The Right Story: The secret to spreading your ideas

We mistakenly believe that changemaking and persuasion are only about getting someone’s attention by creating awareness of an issue or option, and then presenting people with rational arguments that will convince them to make choices we find desirable. But both the science and what we ourselves witness in the world around us prove otherwise.

Effective change engages someone in the act of becoming the kind of person they want to be.

The goal won’t always be to get them to change their behaviour. Often we’re trying to help people to see the world through a different lens, one that causes them to question their worldviews.

Geography and tradition can influence where you choose to show up to tell your story.

We must choose whether we want to make weak ties by going broad and shallow, or strong ties by going narrow and deep. We need to decide if we want to be the loudest or most resonant, most visible or most memorable. We can’t be both.

The Change Journey consists of four parts: attention, connection, persuasion, and action.

If you want to appeal to the right people you have to be willing to repel the wrong people.

Now, instead of investing time to understand customers’ unmet needs and unspoken desires as successful companies had been doing for generations, we began to monitor their online behaviour, looking for patterns and vulnerabilities, gathering data to leverage later—sometimes to serve or oftentimes to exploit the user. Virality became top of mind.

Before you begin to craft your message, you need to decide if the purpose of that message is to get attention or to deepen trust and connection. Is it to empower people to be open to persuasion or to act?