Every story has a hero – or at the very least, a protagonist who drives it forward.
So when you are using storytelling to persuade, one of the most important questions you can ask is: who is the hero here?
Take a standard sales presentation, like a customer case study. There are three possible answers.
The first is you.
If you’re telling the story of how you helped someone overcome a challenge or achieve an extraordinary result, it’s natural to see yourself as the protagonist. You’re the one driving the action.
The second is the customer.
To avoid looking like you’re seeking the spotlight, you can shift the focus to them. After all, they took the leap of faith. They listened to your idea, convinced their colleagues, found the money, and had the courage to follow through. You may have done the work, but they made it happen.
Both perspectives work. Both can lead to strong stories.
But if your goal is persuasion, there’s a third option, and it’s the most powerful.
The hero is the audience.
Great persuasive storytelling helps your listener see themselves in the hero’s role. You want them thinking: “That could work for us. We could do that.” The ultimate aim is to have them carry your idea back to their workplace, where they can apply it, solve a pressing problem, or seize a new opportunity — and in doing so, elevate their own standing.
In other words, you want them to imagine themselves as the hero of the sequel to your story.
To make this work, you need to shape your story with the audience in mind:
Relevance: Will they recognise the problem or challenge you’re describing?
Practicality: Is your solution something they could realistically implement?
Value: Does the benefit clearly outweigh the effort, risk, or cost?
These are simple idea, but too often they’re lost in the noise of a presentation.
Films such as Star Wars worked because kids could imagine themselves as Luke Skywalker, Han Solo or Princess Leia.
Your challenge is the same: can your audience imagine themselves as the hero of the story you’re telling?
When it comes to persuasion, a little knowledge can be dangerous. Too much can be downright counterproductive.
One pattern I see again and again in my work as a communications coach is how domain experts struggle to explain their ideas to people outside their field. We all recognise that knowing something and explaining something are two different skills – but there are subtler ways expertise can undermine communication which often go unnoticed.
A recent client session brought this home. He was leading a major technology-driven transformation program and needed to secure the backing of senior leaders. As a technologist, his instinct was to explain how the program would work and what others would need to do.
But when we reviewed his presentation, one glaring omission stood out: the why.
To him, the benefits were obvious – so obvious that he jumped straight to implementation. But for his audience, the absence of a compelling why meant they heard only disruption, extra work, and unfamiliar processes. With no reason to believe in the change, there was no reason to buy in.
Balancing the what, why, and how is the cornerstone of effective change communication. Without the why, the audience has no stake in the outcome – only a sense that something is being imposed on them. In my experience, at least half of failed change programs can be traced back to this very oversight: failing to win support by clearly articulating the reasons for change.
For leaders driving transformation, the sequence should be simple:
Start with the what. Define the change quickly and clearly. This usually requires the least time.
Expand on the why. Connect the rationale to outcomes that matter for your audience: better customer experiences; a stronger organisational future; or improvements in their own work. Don’t be afraid to tap into the “what’s in it for me?” factor.
Save the how for later. Early on, avoid drowning people in complexity. If the how is simple, explain it simply. If it’s complex, offer just enough detail to reassure them that a plan exists, that support will be provided, and that specifics will follow at the right time.
Getting this sequence right shifts communication from a technical explanation to a persuasive story – one that makes people not only understand the change, but believe in it.
Today I was part of a group discussion at the Clutch Events Project Management Technology Summit in Melbourne, where someone asked the question ‘what is organisational culture’.
For me – that’s an easy question to answer: organisationalculture is the manifestation of individual behaviour at scale.
It is an emergent quality that is the sum of the actions of the people that contribute to it.
When people behave in ways that are supportive and demonstrate ethical decision making, then their organisation’s culture will reflect that.
You can plug in different behaviours and the output will reflect them accordingly. Hence when behaviours are individualistic or geared towards profit at the expense of all else, the organisational culture will form accordingly.
So the second question that naturally arises is: what are the key factors that influence organisational culture?
If you’re willing to accept my argument about culture emerging from individual behaviour, then there are two critical factors that I believe outweigh all others.
The first of these is the organisation’s statement of purpose. Whether this is a single sentence or is expressed through a set of a dozen leadership principles, the organisation’s purpose provides a test that can guide workers in their decision making, simply by offering the opportunity to ask, ‘does this action align to our purpose’.
This makes the defining of purpose and principles something that must be considered with great care, as they can influence critical actions right through the workforce and will go a long way to shaping its culture.
