Playing To Win
Influenceability, Society & Strategy
Don’t Choose the Path of an Intellectual Hermit
A couple of weeks ago, I had dinner in Chicago with Eric, a big fan of the series with whom I had corresponded before. But this was the first time we met in person. It was a lovely conversation during which I mentioned, almost in passing, the problem with uninfluenceable people. He was fascinated, and asked me to write about it. So, I am doing so in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece called Influenceability, Society & Strategy: Don’t Choose the Path of an Intellectual Hermit. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
The Conversation
The discussion at dinner had touched on people who tend to get deeply entrenched in positions and are unwilling to contemplate anything else. My assertion was that anyone who is entirely uninfluenceable should live as a hermit because the person is simply not a productive member of society. Additionally, interacting with society will just annoy them — so it’s in the lose-lose box. Being alone is best for both the individual and society — a strong claim to be sure.
Eric and others at the table were intrigued and encouraged me to write about it. I am doing so because the topic relates to the practice of strategy. But I will start first with society and then move to strategy — i.e., from the general to the specific.
Influenceability and Society
Society is what we construct when individual people in it interact with one another. When they interact, they influence one another and that pattern of interaction and influence shapes society. Sometimes the influence is subtle — you learn something you didn’t know from someone at a dinner party and adjust your opinion a bit. Sometimes it is less subtle — a lightbulb goes on in a classroom during a lecture.
People who are completely uninfluenceable can’t participate in that societal building and shaping process. By definition, uninfluenceable people can’t learn, can’t get better, and get completely stuck. You could argue that they contribute by stating their uninfluenceable positions to others. But that has limited utility. It is a frozen message. It doesn’t get any better. Whatever you heard the first time will just stay the same — and people will quickly tune it out.
If you are uninfluenceable, you might as well live by yourself. You can’t be a contributor to a healthy, progressing society because members of a society advance one another and society as a whole by exchanging ideas with one another and coming to better understandings.
On this front, I am greatly influenced by my favorite philosopher, Aristotle, who is in some ways the king of influenceability. He exalted the discipline of rhetoric, and his writing on the subject is compiled in a book called Rhetoric. However, the subject is largely overlooked and untaught in modern educational life. While in modernity, rhetoric has come to mean some combination of bombast and grandiloquence, Aristotle viewed it as a valuable and highly skilled activity. According to Aristotle, rhetoric entails citizens putting forth their arguments for the best way forward and, based on the back-and-forth of that discussion, choosing the path for which the discussants judge the logic to be most compelling. The better the arguments, the higher-quality the discussion, the more likely that the chosen direction will be fruitful — or at least the best society can come up with at that point in time.
And in my experience, that chosen direction is rarely based on the precise initial argument of a single participant. Rather, the discussion strengthens the argumentation and builds newer, better answers — and with that, a better society.
It is consistent with the findings of my 20+ years of work on Integrative Thinking. I found that valuable breakthroughs that overcome apparently irresolvable tradeoffs consistently take the form of “a new model that contains elements of the individual models but is superior to each.” That is, great ideas don’t come from a vacuum or from a blank sheet of paper or from a singular idea, they come from building a new model from pieces of existing models. But the only way for that to happen is to accept that even if you disagree with or even despise an opposing model, it might contain elements that would help you and your colleagues to build something better than your own model.
That is the power of rhetoric as conceived of by Aristotle — and being uninfluenceable is an anathema to it. It the reason why you need to be influenceable to be useful to society.
This is why I am not a fan of strict constructionism in law. For a strict constructionist, the Constitution of the United States says X, therefore, by strict reading, Y is true. If you genuinely believe that you can determine exactly what was meant by words that were written by anybody else, let alone by a group of people 238 years ago, you are uninfluenceable.
Life doesn’t work that way. Everything, including taking meaning from words in the US Constitution, is an act of interpretation. And to be useful to the world, interpretation needs to be influenceable. Your interpretation needs to be subject to augmentation through argumentation. If you start from the perspective that your interpretation isn’t one of many possible but rather the only proper meaning, you are delusional and unhelpful to society.
I am also not a fan of strict constructionism in religion. I am a purebred Mennonite (based on a family tree that goes back to the 1600s), which is a Protestant sect that took shape in the mid-16th century in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Most outsiders think that Mennonites and Amish are the same because Amish and Old Order (i.e. conservative) Mennonites look and act the same (for a quite accurate representation, see the Harrison Ford movie, Witness) and have lived side-by-side for hundreds of years in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and Waterloo County, Ontario (where I grew up).
