By John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead
Harvard Business Review Press, 192 pages, $22
If you have a good idea, brace yourself. You may expect everyone to embrace it immediately, congratulating you on your brilliance. But more likely, you will find the proposal (and perhaps even you, its proponent) undermined and attacked.
ou will have finished presenting the idea to colleagues when a barrage of silly questions, inane comments, vicious attacks and delaying tactics erupt. The responses could block your idea from moving forward, or kill it outright.
“It can be maddening,” Harvard Business School change expert John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead, Leader of Education Innovation at the University of British Columbia, note in their new book, Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down.
“You end up flustered, embarrassed, or furious. All those who would benefit from the idea lose. In an extreme case, a whole company or nation may lose,” they write.
The authors argue it doesn’t have to be this way, and offer a counterintuitive approach to making sure you triumph over the naysayers. It starts by welcoming those critics into the conversation and basically encouraging them to shoot at you. Sometimes the toughest part of getting an idea approved is drawing attention to it, and the attacks will help generate the interest you need.
Instead of trying to overwhelm your critics with a barrage of facts and figures, or counterpunch with heated replies, listen patiently and respond civilly, with crisp, general, respectful answers. It’s the leadership equivalent of Muhammad Ali’s “rope-a-dope” strategy in his famous 1974 match against George Foreman in Zaire, in which he wore down his rival by backing up against the ropes and accepting his opponent’s most punishing blows until his foe tired.
In the case of defending your fresh idea, the authors argue, your critics will eventually run out of steam and the audience will be won over by your brief, common-sense statements that deliberately avoid presenting a litany of facts, figures and dense arguments.
“An approach of overwhelming others with data and logic certainly sounds reasonable and certainly can be successful some of the time. But a potential danger is that it can inadvertently make it hard to develop – even can kill – the very quality that must be present in order to build strong attention for an idea: Crucial attention,” they observe. So don’t take a chance on confusing your audience. Clarify, and do it in simple terms.
The authors spell out a list of the 24 attacks that can surface, such as: “We’ve been successful, so why change?” “What’s the hidden agenda here?” “You’re abandoning our core values.” “It’s too simplistic to work.” “No one else does this!” “We tried it before and it didn’t work.” “We can’t afford this.” And so on.
The authors also provide a short, generous reply that will help you deflate each attack in a charming, deft way. The 24 arguments, they explain, really fall into four main categories:
Fear mongering: This sort of attack raises anxieties, so that a thoughtful examination of the proposal is difficult, if not impossible.
Delay: These objections slow down the communication and discussion of the plan so critical buy-in can’t be achieved before a critical cut-off time or organizational attention wanders on to something else.
Confusion: Here you endure a fusillade of questions and criticisms that aren’t even related to one another – “What about this?” “What about that?” The discussion spirals out of control, and the audience concludes the proposal isn’t well thought out.
Ridicule or character assassination: Here the verbal bullets are aimed at you, not the idea, as the critics try to make the idea’s proponent look silly.
Instead of sailing into a meeting to discuss your ideas drunk on their brilliance, the authors urge you to prepare for these kinds of attacks so you can neutralize them. The writers stress that the method, although powerful, isn’t guaranteed to work in cases with a particularly aggressive, nasty opposition (think of the world of politics), but for the vast majority of us, in the vast majority of business situations, they are sure it can help our ideas triumph.
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Fact Box
The 24 Attacks
1. We’ve been successful; why change?
2. Money (or some other problem a proposal does not address) is the real issue.
3. You exaggerate the problem.
4. You’re implying that we’ve been failing!
5. What’s the hidden agenda here?
6. What about this, and that, and this, and that…?
7. Your proposal goes too far/does not go far enough.
8. You have a chicken-and-egg problem.
9. Sounds like [something most people dislike] to me!
10. You’re abandoning our core values.
11. It’s too simplistic to work.
12. No one else does this.
13. You can’t have it both ways.
14. Aha! You can’t deny this! [“This” being a worrisome thing that the proposers know nothing about and the attackers keep secret until just the right moment]
15. To generate this many questions and concerns, the idea has to be flawed.
16. We tried that before – didn’t work.
17. It’s too difficult to understand.
18. Good idea, but this is not the right time.
19. It’s just too much work to do this.
20. It won’t work here; we’re different!
21. It puts us on a slippery slope.
22. We can’t afford this.
23. You’ll never convince enough people.
24. We’re simply not equipped to do this.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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