Section 1 - The Core Strategy
The Strategy is the most important part of the book. In this section you will find how you are going to go about winning others to your cause! First, you need a strategy, a plan. Without a plan, you will thrash around, stirring up trouble and stepping on toes. Without a plan, you will have no idea what is and isn’t working. You’ll be leaving everything to chance. That just won’t do! Your idea is too important to leave to chance!
To convince others you need to do one simple thing: make the change worth the cost. Ultimately, you need to get your point across, and that means proving that your suggestion is worth it. As the saying goes, “ideas are cheap, execution is everything”.
Tip: Make the change worth the cost
The following eight steps outline are my recommendations for how to prepare your idea to be successful. Not every successful idea follows exactly this path, but following it will help you stay organized and ensure you don’t miss anything obvious. Over time, you will get skilled enough that you won’t need to refer to this list to keep track of the details.
Core Steps
- Ready Yourself
- Clearly Understand What You Are Suggesting
- (Optionally) Find Allies Who Will Support You
- Determine Decision Makers
- Isolate Decision Makers’ Needs
- Address Needs
- Propose Your Idea
- Modify And Repeat As Needed
Simple as that. If you can figure out how to successfully communicate a proposal that best meets the needs of the decision makers, you will win them to your cause.
In reality it can be very difficult to follow these steps, otherwise you wouldn’t be stuck. We’ll cover each step in greater detail in the following chapters.
Social Capital
Before we talk about the Core Steps, we need to define an important concept: social capital. Social capital is a term we use to loosely sum up all the trust, respect, credibility, and favors you are owed. You can’t actually get any sort of number, but you can roughly estimate how much trust people have in you based on your experiences with them. You can also think of it like an “emotional bank account.” Every emotionally positive interaction you have with someone is a deposit in their emotional bank account; every negative interaction a withdrawal.
The amount of social capital you have varies from person to person and your individual interactions with that person. One person might owe you a number of favors. They will give you greater freedom or help than someone who distrusts you because you let them down in the past.
Tip: You can “borrow” social capital to push forward an idea
Think of social capital as a line of credit. The person who trusts you a lot is willing to let you convince them more easily than someone who distrusts you. The problem is you have to pay back that borrowed capital, or they will not lend you as much next time. If you pay it back with extra, they will trust you even more next time.
For example, I want to propose a new idea at work that I think will make us a lot more productive. I go to my boss and propose my suggestion. He thinks it is a bad idea. I have previously made good suggestions, so I have a good line of social capital with him. He lets me implement the idea “on credit” even though he doesn’t like it. If my idea is a massive failure, he will be a lot less willing to trust me in the future. If it is a success, he will trust me even more.
Convincing coworkers requires social capital. Unusual or unconventional ideas rarely stand on their own, and most of the best ideas are unusual or unconventional. The proposer will almost always need trust and respect from their coworkers if their ideas are to succeed.