Changing Someone's Mind Rarely Works
I get this kind of consultation a lot, in various shapes.
If the question is something like “technically, is A better or B better,” you can just thoroughly debate the merits until you reach an answer, so no one really agonizes over that. Even when someone seems to be agonizing over it, it’s more like minor grumbling. That’s not what I’m dealing with here.
What I’m dealing with is the question: “Is it possible to change something like a person’s individual principles or convictions?”
Suppose, for example, you have a subordinate who’s a technically excellent engineer. His skills are solid, but he pushes himself to the limit on everything, and the slowness of his progress ends up affecting the rest of the team. Suppose you point this out and it leads to an exchange like this:
“I’d like you to cut corners a bit more where it’s fine to and speed up your output.” “I just want to do my work properly. If I cut corners like that and a mistake happens, what then? Even if my speed is slower than expected, wasn’t that already clear from past development before the task was assigned to me? Isn’t that a management problem?”
This is a tough one to handle.
Frankly, I don’t think you can change someone’s opinion through persuasion. Especially on things like “future concerns” or “matters no one knows the right answer to,” as in the example above, opinions vary from person to person. If he has his own past experience behind him and has built a philosophy out of it, there’s no overturning that.
So if trouble is occurring, then, as he says, it really is “a management problem.”
Just accept that calmly and let it go. That’s what I’d say first, but I should add something here: guiding someone from a mid-to-long-term perspective is possible.
People generally build their policies through experience. For what it’s worth, I’ve made it a rule not to do creative work more than six hours a day. “Creative work” is fairly broad by definition, and covers almost anything that isn’t clerical — design, debugging, new business planning, and so on. Back in my twenties, when I relied on physical stamina and worked overtime constantly, I made a major mistake, and everything I thought was “for the best” backfired as a result.
I’m embarrassed to admit that at the time I had a feeling of “I’m so cool, working myself half to death with all this overtime.” But the results were bad enough that I later rethought things. Now, the moment my productivity drops even a little, I take a break. When ideas stop coming, I play with my kids. I don’t work on days off. Doing this raises my overall creativity, I’ve found, and as a rough guideline, I’ve settled on roughly six hours as what works for me.
As in my own case, the trigger for a major shift in someone’s opinion is, in most cases, failure.
To begin with, opinions and convictions arise from introspection, from looking back. Very few people look back, reflect, and revise their thinking without having failed at something first. Even without a clear-cut failure, a minor stumble, a bout of anxiety, an inconsistency, or a disappointment can serve as a trigger for introspection. Either way, one thing is clear: you can’t skip past that trigger.
If you’re in a management position, for instance, it’s important to keep stating the behaviors and mentality you expect. Say it persistently, even to the point of nagging. But that alone won’t change another person’s behavior. People change because of their own trigger, on their own terms. In most cases, all you can do is wait.
The content of this post is an excerpt (original text) from the following book. If you’re interested, please consider getting the book.
The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup
The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/09/523/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.