Tag Archives: communication

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What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Models, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , ,

retochetRacquetball is more than a sport. It’s a good model for the unanticipated associations, meanings and slights that are possible every time we open our mouths.

A number of years of writing and teaching persuasion have forced me to be a student of the unexpected ricochet.  That’s pretty much the whole game if you are playing racquetball, and it has a lot of relevance to communication.

The actual court for the game is simply a room-sized shoe box that functions as a playing surface for a hard rubber ball and several players.  It’s typically smashed so hard against the playing wall that it comes back at speeds and angles even a supercomputer couldn’t predict.  Those who have escaped the sting of that small missile can be thankful.  It hurts.  the word“ricochet” must have been coined by a bruised French player. But it also evokes the unanticipated associations, meanings, slights, and bogus significations possible every time we open our mouths. More than most kinds of human endeavor, persuasion is fraught with effects that are unforeseen. No wonder it is so difficult.

Try the different analogy of competitive running. Our inability to anticipate effects usually means that a person’s resistance to change is pretty much on its last lap before the possibility of personal transformation has even left the blocks. From a number of meta-studies we know that the odds of getting someone to alter their attitudes even after a flurry of good reasons have been presented is—on the best days—no better than one in ten.  After explaining this theory of “minimal effects” in a recent class, a student glumly asked, “What’s the point?  Why bother? The challenge hardly seems worth the effort.”

The short answer is that we have no choice.  Gaining assent from others is why we are mostly social rather than isolated creatures.  We are hard-wired to connect.  And, by the way, who says that convincing another person to give up an attitude or a cherished behavior should be easy?  We’ve worked hard to put our lives together in some sort of coherent way.

The point is how functional it actually is to be ready for the worst.

In persuasion theory, unexpected effects are called “boomerangs.”  Even well-planned campaigns to change others’ behaviors can easily veer off course. I teach this logic, and encourage my students to wear their newly acquired skepticism as a badge of honor. Having a healthy level of doubt about predicted effects is a life skill.

Consider some cases, all mostly true:

  • You show up to give an invited presentation to a group and (a) there is no screen for the PowerPoints you counted on, (b) there is nowhere to plug in your video projector, (c) there is no podium for your notes and (d) and a crew of ten men and nine machines are busy re-paving the parking lot next door.  Under these circumstances, how effective do you think will can be?
  • Your advertising agency has prepared a gay-friendly ad campaign that tested well and is now running in three national media outlets. Everyone on the creative team basks in their certain rewards of their progressive messages. But a respected leader in the LGBT community condemns the ads for “promoting old stereotypes.”  Condemnation of the ads is getting more attention than the ads themselves.
  • At a business lunch with a potential client you innocently praise the good service you once got from a large national retailer, only to be chided for supporting a chain whose owners are “political reactionaries.”
  • You meet a new set of Michigan in-laws for the first time, not realizing that for this family of General Motors employees, your new Ford visible to all in their front driveway might as well be a load of manure.
  • You are Bridget Jones at a literary party in the midst of introducing the work of a hack you oversell as the author of “the greatest book of our time.”  This happens just as you catch a look of dismay cross the faces of Jeffrey Archer and Salman Rushdie, just a few feet away.

There’s a saying that “even paranoids have enemies.”  When it comes to communication, some of us need the prerogative to worry about everything, to be the pessimist who is certain that life will not work out as planned.

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Character and the Confidence to Not Know

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , , ,

Q A imageOf course experts are paid to know their stuff.  We want them to have answers. But sometimes they need to allow complexity to have its way.

There are many ways to take the measure of another person’s character. One simple way is to look for how a person treats a server in a restaurant.  It’s a useful test of an individual’s temperament to notice their behavior with a total stranger who happens to be in a subordinate position. And it’s always a pleasant experience to discover that a new lunch companion is considerate of a staffer’s efforts. When a patron has no interest in the other, it suggests that they may be so locked into their own world that they can’t bother with even basic forms of human acknowledgement.

But there’s an even better marker of character, one that is especially useful for judging a person’s professional credibility. The test involves noticing how a person handles questions that draw them to the outer borders of their knowledge. What happens when someone is invited to give an opinion on a topic that is beyond their understanding?  My theory is that the more secure a person is, the more comfortable they are not answering every question.  These are folks who can say “I don’t know” with no loss of self-respect. And there’s an irony here:  It’s sometimes the case that the person who admits to not having a ready answer actually may still have more to tell us than the one who is a bit too eager to comment.

Here’s what I mean. Watch talk shows, or a typical panel of experts brought in after a “breaking news” story to speculate on possible causes. This was the case after the March 2014 disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines airliner after departing from Kuala Lumpur’s airport.  It disappeared somewhere in the Southern Ocean, even at this date without a clear reason. It’s rare to see a news show guest with the confidence to make the observation that they–and probably everyone else–cannot know why it disappeared. It’s the same for a psychologist being queried about the motives of a mass murderer, or a professor like myself teaching a course (“Theories of Persuasion”) that attempts to predict human behavior. We too rarely use the  option to acknowledge the limits of our understanding.

A person’s willingness to exercise this choice affirms their basic credibility. Like good diagnosticians, the most reliable experts don’t need to feign perfect knowledge to feel comfortable about their professional standing. An unjustifiable compulsion to respond to all queries can become a fraudulent kind of performed competence.  Faking a response is not the same as having something worthwhile to say.

The presence of false certainty should make us suspect. In my area one local radio program on gardening tips features a host who is never at a loss for an answer to a listener’s query. The subjects range broadly from trees to grass, flowers to invasive fauna, soil chemistry to hydrology. To be sure, he’s knowledgeable. But why is he never stumped?  For this person, apparently, all of the natural world is an open book.

This willingness to acknowledge the unknown is especially important for teachers and mentors.  It’s a useful lesson to show people new to a field that there is not an answer for every condition. Our love of science and its promise of ironclad certainty makes us look for apparent causality. Indeed, the rhetoric of causality has embedded itself within the rhetoric of answering. But sometimes asking good questions is the best we can do. The trick is to learn to value the individual who is comfortable enough in their own expertise to accept the limits of human understanding.

Comments: woodward@tcnj.edu