But no, a century and a half after the founding of the Mennonite church, Mennonite minister Jakob Ammann insisted that Matthew 18:15–17 demanded that those who sin in the eyes of the church be shunned completely — even by their own immediate family — and created a fissure with the Mennonite church that created the Amish sect. In verse 17 of that passage, the German Luther Bible (which is what Ammann would have most likely used) exhorted members of the church to “treat [the sinner] as a tax collector or a Gentile.”
An imperative for total shunning was an interesting conclusion for Ammann to draw from that passage. For one thing, the sinner and the congregation would have all been Gentiles, so a strict interpretation would be to treat them as you would treat yourself! And certainly, tax collectors are not particularly popular people, but do you refuse to ever speak to tax collectors and treat them as if they don’t exist?
My point is not that Ammann was provably wrong but rather that he was simply treating his own interpretation as an uninfluenceable fact. Because the rest of the Mennonite church wouldn’t agree with him, he left with his own flock — for 332 years and counting!
If you are influenceable, you would want help from others in coming up with the most useful interpretation of the law or Bible or anything else. If you are uninfluenceable, that is simply not an option.
Why it Matters for Strategy
Influenceability is important to contemplate in strategy because strict constructionism dominates in the modern practice of strategy. The mantra is to do the analysis and then do what the analysis says. Anything else is considered to be negligent and abhorrent. The analysis is viewed as providing ‘the right answer.’ If you don’t concur, you are an anti-analysis business floozy. And that reinforces the dominant culture.
My experience of executives is that under this strict constructionist regime, they tend to become more uninfluenceable as their careers progress. They get more inclined to say: I know this business, this is the way it is always done, the analysis agrees with me, so it is what we are going to do.
It is fundamentally anti-Aristotelian. That way of thinking doesn’t lead to imagining possibilities and choosing the one for which the most compelling argument can be made, which requires influenceability. It is one of the main reasons why executives are so disappointed with the pace and level of innovation in their organization. Their strict constructionism doesn’t allow innovation to happen.
Influenceability leads to harnessing the best interpretations and thinking patterns of groups of colleagues. It directs teams away from strict constructionism, not toward it like a moth to the flame. That makes for better strategy. It enables members of teams to ask what would have to be true (WWHTBT) rather than obsessing about what is true. It enables them to gain confidence in creating outcomes that don’t now exist. Influenceability is central.
As an imperfect creature, I am always susceptible to uninfluenceability. But I am cognizant of the danger and for that reason, I try as hard as I can to be influenceable. And my greatest learnings have been when I have been influenceable. As I discussed in an earlier piece in this series, I have worked hard to integrate aspects of many models into the model that I currently use to solve business (and other) problems. And I plan to never stop integrating.
Practitioner Insights
I can already imagine some of the responses to this piece. You are arguing that one shouldn’t have a point of view. Just do what everybody says. You are suggesting being an intellectual milquetoast. I can see that reaction.
But that is not the practitioner insight of this piece. Rather, my advice is that you should have strong convictions, loosely held, to quote an old saying (the origin of which is not clear).
With respect to the strong convictions part, it is super-important, if not essential, to have a point of view. You can’t be a useful strategist without strong convictions. I haven’t met any strategist in my 44 years of strategy work who is good without having strong convictions. Good strategists have thought about the problem they are trying to solve, come up with possibilities for making it go away, reverse-engineered the logic, explored the barriers to choice, and arrived at a conviction on the best way forward.
But on the loosely held front, the truly smart strategists test that conviction against the logic and conviction of others. AG Lafley, one of the best strategists with whom I have had the pleasure of working, always did it — whether with me, one or more of his colleagues, or even his (and my) friend Peter Drucker. And you can productively test your convictions at every step — your definition of the problem, your possibilities, etc. It will make your eventual conclusion better — much better.
But that only happens if you are influenceable. The only way that systematically happens is if you are committed to influenceability.
If you decide to be uninfluenceable because you believe that when you come to a conclusion, you are correct, it would be better for the world if you are alone on an island. And it would be better for you too — to be a hermit, reminding yourself just how right you are.
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As a reminder, I am doing a PTW/PI podcast series with friend Tiffani Bova. The eighth in the series will be on LinkedIn here on Wednesday, June 18th at 12 noon EST and 9am PST. I look forward to seeing you there.
