my father has a saying if something's now worth doing it all that is certainly not worth doing well I think that saying captures an attitude pretty well if you ever felt as if you are trying to convince people to do something well to put their hearts and souls into it that they didn't really care about it all so it was like pushing a string or herding cats because they didn't think your project or your activity was worth doing at all I worked with a call center where the help desk people who answer the phones felt like Rodney Dangerfield's they got no respect it wasn't that they wanted the callers to respect them the callers called in with problems and they just wanted quick action the folks in the call center wanted respect from their own internal people their peers from other departments here was the problem a customer would call in upset about a technical problem or a billing issue or what have you and 95% of the time the person in the call center would solve the problem on the spot and everything would be fine but about 5% of the time the call center employee would need to involve someone from a technical or billing or some other group another employee in their own organization this was where they'd run into problems these folks in other departments wouldn't return their calls or when they did they'd be rude they'd sort of imply that it was beneath them to even be talking to an employee from the call center much less hurrying to meet a deadline set up by a call center employee they didn't think that supporting the call center was worth doing at all much less worth doing well so here's the problem how do you convince people that your issue is important that they ought to care there's a common mistake we tend to make we try to influence people using lectures sermons and data dumps we try power pointing and pencil whipping we try what psychologists call verbal persuasion now we've all read the books on verbal jujitsu and getting to yes but the bottom line is verbal persuasion just isn't very persuasive as soon as people see through our agenda see that we're trying to persuade them they put up defenses I know I so what's a more effective way to change people's minds personal experience is the gold standard if you want someone to say ooh responding to the call centers more important than I thought then the way to get there is to put them in the call center where they experience what the call center people have been experiencing and that's what we did we rotated engineers accountants and even people from their attorney group through call center assignments and it worked people experienced the pressure and the sweat on the front line and they changed their minds response rates improved dramatically now of course we're not alone in using personal experience think of the ads you've seen from Saturn they have engineers and people in assembly travel out to customers to check out their cars I think of McDonald's they have corporate executives spend time each year in their stores cooking fries and handling the order window the next time you need to persuade someone your daughter to keep up with their homework your colleagues to return calls from the call center or whatever think about how you can create a personal experience for them maybe have your daughter volunteer to help with an adult literacy program instead of relying on verbal persuasion