"Belief Echoes" Can Kill Your Vision or Strategy

culled from:wobi.com

Have you ever worked hard to roll out a new strategy or vision just to have your people completely misinterpret it?  Then they start negative rumors about your plans?  And then you struggle to correct their misinformation?

For example, say you're launching a new technology strategy and word gets around that this new technology will cause layoffs.  Now, the truth is that your strategy will actually create jobs, but no matter how many times you correct the misinformation, people still don't feel comfortable with your strategy.

There’s interesting new research that explains why this happens. A professor at George Washington University named Emily Thorson has been studying something called "belief echoes."  Here's how it works (stick with me, it takes a minute to explain)...

In one of her experiments, Emily had 3 groups of people read an article about a fictitious Iowa politician. 

·         In the control group, they read a neutral article about the politician (one of those bland local news type articles). 

·         Then a second group (call them the "misinformation group") read the same article but they were given a piece of misinformation—that the politician had accepted donations from a convicted felon. 

·         The third group (call them the "correction group") got the misinformation article but with a correction at the end.  The correction basically said that the article was wrong, the politician had not accepted donations from a felon, they got the name wrong and it was really just a local plumber with a similar name to the felon.

Okay, so what happened?  Well, theoretically, the people who got the neutral article should like the politician (and they did).  And the people who got the misinformation should dislike the politician for being crooked (and they did).  And theoretically, the people who got the correction should have momentarily disliked the politician, but then after reading the correction, they should have gone back to liking him.  But that's not what happened...

The people who read the correction (even though they fully believed the correction) never went back to fully liking the politician.  It was like there was a bad taste left in their mouth that they couldn't get rid of.  Emily describes this as similar to having a negative dream about a friend—you know it's just a dream, it's totally made-up, but you still have that slightly negative feeling about them throughout the day.  This feeling is what she calls "belief echoes."

This is what happens when negative rumors start about your new vision or strategy.  Even though you correct the misinformation, and even though people may believe your correction, the negative taste from the misinformation never really goes away.

While this is a real problem, there are things that you can do.

First, don't try and negate the misinformation.  Instead, positively state something else.  Every time you say "this strategy will not cause layoffs" you're negating the word "layoffs."  But to negate something, you first have to mentally access that thought, and what happens is that you just end up reinforcing the word "layoffs" and associating that terrible word with your strategy.  Instead, stop repeating the word "layoffs" and instead say "this strategy will create jobs."

Second, don't use all the corporate gobbledygook to explain your vision (e.g. words like synergy, core competencies, value proposition, etc.).  Speak in concrete language (words that you can picture in your mind) like when Steve Jobs described the iPod as "a thousand songs in your pocket."  The more concrete the language in your vision, the more resonant it is and the harder it is to misinterpret.