The second factor is the behaviour of the leadership group. Culture may emerge from behaviour throughout the organisation, but it is set from the top, which means that the behaviour of senior leaders is critical to shaping the culture
If leaders preach inclusivity and supportiveness but behave in an opposite fashion, workers below them will mimic the behaviour, not the rhetoric. Worse still, they will understand that the leadership is duplicitous, and the resultant culture will reflect all this trait.
These realisations arose thanks to a research project I was engaged in several years ago, when I had the chance to examine numerous businesses up close and pose the question of why some were able to undergo successful transformations, and others weren’t.
Amongst the findings was the realisation that organisations which were able to transform successfully had a strong statement of purpose that workers could align with, even in those times when the transformation was directly disrupting their lives. When they could see that result of disruption would enable them to better serve their purpose, then disruption became something they were more willing to put up with.
which led me to my final contribution to yesterday’s discussion – never discount the importance of organisational culture as a factor in successful transformation programs.
Late last month I travelled to Queenstown, New Zealand, to deliver a speech to a group of property managers and investors on the topic of technology-driven change and the choices we face (thanks to Dinesh Pillutla and the team at Core Property Research for inviting me to speak).
It was an interesting experience, not only for the chance to delve into an industry that is itself undergoing significant change, but also because the speech that I gave wasn’t the one that I had first set out to deliver.
Having spent more than 20 years swept up the rapid changes of the technology sector, it is easy to forget that people outside the sector have a very different perspective on the role of technology, and a different appreciation for what it can and can’t do. As a speaker, this makes it all too easy to bamboozle an audience with demonstrations and prognostications of the technological utopia/apocalypse ahead – which might be entertaining (or unsettling) in the moment, but which holds little value over the long term.
This time I set out to take a different approach. My main thesis was that while technology is evolving quickly, we are putting our focus on the wrong things, in that we are focusing too much on technology and what it can do, not enough on what we want it to do.
In short, we need to stop thinking so much about technology, and start thinking a lot more about ourselves.
So when it came time to talk about AI, I choose to talk about something that technologists rarely talk about – human intelligence – and the skills and abilities that we already possess (and should be thinking about more) when it comes to understanding our role in a future world where AI is a major factor.
Why? Because getting from the first Australian computer (CSIRAC, built in 1949) to today’s AI took less than 75 years. We have gone from basic machines to a simulacra of intelligence in the blink of an eye. Evolutionary biology took approximately 750 million years to complete the same task.
It’s an impressive achievement, and not something we’ve needed to be overly concerned about – until now. Throughout history the development of technology has mostly been in support of human endeavour, and has tended to create more opportunities that it has erased. Now we may have reached a point where instead of supporting us, technology is competing with us (or more precisely, we are competing with it), and given its rapid evolution, we will fall behind quickly.
This is something we have seen time and time again throughout history – especially in sectors such as manufacturing – but now the emergence of more capable AI systems means that field of competition has broadened considerably. The most common question I get asked in any conversation about AI is ‘will AI take my job’. And the answer I give is most often ‘yes’ – it’s just a question of when.
At some point many of the jobs we do today won’t exist, but the expectation (still – and far from proven) is that more new ones will be created. The key for us as individuals is to anticipate which roles AI will perform better than us – and by when – and then work out what we need to do to ensure we stay relevant in that AI-focused future.
Hence the need to think more about human intelligence.
So in my presentation in Queenstown I posed the question of whether my audience would find their jobs replaced by AI, and then answered with a provisional ‘yes’ – that being if:
You had lost your sense of curiosity.
You were unable to listen and learn from diverse perspectives.
You cannot elevate yourself out of your immediate environs to see the bigger picture.
You lack empathy.
You are unable to align to others.
You cannot communicate.
You have stopped learning.
You are not adaptable.
If those traits describe you, then there is a very good chance that you will find your job replaced by AI. But it only takes the exercising of a few of those skills to provide a foundational capability that will help you maintain or grow your value in the turbulent years that lie ahead.
In summary – we need to be worrying a lot more about the exercising of our own human intelligence than we are worrying about the artificial kind.
No one can predict the future. We can make inferences and predictions, and we can run the risk of being very, very wrong.
But even though we can’t predict the future, we can consciously change the future through the actions that we take today.
And that is a capability that no machine can match (at least not yet).
Not only was it a chance to sit alongside luminaries such as Adam Spencer, Lisa Andrews, Morris Miselowski, and our moderator Holly Ransom, but it was an opportunity to explore exactly what AI means for local government – which it turns out, is not dissimilar to what it means for many other mid-sized organisations.
The key question I considered when going into the session was whether an organisation such as a local council actually needs an AI strategy.
