Persuasion, Intuition, and Why We Need More Than Facts

Steve Denning provides a good rationale for the disagreement with Mel Kleinman’s article on fact-based hiring that I voiced in this entry.

Discussing his work on a chapter on changing minds in his forthcoming book (to be published by Jossey-Bass in September 2007), Denning writes in his newsletter:

I looked into the … psychological literature on persuasion, and found that it was vitiated by a fixation on the mind as a “sequential information processor”, when it is obvious that most of our thinking is intuitive, associative and done in parallel, and most of our key decisions have a huge emotional component. It took me a while to figure out how all this stuff fits together. Finally, to pull it into focus, I included some very personal stories about occasions in my life where I had changed my mind — subjects I’ve never written about before.

I end up with (a) three ways we change our minds; (b) four ways to persuade people to change; and (c) three basic principles of leadership.

Bingo: “Most of our key decisions have a huge emotional component.” Mel Kleinman seems to think we can skirt that component and conduct hiring based on facts alone and linear, sequential decision-making.