When Followers Don’t Follow: The Limits of Persuasion
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Read the series so far.
Parents, spouses, teachers, team leaders, ministry leaders, and others are often not content with gaining short-term outward compliance from those in their care. They understand that a deeper and more enduring understanding is better, whenever that’s achievable. It follows that they should reach early and often for the tool of persuasion.
But persuasion is sometimes ill suited for the task at hand. At least four situations call for a different approach, either foregoing a persuasive effort to begin with or setting it aside for another day—or possibly tabling it indefinitely for a particular audience.
When to rethink an attempt to persuade:
1. When The Need Is Too Urgent
There’s a suicidal man on the tracks and a train is coming. We’d like to see him understand and embrace his responsibilities to his family and his Creator and reject the self-indulgence of killing himself. But (a) he’s probably deep in a pit of despair and not thinking clearly, and (b) there’s a train coming! The situation calls for some coercion—or whatever the term is for bodily dragging him off the tracks.
It’s an unlikely scene, yes. The point is that when the authority to act coercively exists, and the situation is urgent, persuasion is for later, after everything settles down.
When junior is throwing a wailing fit at Walmart, it’s no time for methodical lecturing about the Golden Rule and common courtesy. It’s best to end the incident as quickly as possible, using whatever means will work (short of actual or perceived harm to the child), and conduct an after-action assessment later. These events have patterns, and some planning can keep most of them from happening at all. Mom or Dad can also do some teaching and have several efficient forms of leverage ready to deploy next time.
2. When It Has Turned Into a Fight
Several Scripture passages come to mind on this point.
It is an honor for a man to keep aloof from strife, but every fool will be quarreling. (ESV, Prov. 20:3)
Remind them of these things, and charge them before God not to quarrel about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers. (2 Tim. 2:14)
The beginning of strife is like letting out water, so quit before the quarrel breaks out. (Prov. 17:14)
We try to persaude because we hope to see others share our belief that a particular point of view or course of action is best. Sometimes we “hope” quite strongly—and when that clashes with strong opinions to the contrary, sparks fly; fires ignite.
So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! (James 3:5)
We’ve all been there. We made our case, and our listener(s) counterargued. We countered the counter; they parried and counterattacked. We returned the favor. Soon it was a verbal brawl, and we could barely remember how it started. The focus shifted to defeating each other rather than discovering the truth.
Sometimes we’re fighting the good fight and standing up for the truth, but usually we’re just quarreling. Regardless, once the interchange has moved into personal verbal combat, we’re no longer engaging in persuasion.
In a fight nobody is listening.
So what can we do instead? Where we don’t have decision-making responsibility/authority, we can simply back off and maybe try another angle another day. Where we do have decision-making responsibility, the best step is often to end discussion, communicate understanding of the other points of view, then state the decision.
3. When It’s Time to Make the Call
Those of us with strong instincts toward persuasion dislike telling people what to do. To us, issuing emphatic imperatives or promising unpleasant consequences feels arrogant and presumptuous. Further, we see wisdom in winning support for our ideas rather than ramming them through.
That may sound noble, but there’s a dark side. Sometimes we’re not seeking the high ground of creating accord so much as we’re trying to feel more confident about making the decision. Are we being humble and respectful or timid and self-indulgent?
Whatever the motivation, sometimes we keep trying to persuade when the decision is ours to make and we’ve already done all the consensus-building that we can or should. It’s time to act.
Framing It
In the give and take of authoritative relationships, listening—truly listening—to counterarguments is often vital. “In the abundance of counselors there is safety” (Prov. 11:14). For the sake of keeping the relationship healthy we should also show that we have listened and understood. But when we’ve done that, and disagreement persists, further effort to persuade is actually damaging.
Not only does it lead to quarreling (see #2), but it encourages confusion about who “the decider” is supposed to be. Whether we’re managers, team leaders, pastors, parents, or husbands—if the decision is ours to make, we need to gently and respectfully, but firmly, demonstrate that it’s ours to make. We often do that best by ceasing attempts to persuade.
I can’t claim to be skilled in this. But through many failures and a small set of successes, I’ve learned the value of transitional statements similar to these:
- I appreciate that you’ve shared your thoughts on this. It’s important to me to know what you’re thinking. I’ll let you know what my decision is before the end of the day.
- I can see that you’ve put a lot of thought into this and that you care deeply about it. So do I—and I believe I have the information I need to make the decision. Here’s what we’re going to do.
- It’s clear that you believe A is the best option for reasons X, Y, and Z. I might eventually end up agreeing with you. But as far as I can tell right now, B is what we need to do and that’s what I’ve decided.
This kind of response is difficult if our audience has been unfair and vicious toward us. But if we’re truly responsible to be “the decider,” it’s the right thing to do.
