As an attorney, I've found that the best persuasion is the removal of impediments and friction standing between the person you hope to influence and what they want to do in the first place.
Most other tactics amount to force or deceit ("manipulation").
For most of us ideally a colleague is more aligned than that.
But yeah, aligning incentives and making friends. Even if they don't go the way you want, you both still had a positive experience and can potentially find a way to work together in the future.
I always found that put me in the right headspace to focus on listening first, then being clear. Whether they sort themselves into a yes or no is on them.
If it is truly two way in this sense, including your best efforts to extract from the other party their strongest, potentially unexpected, arguments for their position and give them your due consideration, it shouldn't feel like manipulation.
Well, yes there is.
In fact, that is the central problem of unresolvable divisions. People implicitly making themselves "the decider" by imagining their principles are so great as to preclude any need for revision. (Faith in the primacy of one's beliefs, is inherently the same as faith in one's own primacy to choose beliefs.)
There is nothing wrong with having strong core principles, because your best understanding supports them strongly. But as soon as you discount the possibility of them being wrong, even partially wrong, not the whole picture, framed within a non-tautological assumption, or not supercedable by other wiser principles, ..., you become the enemy of your own progress.
Nobody's knowledge, wisdom, or principles are complete, or have consistent primacy over all others.
Ultimately, principles, ethics and morality are a kind of economics. Decisions are tradeoffs between options. How does one make choices, so that the result is the outcome with the greatest value, and doesn't create other problems that exceed what is solved. That is a decidability problem, which will never have a complete or completely consistent answer.
The landscape for the question "What is best?" and "What is true?" is chaotic, fractal, non-Euclidean and infinitely complex.
---
One of the biggest reasons to strong man the arguments of others, is the better at strong manning you become, the more likely you find something worth changing your own views over. Regardless of how explicit, implicit, or non-existent that was in their original argument.
Leveraging others disagreement, to identify misunderstandings and gaps in one's own knowledge, is the most important reason to talk to someone we disagree with.
Persuading them should be second, but is also more likely if we are clearly pushing ourselves to improve first.
There are very few cases where someone who disagrees with us doesn't see something wrong with our side. Or at a minimum, is not convinced because we are not as clear of a communicator as we think we are. Or not as good a listener as to what their question is, as we think. Even when we are "mostly right" and they are "mostly wrong", others rarely can't teach us something more about what we already know in one of those dimensions.
---
Finally, don't try to persuade people in real time. Discuss, then move on. Discuss again if they want to.
People don't decide anything big in the moment.
They need time to understand an argument. Time to consider both its strengths and weaknesses. And time to consider ramifications we haven't even imagined. And the freedom to prioritize what is worth going down a rabbit hole for, in their life.
---
I have been preparing to persuade a lot of people of something highly contrarian for a long time. This topic lights all the fires in me!
“Ratianolising” is the word used in the most wrong way. The word normally describes inventing post-hoc reasons for some decision or behavior.
“Negotiating” is a big list of aphorisms which pull in different directions. Some of the advice sounds like amateurish art-of-the-deal tips which encourage you to extract as many concessions as you can from the other side. Some of the advice pulls in the opposite direction. And then, to mix everything up, the advice to compromise and meet half-way rears its ugly head.
The more I read in this article, the worse my opinion gets. I’m stopping.
:-(
I think if you already have well-developed thoughts about persuasion and social interaction, it might not add much, but it was useful for me.
I had a bit of a moment when I first became a PM. (I've done a bunch of things, engineering / sales / founding, but PM only sort of recently.) I realized that my job was to wake up in the morning and pick fights. Or more diplomatically: to tell people they were doing the wrong thing, and they should be doing a different thing, in a way that made them want to listen to me more in the future, not less.
That's the job. In fact, in almost every job, that's the job.
Impact happens when you reach people and they behave differently because of you. That's nothing to be ashamed of. If you do it authentically and with good intent, it's one of the best things you can do with your time.
There might be systemic issues getting in the way. You and them having competing OKRs for example. Good to surface that and deal with it too.
Even in direct selling, many people don't want to feel they're being sold to! At a minimum, they don't want to feel out of control on decision they care about. But they're frequently open to learning, even if the constraints of how much time / credit they'll give you are extremely different.
The action of manipulating people is fairly obvious. It means you have a predetermined outcome that you want other people to accept The same assumption is implicit in the "How can I influence others..." Again there is the same predetermined outcome.
The answer then is obvious. You cannot. Perhaps what you are looking for is instead a way to join with other people in a participatory/collaborative fashion. You can ask what other people think, you can talk about what you think.
But as long as you have a predetermined outcome in mind, I suspect your only choices is manipulation.
You might also want to reassess what the question is. We talk about so much, but we do so little. Imagine that my car won't start and I want to fix it. The idea of influencing people here is silliness. We care very little about who thinks what, as long as the car starts. The thinking is in service of an action that produces a result.
In my opinion! :-)
[edit: fix wording, typos]
sema4hacker•5h ago
codr7•2h ago
klodolph•2h ago
My first reaction to this? I think that you’re using “manipulate” to describe a process where somebody doesn’t want to do something, and make them do it anyway, but without using force. It feels like this has to be rooted in some kind of denial of other people’s free will—that they are somehow incapable of choosing to help you or agree with you, and can only be tricked. It seems like you would need to believe that other people don’t genuinely like you or value you.
kaechle•2h ago
Kidding aside, my first reaction was: perhaps the occasions they were aware of their own influence were ones in which they didn't much care for the outcome. Or maybe a conflict of interest, like trying to win over a hiring manager for a position you know you'll hate.
I don't think cajoling or persuading others inherently manipulative, but I can think of a lot of examples where doing so feels grimy.
klodolph•39m ago
What I am trying to do is understand why sema4hacker, and some others, feel that influencing people is manipulative. So if you pop into the conversation and say that you don’t feel the same way that sema4hacker does, that doesn’t really help me understand sema4hacker’s perspective.
That’s the bounding leap here and I want to pull it apart, dissect it. The bounding leap from “I influenced somebody” to “I manipulated them”. I think there’s not just raw, random feelings here, but some kind of rational thought that I want to understand.
rendx•1h ago
In an "original" definition, manipulation literally means "to move". In that sense, we all manipulate. We move.
The two combined together: You're allowed to "move". You are broadly "allowed" to "manipulate" in that sense. If you add lies, deceit, etc, you're in territory others might not find acceptable, and will in turn reject you or remove you from their lives.
If you feel bad about your "success" but can't see why on a rational level, you may want to remember how your parents or other people growing up treated you. Can you find some childhood memories related to this? Potentially "adverse" experiences related to "manipulation" around you?