The Vindicators' Blog

Why This is the "Vindicators' Blog"

Now that I've blogged about the Three Vs, I can point out that the blog is named for the third V, the Vindicator who is trying to correct the harm done to the victims in the story.  I'm hoping that I can use this blog to outline tools that will help people become better Vindicators.

Strategic Dumbfounding - Part 2

I just wanted to add a couple of more things about why I've started writing this blog:

1. I want to address how we make recommendations about how to be more persuasive.
2. I want to share my approach to these issues.  I've tested these ideas over the last five years and I've come to believe:

• That they work.
• That they are different from how I see most others approaching how we persuade.
• And that they can be improved by scrutiny and input.

It's the last point in particular that has motivated me to start blogging.

Strategic Dumbfounding and the Question "Why?"

"Why?" is a good question to keep in your arsenal. It's a weapon you can draw out every so often to attack your own reasoning. The trick to using "Why?" is not just to use it once or twice but to keep asking it until you are five, six, seven or more layers into your assumptions. (Toyota developed a formal process for this called The Five Whys.) The problem with "Why?" is that sometimes you run out of answers.

A while back, I started asking myself "Why?" I had spent fifteen years counseling people about how to win political campaigns and solve public relations and marketing problems, so I obviously thought clients should take my advice. But I wanted to be able to answer the question if they were to ask me "Why? What makes your advice right or even better than someone else's?" Turns out, I didn't care for my own answers.

No matter how I answered each round of "Why?" I wound up at the same place. The penultimate answer was "Because I have a poll (or a focus group or other form of market research) that says I'm right and backs up my conclusions." But in the face of another round of "Why?" this answer started to fall apart. After all, in every political campaign there are two sides with polls conducted with equal rigor that come to conclusions that are both statistically accurate and often COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. And on any given day, thanks to priming, framing and quirks of question order and wording, you can get entirely different poll results out of the same sample of people. So, I needed an answer for another level of "Why?"

What I was left with, no matter how I tried to dress it up, boiled down to "Because I'm an expert and I said so," which in my view was pretty much no answer at all. I've taken to calling this place I found myself in "strategic dumbfounding" because after all your rationalizing about why your advice should be heeded, you realize that when you get down to the final"Why?" you have nothing left to say.

This blog is about how I've tried to answer the final strategic "Why?" for communication problems, what I've found and how it can be put to use. It's also meant to be a work-in-progress, where I can ask what others think and put these ideas to the test.

So here's my first question in that regard: "Would you have answered the question about why your advice should be followed differently?" (It doesn't matter what your job is - everyone gives advice.) And then, of course, the follow up question: "Why?"