4. The Persuasive Case Can’t Possibly Work
A would-be persuader has made his case that balls roll down hill. He has (a) provided historical examples from multiple periods, geographies, and cultures. He has (b) reviewed the basics of gravity and argued that spheres, by nature, offer little resistance to it. He has (c) argued from general experience that none of us have ever seen a ball behave differently.
His listener accepts a, b, and c. Then, for no apparent reason, he declares, “But I still say balls roll up hill” (or maybe “But I still say balls belong on hilltops and we should leave them alone!”).
What’s going on? The possibilities include these.
- The listener is a stubborn fool. Some are just too wise in their own eyes to ever listen and learn (Prov. 1:7, 26:16, 15:5). Trying to reason with them is a waste of time (Matt. 7:6).
- The persuader has bumped into a pocket of stubborn foolishness. We’re all stubborn fools sometimes! The listener may be a generally reasonable person, but the result is the same on this topic: trying to reason with him is a waste of time.
- The listener is just having a really bad day. Some days the answer to everybody is (hopefully not out loud), “I’m right and you’re wrong and that’s that. Leave me alone!”
- The listener has an intuitive thinking style. We all make hundreds (thousands?) of choices intuitively every day. We see a situation and, without consciously analyzing the options and evidence for and against, we just decide. Some people, though, rarely (never?) arrive at a conclusion any other way. They are hard-core intuiters. They may appear to be stubborn, but in reality they just aren’t very rational about things. You’re not going to persuade them until you find out what kind of communication moves them.
A Question
What if persuasion doesn’t work and coercion is inappropriate or impossible as well? All is not lost. The most subtle and indirect tool for changing what others think or do may well be the most potent. The next post will explore influence.
Aaron Blumer 2014 Bio
Aaron Blumer, is a Michigan native and graduate of Bob Jones University and Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). He and his family live in small-town western Wisconsin, not far from where he pastored Grace Baptist Church for thirteen years.
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….that the time for outright coercion is when there open sin, or when it’s an emergency. That I can go with.
We might admit intuition as a source of premises, though—the trick and problem is when intuition is flatly contradicted by other evidence. And then I’d argue you’re right back at a sin situation; if I intuit X, and you provide several pieces of evidence that the answer is indeed Y, it’s not just stubborn, it’s elevating one’s own hunch over the facts. We might define that Biblically as “divisive”, no?
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
I’m pretty close to sharing that perspective. The sort of communication that uses a short-term consequence to motivate change (action/cessation of action) can be positive (rewards) negative but gentle, negative and severe… and just about anywhere along that scale. It’s not aimed at getting a person to agree with you about what ought to be done, though, so that’s the main distinction. And they also appeal to short-term (non-sinful) self-interest.
It’s not always sinful situation that requires the use of short-term consequences though. I mean, with humans, there’s wickedness and there’s weakness and the two aren’t always easy to tell apart—and often are intertwined.
I’m thinking mainly of the employer-employee situation on this one. It would just be naive to think you’re going to get the best results from everybody without a system of rewards for performance and negative consequences for various failures. The most mature and noble workforce in the world is going to need some of that. Human nature.
So maybe it’s fair to say the short-term consequence motivation is for responding to or preventing sin. But I’m not sure I’d even go that far. It’s just how people are.
Maybe a better way to look at it is, do I want to see people succeed or see them fail? If I want them to succeed, then I want to make doing the best thing as easy and attractive as it can be. So usually even where persuasion is the main tool, it’s good to have some reward/penalty dynamic in the mix. It’s never really enough by itself, but persuasion usually isn’t either.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
The reason I believe persuasion is usually superior to coercion is that coercion is a temporary fix as well as a first step and not the solution. You can get the guy off the train tracks, but then he goes home and swallows 50 No-Doz with a bottle of vodka. You’ve done very little to improve his condition, except to give you more time to persuade him to get help.
That’s the problem with using coercion to prevent or deal with sin - it works, but only temporarily. If you can’t appeal to someone’s common sense, conscience, or spirit, then all the constraints you can muster will not alter their path. They’ll just wait until you are out of the way.
With the wailing kid in the store, I would view removing them and not allowing them to go with you on errands is more of a natural consequence than coercion. When my kids were little, I made going to the store the highlight of our week—lots of fun and laughing, possibly a treat of some kind. If there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, I left my cart where it was and we went home, and that child would be left behind the next time I went out.
The lesson was that if they couldn’t conduct themselves properly in public, then they didn’t get to go out in public. I never had to do that more than once with each child, and the older ones always helped out by warning their younger siblings that Mommy wasn’t kidding around. This doesn’t feel like coercion to me, because it’s more of a teaching moment, and losing a privilege because of misbehavior (especially when the consequence is directly related to the situation) is an important lesson kids need to learn. ASAP.
Though I think it helps a lot to look at the tools separately, an interaction quite often employs more than one.
In the case of a parent using a consequence as a teaching moment, there is coercion linked closely to persuasion. The negative consequence (which implies future negative consequences) gets the individual’s sober attention for the more persuasive work of teaching.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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