Shaping the mental models you need the get your message received…
There is always a difference, sometimes subtle, sometimes significant, between the message we’re trying to send and the actual message received by the other person.
This is because we all have mental models and narratives, developed from experience but also inherited from parents and authority figures, and continually reinforced by biases – availability, recency, and so forth – which create shortcuts.
These shortcuts are the “fast” in Daniel Khaneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” thesis, allowing us to quickly react without having to slowly and logically process everything we see and hear.
They drive our instinctive response. They tell us whether something is wrong or something is right before we can say precisely why. And they shape how we interpret everything that’s said to us.
Most of the time we pretty much ignore this fact of life, but in some situations we do feel it, in fact we feel it so acutely we hesitate before we speak.
We’ve all experienced those occasions, where we’re racking our brains to find the right words, the right route to raising something with a friend or colleague or boss. Trying to ensure we get our message received well, when the wrong phrasing or approach might easily provoke the wrong reaction.
That’s because we recognise when individual mental models might be primed, sensitised by emotion so that they’re literally looking out for things that fit. It’s why someone who just found out they’re pregnant sees babies everywhere; someone who just lost a loved one has memories triggered afresh in every room; and someone incensed by a particular injustice, whether real or perceived, has little tolerance for a nuanced or more neutral view.
But most of the time those models all just sitting there in our subconscious, vying with each other to help us rapidly interpret the ongoing events of our lives and the actions of those around us.
Vying, because many of those models produce very different reactions depending on which gets triggered: “we are all products of our environment” and “they brought it on themselves” are both mental models we all share, and either one will dramatically shape how a given message gets received.
Which of those two gets to shape our reaction depends on a whole host of things – the context and our experience of it, the individual and our history with them, or with others of whom they remind us, their bearing, their clothing, their face, voice, and accent.
Irrespective of what was intended, all of these factors shape the message received.
It can even be the time of day: for instance, you are far more likely to be granted parole if your hearing is just after lunch.
But one thing it always depends on, is the framing.
The FrameWorks Institute recently produced a guide to help identify and navigate the most common mental models around homelessness among the general public, building on about eight years of work in partnership with organisations like JRF in the UK, and many more in the US.
Their previous recommendations for language and framing around poverty have been instrumental in how campaigners have spoken about it over recent years, aiming to trigger a different model in the public’s mind: one based in ethics rather than economics, one that leads us not to shame those “who ought to try working their way out of poverty”, but instead to feel shame for the failing system which has “locked them in” to it.
Their work underscores the timeless value of a good metaphor and a resonant story, the power of positive framing and the potential to create solutions, but more than that, the importance of understanding the different and competing mental models that others can switch between, based purely on the language and frameworks you employ when delivering your message.
If you want to land an aircraft safely, you need pretty good visibility of the terrain on which you’re going to land.
Whether we’re launching a new strategy or an internal change initiative, seeking to alter the behaviour of a belligerent teenager or the preconceptions of an entire population, if we want our message received well, to have the intended impact, we need to understand their landing zone.
For all the time and effort we spend on communications and campaigns, on policies and party conferences, often with little genuinely lasting impact, it’s surprising how little time we spend, not just on actually understanding how those messages have landed, but why.
And more specifically, on how we can consciously reframe them, or reinvent them entirely, in order to trigger the right mental models in their recipients, and not the wrong ones.