Controlled Demolition

Facts aren't enough. We must change the way people think to make our case.

Photo by Katie Jowett on Unsplash

I'm sure you've seen one of those super satisfying videos of a controlled demolition. A clock counts down to zero, and then you hear some pops, maybe see some puffs of smoke or dust. After a moment, seemingly all at once, the building collapses in on itself.

Where there once was a massive structure, there is only a pile of debris and a building-shaped hole among its undamaged neighbors. Once the debris is carted away, builders can construct something new on the same site.

Compelling communication can work in much the same way.

I'm thinking about persuasion, changing minds, and compelling communication today for... reasons. However, this is something I regularly think about because these skills are central to how we live and work together. We are almost always in the process of changing someone's mind, whether it's getting your kid to do their homework, convincing coworkers your approach to a project is the right one, or crafting a marketing campaign for your company's latest offer.

We err when we assume that, given the right facts or the best information, someone else will see things our way. We interpret information through a scaffolding of beliefs, mental models, and heuristics—and if my scaffolding is significantly different from yours, we likely won't agree on what the same information means. And that can have devastating consequences.

If we want to change minds, we must plan for the controlled demolition of the mental scaffolding that produced them.

Just as an engineer figures out where to place the explosives to raze a building without causing unwanted damage, we must figure out what messages will cause another's mental scaffolding to collapse. Engineers use practical physics, materials science, and blueprints to make their plans. A persuasive communicator uses empathy.

Empathy, as I've argued before, isn't a passive emotional state. It's not (only) an intuitive sense of what someone else is experiencing.

Empathy is better understood as a precision instrument—a social technology that provides useful insight into the world someone else is living in. Emotional empathy provides insight into what someone feels. Cognitive empathy provides insight into what someone thinks. Conventionally, our empathetic processes then allow us to experience compassion for the other—that's the use in the useful insight.

While compassion is useful, it's not the only use for empathy.

Emotional and cognitive empathy have significant limits when it comes to truly understanding people. Knowing what someone thinks or feels is good information, but knowing how that thinking or feeling came to be offers a blueprint to guide our intervention.

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Figuring out how someone thinks helps us change what they think.

Figuring out how someone thinks is what we need for controlled demolition. Learning how someone thinks can be called epistemic empathy.

The beliefs, mental models, and heuristics that form the conditions of knowledge (that's the 'epistemic' part) ultimately determine what someone thinks or feels. How someone arrives at Thought A based on the information they have is a product of a whole scaffolding of preexisting frameworks. To turn Thought A into Thought B, we must understand that scaffolding.

Epistemic empathy helps us make the case in the most complete and compelling way. We learn where to place the cognitive explosives that raze the infrastructure that supports their thoughts and feelings.

Over the last eight years, I've regularly come back to something one of the guys from (what is now) Pod Save America said the day after the 2016 election. He said that we have to go back to basics; we have to ‘make the case’ for not only our candidates and preferred policies but for our worldview. The only way to do that is through epistemic empathy.

Making the case—again, this applies far beyond partisan politics—requires us to discover the most basic truth we can agree on. From there, we have to figure out where our mental model diverges from the other's mental model.

For example, we might both share a value for family. My value for family is scaffolded by beliefs about gender, equity, personal agency, etc. A different set of beliefs scaffolds the other's value for family—and therefore, they reach different conclusions about how that value plays out in their lives than I do. It's easy for me to throw up my hands, saying that I don't know how they come to the conclusions they do. It's easy for me to argue in frustration or write them off as a lost cause.

But that's not how you change minds.

You change minds by dismantling another's scaffolding of beliefs and mental models and helping them rebuild it with something you believe is better, truer, more productive. For the record, this is how you change your own mind, too.

If I can determine the beliefs that scaffold how another acts on a shared value, then I can deconstruct that scaffolding.

Is it manipulative? You bet. That's what effective communication is! Is epistemic empathy a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands? It absolutely is. However, we will get nowhere in our organizing—very broadly defined—without practicing epistemic empathy and understanding others' mental scaffolding.

To make the case, we must understand what makes for a persuasive argument. To understand what's persuasive, we must learn how others think and why they believe what they do. We can't persuade by presenting the facts. We persuade by offering a more compelling way to think about the facts. We can't persuade by presenting a different set of emotions to feel. We persuade by offering a different framework that produces emotions.

I don't encourage empathy at this time (or any other) because we have to understand those who disagree with us. Understanding is good—but it’s not enough. To stop at understanding is to stop planning demolition once you know where the explosives should be placed.

I encourage empathy because we must persuade. We must not only place the explosives; we must set them off.