GUEST ACADEMIC
‘The field of strategy has made huge advances in the past 20 years. The field of strategy implementation, in contrast, has made much less progress’
write it up in a form that is easy to understand, that is clear’. That’s how I do my work, and that’s what led to the book.” The challenge, says Kotter, is that the amount of thought and edu- cation put into creating good ideas is far higher today than the knowledge and instruction on how to implement these ideas. “In the world of business, for example, the field of strategy has made huge advances in the past 20 years,” he says. “The field of strategy imple- mentation, in contrast, has made much less progress.” The premise presented by Kotter is one with which most of us will be familiar: you have a solid and innovative idea that you know can work, but you need sufficient support to make it happen. You pres- ent your idea well and then, along with the thoughtful feedback, comes the barrage of inane comments, confounding questions and verbal bullets. No matter how good or innovative the idea, it gets shot down, is accepted without sufficient support to gain all of its true benefits, or it slowly dies a death. It need not be this way, he says.
Common attack strategies Just understanding the most common attack strategies employed by the naysayers is tremendously helpful in achieving your goal of getting buy-in, he says. Kotter and Whitehead break these down into four key areas: confusion, death by delay, fear-mongering, and ridicule/character assassination. These are employed not just by the devious, but also by well-
meaning participants. “The motives that people have, consciously or unconsciously, when they pull up their verbal guns and shoot a bul- let can vary greatly, from the person who actually thinks yours is a good idea but thinks – perhaps naïvely – if they ask this question you’ll come back with an answer that will gain it more support, all the way to the other extreme of somebody who is deeply jealous of you, who will do everything possible to make sure you do not achieve your aim.” Confusion: “This is an important one,” says Kotter. “The more we educate ourselves, the more we inadvertently teach people how to be very good at this. This is where somebody comes in and it’s hard to even understand the question, much less remember the answer. So, your answer comes across as fumbling, and it raises credibility among a reasonable person in the audience.
“Or the great one is ‘what about this and this and this and this and this?’ and after 20 objections you’re desperately trying to remember what the 20 are, and so it’s impossible not to come across tongue- tied in your answer, and looking a little foolish.” Death by delay: “This is a big one and we’ve seen this all the time,”
says Kotter. The classic response is ‘this is a fascinating idea and we want to get it right. I think we should form a taskforce’. We all know where that goes,” he laughs. “The government is great at this – the Prime Minister hates it so he forms a committee and 19 years later,
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the whole thing is irrelevant by the time the committee gets around to reporting.” Fear-mongering: “This is simply about raising anxieties because once people have even unconscious anxieties, they back away from your idea,” says Kotter. “That’s just human nature. Again, there are all kinds of lit- tle subtleties that can be employed here, like referring back to some event in the past that was disastrous to the point where it hurt people, and you end up with people feeling the hairs on the back of their neck rise. Even certain words can do it. In the US, if you can somehow work the word ‘lawyer’ into a question, that can have the immediate effect of putting previous supporters off.” Ridicule/character assassination: “The last attack strategy to be
aware of is ridicule, or the extreme case of this is really character assassination,” he says. “Clever people can zip you and make it look like they’re not trying to do exactly that. They can subtly bring about a little chuckle in the audience that reduces your credibility, and sud- denly everybody begins to wonder whether they should support you because he or she has successfully made fun of you.” Character assas- sination is rarely overt, and is usually applied with a light hand, says Kotter, but is nonetheless effective. The book breaks these down into 24 actual attacks and strategies to counter them but, says, Kotter, “everything can be grouped more or less into these four areas, and just knowing that – it’s amazing – it really helps a lot.”
A counterintuitive strategy that works As regards countering these attack strategies, Kotter and Whitehead steer away from common persuasion and communication tactics. Far from trying to keep the naysayers out of the room, the authors’ approach welcomes them into the discussion, and treats them with patience and respect. Kotter tells me that the key strategies can be broken down into five areas. “Again we’ve tried to make these easy to remember and deal with,” he says.
Win the minds of the relevant attentive audience with simple, clear, and common-sense responses
“It turns out if you study people who are good at this, they keep their responses as simple, as succinct, as clear as possible,” says Kotter. “Common sense turns out to be a very powerful weapon, especially against all the fog and the bullets that can come at you. That’s tricky because the more we’re educated the more we want to explain every- thing, but when we try to do that, in a sense we feed the confusion strategy.”
Win their hearts by, most of all, showing respect “Respect is vital, because you can’t predict the motives of the attacker,” says Kotter. “It’s so tempting when something is coming at you to
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