Influencer: The Power to Change Anything seems to be written by a committee: Kerry Peterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler.
(288 pages, McGraw-Hill; (September 13, 2007). The book’s message is clear, crisp and poignant.

The authors say that to influence, one must stop arguing with resistant minds and instead search out “vital behaviors” that promise to have high leverage in teaching others from best practices. Studying the best, focusing on even moderately good performance, is better than banging your head against the verbal brick wall, trying to persuade people to do what they cannot comprehend without seeing top performers perform.

How do the best succeed? The authors encourage us to “search for positive deviance” –- dive into the stew of experience and research, discover and study situations in which we would expect “the problem” should exist, but in fact it does not. “The problem” is absent when some members of the group succeed, overcome “the problem,” prevail and succeed. How do they do it? Why do their behaviors produce different results? What is different about these members compared to the rest of the group. Answer those questions, and we can understand how best performers achieve best performances.

What do the best do differently from the rest of the group? They rapidly alternate between teaching and questioning or testing. When required, the best make immediate corrections, alter their path away from what doesn’t work. The authors encourage us to look for those “recovery behaviors.” When do the best step up to a challenge or a conversation that frightened their peers into inaction? When do the best confront those who do not carry their weight? How do the best hold “crucial conversations” with senior management about policies or practices that they believe impede progress and prevent improvement?

Equally important is the author’s mandate to change your persuasion strategy: don’t try to change minds. Resistant minds will not be argued into agreement, so the authors suggest instead that we provide vicarious experiences: tell stories that expose the resistant mind to the experience of other people as they demonstrate successful behaviors. By observing the success described in stories, the resistant mind has to at least ponder why the other people are succeeding and not failing.

The resistant mind will ask “Is it worthwhile to change my behavior?” and “Am I capable of behaving differently?” The stories must demonstrate both the desirability and the feasibility in terms the resistant mind can absorb.

Attempts at direct verbal persuasion will not influence anyone to change their mind. The story-telling helps people experience the world as others experience it. The best stories create innovative, profound and vicarious experiences. They are entertaining and educational parables that enable people to change their view the world. Good story tellers use vibrant and credible tales. The gold standard of story telling is based on real-world experiences.

A well-told narrative provides concrete and vivid detail; it presents a pleasurable, touching and memorable flow of cause to effect. An effective story alters listener’s view of the consequences of their actions and beliefs.

As important as the story is the story teller. The teller must be credible, a source of trust. The listener must have confidence in the expertise of the person attempting to influence through story-telling. The narrator’s motive must be clear and worthy.

Stories help individuals transport themselves away from the role of critic, where the resistant mind rigorously applies the rules of logic, analysis, criticism, doubt, rumor, myth, and other tools of intransigence. The story allows the individual to become a participant in the tale.

The story must help the individual actually care about changing their belief, if the desired action is to be induced. Stories generate genuine emotion, grasp the mind of the listener through feeling (not thinking). The story teller must show a clear link between the current behavior and existing negative results.

To tell the story effectively, the teller must involve the audience in the story; involve the listener in the experience as if it were his/her own. The story must offer credible and vivid solutions so that the listener can visualize positive replacement behaviors that yield better results than the former beliefs.

Influencers honor the fact that individuals have choice. By winning their hearts, influencers help people figure out for themselves what is right behavior, skillfully using open and indirect questions. Influencers immerse people in the right behaviors to create intrinsic satisfaction from that exposure and at the same time experience the displeasure associated with wrong behaviors.

The most powerful motivators are people’s own intrinsic accountability to themselves and their inherent desire to do good.