Levers of Influence

Levers of Influence. Why do we comply?

Humanity social systems can exist because people can collaborate and align on common goals. Without our abilities to influence each other and comply to each others requests our civilization simply would not survive. It is not very important how exactly our ancestors evolved those abilities, probably, being social and collaborative gave significant advantage in Stone Age times. What is important – is to learn what exactly makes us comply. And why?

For sure, we are influenced by facts and rational explanations, but behavioral economics and great book Thinking Fast and Slow prove that people are irrational. There are other factors or levers that significantly impact our judgment and readiness to agree.

I have finished recently a book “Influence. The Psychology of Persuasion”. This book has detailed analysis of main behavioral models (we can call them biases as well) that force us to comply. These biases trigger embedded mechanisms in our brain – skip critical thinking part and jump directly to conclusions and actions. Click and run. Let’s dive deeper into them.

Reciprocation

If somebody gives us something, we feel urge to give something back. Favor, gift or our compliance with the next request. There is a deep psychological connection between reciprocity, gratitude and life satisfaction – we feel better when we are participating in exchange of goods and favors. We use this mechanism to influence others decisions and make others feel “much obliged”.

In Japan, normally people say “arigato gozaimasu,”  meaning “thank you”. However, people also say “sumimasen” when they want to express their appreciation or a feeling of regret, guilt, or another negative emotion. For example, when they receive unexpected gift or favor from others.

Practical implementations of reciprocation lever are everywhere. Free samples of products, small gifts after first purchase or a small concession made by one of the parties in negotiation process.

Liking

There is famous quote: “People buy from those who they like”. It is a golden rule for every salesperson – in the situation where competing products price and features are the same, people buy from whom they like more. Even if they know that it is just a compliance strategy.

But liking is a vague term. If we will try to decompose it, then we will see that we like people who:

  • Similar to us
  • Give us compliments
  • Easy to contact and ready to cooperate with us.

That is pretty simple to use in real life. Focus on commonalities rather than differences. Show others that you appreciate them and their actions. Be a “go-to-person” who is ready to work on a shared goal.

Liking is the reason why brands go to influencers for advertisements. Because thousands of people like them and inevitably extend their likeness to a brand too.

Social Proof

When I go to a new restaurant, I often ask for the most famous meal in the menu. Collective experience of other visitors cannot be wrong. The same logic applies to product reviews and ratings. We view an action as correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.

Social proof lever is especially efficient in ambiguous situations. The more unknown environment we are at, the more we rely on others behaviour. I think this is the reason why in a new city I trust reviews at Google Maps completely and blindly.

So, if you need help, don’t rely on others reaction unless it is clear for them that there is an emergency. A lot of us witnessed situation when a person lies on the ground and people demonstrate zero actions to help the person. Why? Situation is ambiguous and everybody rely on each other reaction. And nobody takes a first step.

Another tip I learned – if you are delivering a webinar and want audience to ask questions, you have to break the ice yourself first. Come up with a couple of artificial questions, read them loud and give an answer. Social proof will do the rest for you.

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How to concentrate

How to Concentrate in the World of Distractions?

Time is a limited resource. It is the only resource we cannot reproduce. If we want to achieve more then we need to increase productivity. Individual productivity depends on how well a person can concentrate and manage distractions.

And our world is full of distractions (surprise!). Everything competes for our attention all the time. Ads, social media, Slack messages, emails. The list is infinite. The world is not going to change (in fact, it is going to be worse over the time). So, we have to adopt to stay focused and keep a steady course to our goals.

There are different opinions on what is happening with human attention span and how digitalization affects it. Some researchers are saying it decreases, others disagree with that. However, the trend to short everything from entertainment content (TikTok videos and Instagram stories) to educational content (“bite-sized” lessons 3-5 minutes each) is clear.

This article is a summary of mechanisms and habits how to manage distractions and improve concentration skills. Some of them I already adopted, others are in the backlog or in progress. I cannot guarantee they will work for you, so feel free to modify them to fit your personality and lifestyle. The mechanisms are not in the priority order and you can start to adopt any of them in any point of time.

Want to know more? Click “Read More” button.

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Prioritize Customer’s Requests Efficiently – Part 3: Decisions

In the previous parts we have done the heavy lifting – got clarity and came to conclusions. In the third and last part we are going to discuss practical prioritization mechanisms and tools. We will also touch sensitive topic how to communicate changes in priorities.

Let’s assume that you have list of clear customers’ requests. You can articulate why they are important and what is the actual need behind the request. They may look like equally important, but they are not. When everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.

We need to introduce additional dimension(s) and rank items from our list according them. It is not a rocket science and plenty of tools are available for that. So, here we will touch only tiny percentage of them.

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Critical Thinking: Prioritize Customer’s Requests Efficiently – Part 2: Conclusions

In the first part we have discussed what is critical thinking and how to get clarity by asking right questions. It is important to get clear on a problem or request but it doesn’t move the needle. To perform prioritization we need to come to conclusions. In the second part we will talk about how we arrive to conclusions and how personalities affect this process. 

Everybody heard that it is bad to assume and we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. I believe it is misleading idea and doesn’t help at all. It is very rare situation when the one has all information about a problem or request and doesn’t need assumptions. Moreover if you will wait for all information to be available, you most probably will lose momentum and be late with decisions. We need assumptions the same way we need facts and observations. However, there is a huge distinction between automatic thinking and critical thinking assumptions.

In the end, it is all about premise and its building blocks.

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Critical Thinking: Prioritize Customer’s Requests Efficiently – Part 1: Clarity

Any customer facing organization deals with questions, asks and demands coming from customers. Some of them are easy to answer and some of them require investments of time and resources.

How can you prioritize them properly?

In this article I will show you how to use Critical Thinking framework to make your decision making process more efficient. I’ll share with you common mistakes in prioritization and how to avoid them.

Moreover, in many mid and large size enterprises there are two different organizations who are responsible for process of receiving customer requests and prioritizing them.

But how the process of prioritization works? Obviously, some thinking is involved here. But what impacts the thinking? What kind of techniques can we apply to do it more efficiently?

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KVM Virtualization 101

This is a translation of my article in Russian which was written in September 2019.


Virtualization is so deep and broad subject, that it is not possible to cover all details of hypervisor (and not needed, actually). I will concentrate on “minimal valuable pack” of knowledge that is required to understand any KVM virtualized solution, not necessarily Telco.

Content


Overview and brief history of virtualization technology

The story of virtualization began in 1999 when young company VMWare has released product VMWare Workstation. This was a first commercial product that provided virtualization for desktop/client applications. Virtualization of the server part started a little bit later in the form of ESX Server product that evolved in ESXi (i stands for integrated). This product is being used widely in IT and Telco private clouds as hypervisor for server-side applications.

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Cloud Native as a disruptive innovation for Telco market

Disclaimer

This article is a summary of my personal views and opinions. It does not pretend to be 100% correct as far I’m a human and have my own biases and tend to make mistakes.

Introduction

The pace of innovation is high and continue to increase. There are very limited amount of industries that were not impacted by Cloud Computing technologies stack. And Telco industry is not one of them. I was witnessing for last 5-7 years how several waves of innovation gone through telecommunications vendors and service providers changing not only products and solutions but organizational structures, processes and ways of working.

The most recent innovation that came to Telco market was Cloud Native technologies. The purpose of this article is to summarize how Cloud Native innovation is different from other multiple changes and improvements happened in industry and explain why it is “disruptive”.

What is “disruptive innovation”?

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