Go up TLDR: Want to change minds? There are five ways: you can nudge people, inspire them, influence them, persuade them, and negotiate with them. These five ways build a ladder moving from implicit to explicit expectations of the result. If you want to make an impact at work, choose which rung to start on and know when to move up or down.
A client of mine, very technical and knowledgeable about AI, was asked to join an AI adoption team with leaders. In the first meeting, everyone was dreaming of ways AI could help their users and drive up shareholder value. My client heard all of it, spoke up, and laid down the facts about what was possible and impossible to build. After the meeting, he was told he had come across as too strong.
Books on the topic include Thaler's Nudge, Grant's Think Again, and Voss's Never Split the Difference, each describing a different way to change a mind. None of them tell you which one to use when. That is why I developed the Buy-In Ladder, a tool I use in my coaching sessions with leaders and in the workshops I facilitate on trust, accountability, and persuasion.
There are five ways to change people's minds. Each rung makes it more explicit that you want to change someone's mind.
Nudge. Set the conditions for a desired outcome. The topic goes unsaid.
Inspire. Give a reason to care about a desired outcome. The ask goes unsaid.
Influence. Open another angle on a desired outcome. Your conclusion goes unsaid.
Persuade. Make the case for a desired outcome. Nothing goes unsaid, but nothing is agreed.
Negotiate. Agree on a settled outcome and what it costs. Nothing goes unsaid; nothing goes unagreed.
It's important to know which rung to start on and know when to move up or down. Not reading the room, as my client did, means you're on a different rung than everyone else. For example, someone inspires when they need to nudge. They jump to negotiating before they persuade. Changing other people's minds is a process, and knowing where your audience is decides whether you nudge, inspire, influence, persuade, or negotiate.
The Buy-In Ladder starts where your audience is. Climb only as high as the wall in front of you, and let the stakes and the power in the room decide how far that is.
To decide where to start, you first need to assess your audience. Take an example. You realize at work there is little to no trust in your org. In the past, the teams were small, and everybody did what they needed to do to make sure things moved forward. As the team grew, teams broke workflows into pieces to make them more manageable, but then everybody became disconnected, and when people met to discuss, there wasn't enough shared experience to trust each other. Where do you start?
Ask Yourself | How It Works | Examples | |
|---|---|---|---|
Nudge | Do they need to know? | Create a space for the topic to come up naturally. | Create a meeting to surface tensions and see if the topic of trust comes up. Leave a book about trust on your work desk for others to see. |
Inspire | Do they need a reason to care? | Give them a reason to care through values and story. You make the point but don't make the ask. | Tell the story of how you learned the importance of trust and let it hang there. Model it yourself. |
Influence | Do they need to see/feel the benefits? | Invite them to look from another angle or imagine new perspectives. | In meetings, when the ball drops, casually name it as a trust issue and leave the conclusion to them. See if others pick it up. |
Persuade | Do they need the case made? | Make the case directly: evidence, consequences, where this goes. | Ask leaders what measures they can put around trust. Lead a 20-minute team discussion about the importance of trust. |
Negotiate | Do they need clear action steps? | Agree, explicitly and mutually, on what happens next. | Codify expectations for communication, deliverables, and decisions, with clear ramifications. |
If you start on the wrong rung, you won't get your desired result. For example, you decide to inspire, and people reject it flat out. You may need to nudge instead, creating space for them to realize it on their own. Go down a rung. If you need to actively persuade, and instead you inspire, you might give a feel-good message that everybody forgets the next week. Go up two rungs. If there's no time to influence, you might skip a few rungs and deliver the persuasive message to a cold audience. Sometimes that's the only option, but it has a cost.
How high you climb depends on the wall you're trying to scale. Some audiences need only a nudge and you're over. Some need you to go all the way to negotiate. But if you jump from nudge to persuade, your audience may get spooked. My recommendation is to start at nudging and see how high you actually need to go.
Back to my client. He wasn't wrong. He was just on the wrong rung. The room wanted to feel inspired. If he had joined in on the dream-making, he would have been perceived as being supportive of the meeting's agenda. He had thought he was jumping into a conversation about practicalities, so he started to persuade. Same topic, different conversation.
The next time you want to change the minds of others, first decide where they are on The Buy-In Ladder and then determine if you need to go up or down to achieve your desired outcome.
If you want to inspire your team/org to communicate more effectively, I do 1:1 executive coaching and workshops to provide them with tools, skills, and practice so they can show up to 1:1s, meetings, and presentations clear-headed, confident, and concise. Contact me at [email protected] and visit leadinstride.com to learn more.
Resources:
Getting Past No — William Ury
Getting to Yes — Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton
How Minds Change — David McRaney
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion — Robert B. Cialdini
Invisible Influence — Jonah Berger
Never Split the Difference — Chris Voss
Nudge: The Final Edition — Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Pre-Suasion — Robert B. Cialdini
The Art of Negotiation — Michael Wheeler
The Catalyst — Jonah Berger
The Persuaders — Anand Giridharadas
Think Again — Adam Grant