My conclusion was a resounding yes.
Despite its label, AI is a very human challenge – one that can create fear and uncertainty among workers, customers, and communities.
Having an AI strategy doesn’t mean developing a complex technological roadmap for the creation of AI systems. What it does mean is being able to articulate how an organisation is using AI today and its guidelines for how it will use AI in the near future.
Many of the applications for AI have come into common use almost by stealth, such as unlocking a smartphone using facial recognition, or using predictive text on a word processor, or shopping recommended items on a website. AI has been a part of everyday life for many years – it is only the accessibility of Chat GPT and similar generative AI tools and their ‘wow factor’ that has thrust AI into the spotlight.
This sudden rise to prominence has created a lot of questions – principal among them being “will AI take my job”. This is quickly followed by “should I use AI to help me with my job”, “should I be feeding data into an AI to improve its usefulness”, and “what are the privacy and copyright implications when I do?”.
These questions are only the tip of the iceberg, and they are being asked by executives, managers, and workers all around Australia. Without an AI strategy, where can they turn to for answers?
For local government, there is also the need to answer the questions of rate payers, many of whom may be concerned by the use of AI and how it might impact their privacy and other rights.
The use of facial recognition without consent is already a contentious topic, and the Robodebt scandal has further eroded people’s trust in government and its use of technology. Recent months have also seen many council meetings interrupted by people who are concerned about how technology is being used today to manage communities – and how it might be abused in the future.
At the very last, an AI strategy needs to consider: – Guidelines and commitments regarding where AI will or will not be used, in alignment with expectations of privacy and human rights. This needs to be specific in relation to the use of AI in activities that involve with the general public (chat bots for customer service, automation of penalty notices, use in video surveillance, etc) and should provide clarity for staff whose working lives may be impacted by these technologies (such as customer service agents). – An inventory of where AI is being used today, and why. This may require an investigation of existing software applications to determine their own use of AI. – Clarification of decision-making processes and guidelines to be used when making future investments in AI based technologies. – Guidelines for managers and staff as to which AI services are cleared for use, and for what purposes. – Further guidelines regarding how different data types can be used in relation to AI systems.
This is not an exhaustive list, and the creation of a strategy should start with the creation of a stakeholder group that can work though a more comprehensive set of considerations.
AI has massive potential to do good things for local government, such as improving services and reducing their cost of delivery. But as with many fast-developing technologies, the potential for backlash – and very real damage – is equally strong.
As a communications trainer, there is one piece of advice that I find myself offering up more than any other. It’s also a piece of advice that I find the hardest to implement.
Slow down.
Rapid-fire delivery is one of the most common crimes committed by speakers, be it on stage, in interviews, or in general conversations. It is also one of the most likely reasons why your communication efforts may not be having the desired impact.
Just because you can speak quickly, that doesn’t mean your audience can listen quickly. And there is no chance they will retain or be influenced by what you’re saying if they can’t keep up with you.
I know this from the repeated experience of being on the receiving end of fast talkers. As a journalist who sometimes records interviews, I’ve heard things in the recordings that I never heard the during the interview. I’ve even asked questions that had been already answered earlier.
When you speak quickly, your listener will hear a few components of what you have to say, but they are unlikely to retain much of value. Like a stone skipping across a pond, you offer no chance for your words to sink in.
Listening is not a passive process (Oscar Trimboli can tell you a lot more about that).
When a person is listening, they are also often learning something new, and trying to assimilate that knowledge with what they already know. By speaking too quickly, you fail to give your audience time to absorb what you are saying, which can lead to them falling behind and quickly losing interest.
Fast speakers have offered me plenty of excuses for their rapid-fire delivery. For some, it is a habit they developed early in life that they have found hard to break. For others, fast speaking arises from nervousness, and the feeling they need to say everything they need to say before they forget it. And for some, it comes about simply because they are excited and have a lot to say and are trying to cram in as much information in as possible (which is the excuse I most often give myself).
None of these excuses alleviate the suffering of the audience, and no matter what the reason, fast speaking will always mean you are less likely to influence your audience in the way you wanted to.
Unfortunately, there is no fast remedy for fast speaking, other than enforcing a stricter discipline over your delivery speed. Trust me, I’ve looked.
There are however some techniques you can use to make things easier for yourself and your audience.
The first is to pause every now and again. This works especially well on stage by providing a moment for your audience to catch up.
The second is to repeat the things you most want your audience to hear. This tends to also work best in presentations, but can also be used to great effect in interviews or even conversations – just don’t overdo it. You might also want to come back to key ideas several times in different ways (for instance, placing them in context using examples) to ensure they sink in.
