How do you budge your employee’s belief systems - when they’re detached from reality?
What if their ‘wrong’ belief will lead to their demise? For example, “AI is a fad, it will blow up, I don’t need to learn anything about it.”
Forget trying to convince them with facts and evidence. Their system is closed, the horse has left the barn on that one.
This is a high fear time. For safety, people can dig in to their belief systems, right or wrong.
Here are 3 steps to budging other people’s beliefs:
Assume they’re scared (because they are). They fear losing their belief in case a. they will look stupid b. their house of cards will tumble down or c. there will be a vacuum where the old belief was. You might ask “assume for a minute, what would happen if this wasn’t true?” You might expose one of their fears that you would then be able to clear up.
2. Show them where and when their belief made or makes sense. And how wise they are (or were) for holding it. There is (was) protective wisdom in the belief, after all. One of my 60+ year old clients wouldn’t invest in his business for fear of another depression such as impacted his parents during the 1930’s. I told him that that fear made sense in the 1930’s.
3. However, you tell them, “because x has changed, y might also make sense these days, given this …” Then give them an option to consider it; ask them if it makes sense. If they come back and say “yes that kind of makes sense,” affirm their good decision-making skills. The decision needs to have come from them.
First and foremost, recognize that their dug-in resistance derives from anxiety. You can move them only with an appeal to their emotional/safety system, not with evidence and facts.
