Healthy Influence Blog

Politely put, this blog seeks to think outside the box, color outside the lines, and in general try to ride a beam of light while sitting in a trolley car.  Less politely, the blog aims to be outrageous, foolish, and weird; sans sense, restraint, or good manners.  More poetically, to be mad, bad, and dangerous to know.  To that end, let me recommend a book no practical or theoretical persuader would consider:  Uncommon Therapy, the Psychiatric Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, written by Jay Haley.

Note immediately that both Erickson and Haley were serious scholars while also pursuing the therapeutic arts.  People smarter than me still read them, think about them, and cite them.  They are scientists seeking control through knowledge.  Erickson and Haley also approached therapy with an orientation anyone would call persuasion:  They wanted to move the client to a therapist selected goal using communication as their tool.

Realize, second, the context.  We’re dealing with willing receivers who believe they can get better.  They seek us out and want our ideas.  Everyone but your enemies wants this or can be led to believe they want this.  This is or can be all states of interaction short of a state of war.  Thus, with anyone with whom you are not trying to kill or “kill,” you can apply these ideas.  But always:  This is a situation where the receiver seeks you, even if you arranged for this to happen.  Finally, the receivers are open to change, to the better, even if they see barriers.

Quick internal summary:  good research aimed at changing people who are “troubled,” and want change through or from you.

Now, consider this incomplete list of tactics.

Seed ideas.
Employ metaphors of change.
Encourage resistance.
Provide worse alternatives.
Encourage a relapse.
Enhance responding through frustration.
Avoid self exploration.
Control space and position.

Notice three broad factors working in these tactics.  First, don’t be obvious, just seed the change you want.  Second, deliberately prevent receivers from easily getting to the seeded changes.  Third, manipulate, trick, misdirect, and otherwise control receivers thinking, feeling, and acting while appearing to do something else.

Let me sketch my persuasion take on the tactics.

Seed ideas and Employ metaphors of change.  These two tactics suggest an indirect approach where you do not explicitly state a desired goal or offer an explicit means of achieving it.  You move through indirection with seeds and other metaphors.  These abstractions allow receivers to generate many self-caused and novel responses (i.e. elaborate on the Argument) which is a High WATT approach.  Metaphors can also avoid or elide barriers.

Encourage resistance; Provide worse alternatives; Encourage a relapse; Enhance responding through frustration; and Avoid self exploration.  These tactics deliberately interfere with receiver goal attainment.  It is a motivational tactic with tinges of dissonance and reactance.  First, you seed a metaphor of desired change, but then second, you make the seed more attractive by blocking it.  Receivers must self-motivate to clear the obstacles which produces internal attributions.  This also has tones of inoculation where your weak offense (resistance, worse alternatives, relapse, frustration) encourages a strong defense in the receivers.

Please realize serious limitations to Uncommon Therapy and practical persuasion.  These tactics aim at people with problems seeking solutions with you.  A sales situation is NOT an example of this situation.  You fool yourself if you conceptualize a customer seeking a product or service as somebody with a Milton Erickson kind of “problem.”  Realize that if you get exposed doing this in a practical persuasion situation, you may face a bad backlash.  This is an incredibly manipulative, deliberate, and deceptive approach in most typical situations.  Your appearances do not match your actions.

So, when do you do this?

If I’m in the State Department or the Department of Defense doing “strategic communication,” I do it everyday with any and every foreign counterpart.  Anytime my counterpart has a “problem” and seeks solutions with and through me, you are in a position to apply Uncommon Therapy tactics.  Seed the change you want with metaphors.  Then make active blocking moves that frustrate attainment of the seeded change.

If, I’m a leader/manager/supervisor, I use this to motivate both “problem” receivers and receivers with problems to solve.  Move indirectly.  Offer parables, stories, and other metaphors that exemplify the problem and/or solutions.  Then frustrate easy attainment.  Make the employee with the problem to solve or the “problem” employee struggle through barriers to make the seed bear fruit.

Here’s an example from marriage counseling.

A distressed married couple approaches Erickson about their woes.  He determines that the couple has problems with sex and also does not like talking about this sensitive topic.  He then discusses other situations where the two are together for their mutual enjoyment and hits upon dinner.  He finds that each likes having dinner together and through further discussion finds that each like dinner in different ways.  The woman likes a long, leisurely meal with interesting appetizers before the main dish while the man likes to dive right into the meat and potatoes.  He does not let this analogy go too far and when the man and woman try to make any comparison to sex, Erickson diverts them.  Later in the session, as part of therapy, Erickson requires to the couple to have a dinner together before the next counseling session.

Here’s my ELM analysis.  The metaphors you choose function as strong Arguments aimed at the desired change.  You block receivers easy access to these Arguments which causes them to go High WATT and to elaborate on these metaphors.  This Central Route processing produces strong attitude change that also makes the attitude more active and relevant in the appropriate situation.  Thus, after “therapy,” the receivers have stronger and more favorable attitudes about the change and are more likely to show the behavior in future situations, resist counterattacks to the change, and persist over time.

Now, of course, most practical persuasion situations are not therapeutic in the fullest sense of the word.  I am not offering this post as a new line of persuasion.  Rather ride the trolley car of this as a metaphor and let it stimulate your imagination and contemplation about how you persuade.  Think about the uses of metaphor as a seed rather than as a narrative or a frame.  Consider how blocking tactics can function as an elaboration moderator or WATTage switch.  Test your limits:  how discrepant can you be between your appearances and your actions?

I give no admonition, advice, or argument for any position.  Just think about it for your own benefit.  But follow the Rules.

There Are No Laws of Persuasion.

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

It’s About The Other Guy, Stupid.

Persuasion Is Strategic Or It Is Not.