Neither strategy is as good as simply slowing down though, and that means being conscious of your speed of delivery and taking the steps needed to moderate your flow.
The great thing is, slowing down not only helps you’re audience, but it also gives you greater control over what you are saying. Slowing down enables you to think further ahead, as your brain is able to catch up to (or get ahead of) the words coming out of your mouth. This means you can start to guide the discussion, and you can also buy yourself the cognitive capacity to pay more attention to your audience and their non-verbal responses.
And you also are likely to become more economical with your use of words. Faster speakers tend to use more words than they need, as they are using ‘verbal polystyrene’ to pad out what they are saying and buy time to think about what they really want to say.
Slowing down gives you more time to think about what you are saying, which can see you using less words to say exactly what you need to say in the same time it would take if you were talking quickly.
Most importantly, slowing down creates a better experience for the audience – and that is crucial if you truly want your words to have any chance of changing the way they think, feel, or behave.
At the heart of all professional communication lies a very basic equation, whose solution goes a long way towards determining whether your efforts succeed or fail.
When you are telling a story for professional purposes, you are asking for something from your audience. Initially you want their attention, but what you often really want is the chance to change the way they think, feel, or behave.
However, if you want something from your audience, then you had better be giving back something in return. And if you really want to be successful, then you need to make sure they believe that what you are giving them is worth more than what they are giving back.
Whether you are delivering a presentation, being interviewed, sitting on a panel discussion, or even writing a blog post, the equation is still the same. If what you are giving is worth less than what you are getting back, then you soon won’t be getting back anything.
This equation is obvious in media interviews, where the person being interviewed generally wants the amplification and authority that comes with speaking to reputable media outlets. Journalists just want good stories (I always did), but we are not the group you are really trying to influence – which is unfortunate, as without an audience, stories can have no impact. Fail to give the audience something of value, and no one gets what they want.
It is also true in sales engagements, where it is obvious that you want something from your audience – i.e., their money. If someone can’t see the value in listening to you from the outset, then you’re going to find reaching your goal becomes harder and harder.
Exactly what an audience might want varies from situation to situation. In some instances it is knowledge of current events. In others it is insight and education. At other times they might simply seek entertainment. But in all instances, if the audience is not getting something of value, then they won’t be an audience for long.
This value equation applies in all forms of communication, such as on-stage presentations, blog posts, or even sales and marketing material. No one is going to pay it any attention unless the value of doing so is established very, very early.
Journalists act as proxies for our audiences, by putting ourselves into their shoes and considering the questions they might like to see asked and the things they might want to learn. The better we are at this, the better we become at connecting with and building that audience. One of the primary reasons I’ve declined interviews throughout my career is that I saw no value in them for my audience
But for any professional communicator, understanding the needs of the audience is critical. If you don’t know who your audience is, then how can you know what they want or what they need – and therefor how can you be sure to be delivering anything of value?
Understanding your audience is one of fundamental elements of good communication. There is never any excuse for not putting in the time to research your audience appropriately, and failure to do the appropriate research is one of the primary reasons why communication efforts fail to achieve their goals.
Most people are polite, but if they are only listening to you out of politeness, that can hardly be classed as a successful outcome.
Only by understanding your audience can you define what value they might be seeking, and align what you can offer to them. It’s surprising how often delivering greater value to your audience upfront will be rewarded in the long term.
In an era where privacy has been steadily eroded, the one sanctuary that most of us have held on to is the privacy of the thoughts within our heads.
But it seems even this last redoubt might soon come under siege. Because while for centuries now psychics have claimed the ability to read minds, now we are making this capability real, thanks to rapid development in the field of neurotechnology, and specifically, the creation of brain computer interface (BCI) devices.
But once more it seems the pace at which we can develop new capabilities is going to outstrip our ability to consider and manage the consequences.
So what is a BCI? Put simply, it is a device for sensing and interpreting the signals of the brain. Where common neurotechnology devices such as MRI scanners can determine what parts of the brain are active at any given time, a BCI device can determine what the brain is actually doing – or more specifically – what it is thinking.
Today the capabilities of BCI devices greatly depends on the proximity they can achieve to the neurons they are trying to sense, with the best results achieved using implanted devices where electrodes are inserted under the skull, such as in the example described above. Good results have also been achieved from devices implanted under the scalp, and even wearable (non-invasive) devices are showing promise.
