let me explain why.
Firstly, motivation is extremely unreliable. It is highly contextual and fluctuates all the time.
You may have woken up this morning intending to go to the gym, but as you go to get ready, you discover all your gym clothes are in the wash, it’s raining outside, there’s a huge traffic jam on the way to the gym, and your spouse has just told you they have an urgent work appointment so need you to take care of the kids this morning. Your motivation to go to the gym has just gone down the toilet.
High levels of motivation tend to wear off over time as well. This is what we see happening every February. A neighbour inspired by the new year sets a New Year’s Resolution to go running and get fit. They enthusiastically don their new sports gear in the early hours of the morning each day in the first week of January. But it’s February and they’ve not been in their sports gear for weeks. Their motivation wore off.
In a business context, I see this happening a lot. For example, your business may consider changing to a new Enterprise Resource Management System. You’ve weighed the pros and cons, and know it will cost a lot of money, take a lot of time and require a vast amount of training to get the company to transition to this system successfully, so there are clear costs.
In the long run, though, this could make the business more agile and save money, so there are clear benefits. But because there are costs, in other words, because it’s hard to do, this requires a considerable amount of motivation. That’s not a problem if you have a charismatic leader spearheading this change initiative and inspiring everyone to get on board.
But what would happen if that leader suddenly falls sick? Or if your company suddenly goes through a public relations crisis and gets distracted? Or if even a pandemic suddenly strikes and the company goes into survival mode? Your company (and people) would lose motivation to carry through this change and the whole project would fall apart.
Motivation is highly unreliable. If we need a significant level of motivation to do something because it’s hard to do, we have a limited window of time and a limited range of contextual constraints within which that motivation will exist. If our request comes at that specific time, we may be successful, but if it doesn’t, we will fail.
An alternative approach is to make something so easy to do that it requires hardly any motivation whatsoever; basically, a no-brainer. This is exactly what tech companies have done. All they ask of us is to pick up our phones and look at them. That’s such an easy thing to do that it requires hardly any motivation, which also explains why smartphones quickly become so addictive.
How to Persuade Others: The Right Ask
We apply this to a business context by making our ask a simple one that gets people onto the first step of a long path towards business, collaboration or partnership. For example, the first step could be to:
- Schedule a 15-minute call
- Sign up to a mailing list
- Try a sample
- Sign up for a trial.
Once they take that first step, we need to craft the next step, and the next step, and the next step, and so on. We need to make sure that each step is so easy that it hardly requires any motivation at all; it’s basically a no-brainer.
Our popular workshop “Changing Minds & Inspiring Action” provides leaders with the skills, tools and understanding to craft a strategy for persuading and influencing their stakeholders. Get in touch to organise a dedicated session for your leadership team.
