“A thousand songs in your pocket.”
“Two great tastes that taste great together.”
“Jaws in space.”
Do any of those sound familiar?
The first is how Steve Jobs famously introduced the Apple iPod in 2001. The second is the 1970s and ’80s tagline for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups—the “two great tastes” being chocolate and peanut butter. The third is how director and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon pitched what became the sci-fi thriller Alien to movie studios.
What do you notice about each of them?
They don’t just introduce something new (or new to you); they explain it using elements you already know. If you were the ideal audience for these products, you also already wanted or valued those elements. Each message has generated billions of dollars for the products they sold by making something unfamiliar feel familiar.
Since change is all about doing or thinking the unfamiliar, the more you understand how to create this fusion of familiar elements, the more agreeable—and effective—your change communications will be.
If you’ve ever impulsively clicked the “Buy” button and later wondered, “What was I thinking!?” you’ve experienced buyer’s remorse. It’s most common after hasty decisions or impulse purchases spurred on by excitement, pressure, or even coercion. You’re not sure the decision is right, but it might be. Either way, you probably feel that the risk of being wrong, or being perceived as wrong, is too great. So, you take a leap of faith and say yes to something in the moment only to regret the decision later, sometimes even immediately.
But there’s no such thing as “believer’s remorse.” (Fun fact: marketing guru Seth Godin mentioned me and this concept in his new book, This is Strategy!) If someone believes their decision was right, and if it continues to resonate with who they want to be and how they see themselves, they won’t regret the decision itself. That holds true even when a change is difficult to make or implement, or doesn’t achieve the outcome someone hoped for.
So how can you help make a change feel right to someone else? You already know some of the requirements:
- A change needs to satisfy someone’s internal story.
- It must be consistent with their deep-seated beliefs and identity.
- It must be the result of a decision a person makes with full agency and control, even if they lack complete knowledge or confidence.
One additional requirement for making a change feel right for someone is to ensure it makes sense to them in the first place.
To do that, it helps to understand what happens in someone’s brain when they hear or see new information. Their brain’s first step is to try to connect that information to something they already know. The more the new information connects with prior knowledge or learning, the more likely understanding will follow. The more someone understands, the more obvious the points of alignment become. And the more the change aligns with what someone wants and believes, the more likely they’ll be to make it.
When O’Bannon pitched Alien, he was unknown as a writer. For the studios he was pitching to, risking $10 million on the script required a giant leap of faith.
As with other kinds of leaps, the larger it is, the likelier it is to fall short, especially if it doesn’t spring from a stable source. The bigger the “yes” you’re asking for, the more likely it is that you’ll get a “no.”
But O’Bannon’s pitch reduced that risk by attaching the idea of his new movie to two other films—Jaws and Star Wars—that studio executives knew to have been incredibly popular and profitable. Four years earlier, Jaws had become the highest-grossing film of all time. Two years later, Star Wars surpassed it. Just as each scene builds the story in a book, movie, or play, each of the “Jaws” and “in space” parts of O’Bannon’s pitch built the case for his idea and how it would deliver the financial return the producers wanted. Alien went on to become the fifth-highest-grossing movie in the year it was released, and the start of what has become the highest-grossing horror movie franchise in history.
The lesson these three examples teach is that change communication or selling an idea isn’t about persuading others to jump blindly. It’s a process of leading people, step-by-step, through a narrative they already know, like, and trust, along a path to your new idea. Rather than one big “yes,” you secure a series of what my friend, author, and human connection expert Tim David calls “little yeses”—each serving as permission to proceed.1 Not only do those “yeses” give your audience more control (lessening the chance they’ll reject the change now or regret their agreement later), but they also tell you if and where your stakeholders don’t understand or agree, saving everyone a lot of time, money, and regret.
IN OTHER WORDS… People don’t regret the decisions they believe are right. Instead of asking for leaps of faith, build bridges of belief.
If a person doesn’t understand the change you’re presenting, they won’t act on it—at least, not for long. The more that any new information you introduce aligns with what a person already knows, the more likely it is that both the case for change and the change itself will make more sense.
In writing and rhetoric, the technique for aligning new information with what someone already knows is commonly called the “known-new contract,” after a theory originally developed by two researchers, Herbert H. Clark and Susan E. Haviland, who studied the connection between language and psychological processes.
To use the technique in your own communication, start with something the stakeholder already knows, and then link that information to a new piece of information. That new information becomes known, which means you can then link it to another new piece of information. By familiarizing the unfamiliar for your stakeholders, this technique encourages genuine interest and commitment, making every step toward the change feel smaller and less risky.
Your stakeholders can rely on their own knowledge and experience—not just on your assurances—to validate your case for change. They’ve said yes to some of the pieces before, which makes saying yes to the whole much, much easier.