Exactly how accurate these wearable devices will prove remains to be seen, but given their use is mostly unregulated (especially as they are not ‘medical’devices), there is a good chance that a lot of investment dollars will be keen to see how finely their resolution can be tuned (Elon Musk certainly seems keen).
But the implications of BCI technology go far beyond giving speech to the speechless. Creating a devise that enables one party access to the thoughts or another has massive implications across many aspects of life.
Take marketing for example. Not only might a marketer be able to see through the difference between what a person thinks and what they say, but they could also be able to pick up on signals and make suggestions based on thoughts that a person might not even be aware of. This would be a much more accurate form of contextual advertising, based on evidence rather than inference.
Whether any individual might be willing to submit to constant mind surveillance by their favourite brand is unlikely – although with the right incentive, not impossible. However, there is one scenario where BCIs are likely to play a major role – the metaverse.
One of the key barriers to truly immersive virtual reality experiences is the control interface, which must use hand and body gestures as proxies to control actions within the virtual world. Using a BCI however means a person might only have to think about ‘running’ in a specific direction, or about picking up an object, or any manner of other interactions, for that thought to be translated into an action in the virtual world.
How much of a stretch is it to go from monitoring a participant’s commands to interpreting all of the other data that the BCI is extracting?
One immediate application is contextual advertising, and the ability to present a brand at the precise moment when a person is thinking about that product category.
For content platforms, whose job is to keep people engaged, the BCI can be used to present content which has been determined as being most likely to garner a response at that moment in time. Given the furore that erupted when Facebook was shown to be manipulating people’s moods through the content it showed them, it is not hard to see the possible harm that might result.
Or what about for an online casino, which now knows exactly what it needs to offer to keep a player engaged and spending?
While none of these possibilities are viable with the BCI technology available today, at the current rate of progress, this decade is the one where the boundaries will be tested – not some distant and unforeseeable future.
So what will the world look like when not even the thoughts in our head are ours alone?
If you’re interested in learning more about the technical, legal, and ethical challenges of neurotechnology, then please come along to the second Neurotechnology Forum, taking place in Sydney on May 17.
Disabled Australians eat fast food, wash clothes using laundry powder, and even drive cars. But looking at the people used to promote these products in advertising shows not a single disabled person in sight.
The tendency towards only featuring able-bodied people in advertising might be defended based on the law of averages (as the average Australian person is not likely to be visibly disabled), but this runs against the spirit of inclusivity that many brands preach. It also ignores the reality that one in six Australians have a disability.
In this article for CMO Australia I had the chance to explore the topic of representation for disabled Australians in mainstream advertising, and speak to some of the marketers that are working to bring greater representation to a diverse group of Australians.
Amidst all the discussion regarding generative AI brought on by the release of ChatGPT and its cousins, another intelligence-based technology may well have an even more profound impact on human life.
Like AI, neurotechnology is a field of research which has existed for many decades, and which has also made some fundamental leaps forward in this decade. Chief among these have been breakthroughs in the use of electronic sensors to detect and decode human thoughts, opening new possibilities for direct control and communication with digital systems, and unleashing a plethora of moral and ethical considerations.
For example, in 2021 researchers demonstrated a system which implanted neurotechnology into a person who was paralysed and non-verbal, and which enabled them to use this brain control interface (BCI) technology to communicate at a rate of 18 words per minute with up to 94 per cent accuracy.
Such technology holds enormous promise through providing new communication options to those who can’t speak, or command and control capabilities to those with limited physical ability, or perhaps one day to give sight to the sightless. This technology can also enable a range of sensations in remote communications, such as bringing a sense of touch or smell to interactions within virtual worlds.
Importantly, these are not possibilities of a distant future – some are being tested today – and as interest and funding grow, so too will the speed of the breakthroughs.
But while the underlying technology promises incredible benefits, it is not hard to imagine less savoury use cases, such as the delivery or novel forms of coercion, or for extracting information and confessions from alleged criminals or political dissidents.
The rapid emergence of neurotechnology and its implications for ethics and the law was the key focus of a world first seminar hosted by Jewelrock in Sydney in December 2022 and supported by the law firm Baker McKenzie. During the session numerous global experts on neurotechnology discussed recent breakthroughs and the implications, highlighting the enormous work required to understand and prepare for the future that neurotechnology will deliver.
A second seminar is now planned, as part of a series that will continue through the year and into 2024.
I was fortunate to be invited to write the official report for the event, which you can find by clicking here.
While the true impact of neurotechnology is hard to fathom, one thing is clear – while artificial intelligence may have the spotlight today, we have barely scratched the surface when it comes to technology’s impact on human intelligence.
