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4
PATTERN PAINTING, COGNITIVE BIASES, AND HEURISTICS

You can't argue with the brain: it wants what it wants what it wants.
– Dr. Katherine Ramsland

Stop reading for a moment. I want you to focus on being aware of every visual, tactile, kinesthetic, and auditory stimulus in your environment. Try to focus on the obvious to the mundane: the color of the carpet, walls, the chair you are sitting in. Study each person walking by you or near you: what they are wearing, their facial expressions, and the content of their conversations. What sounds do you hear? What textures do you feel?

Try to take it all in at once. Instantly overwhelming?

Now, imagine what it would be like if you were forced to experience this massive sensory overload all the time. It would paralyze you.

Much like a computer, our brains can process only so much information at one time. As the cognitive load6 grows, it slows down and becomes less efficient. The brain is unable to focus, and attention control diminishes.

From a purely evolutionary sense, this inability to focus can put you in danger. Should there be a threat nearby – say a saber-toothed tiger crouched in the weeds, or a bus rolling down the street – and you are so overwhelmed with incoming sensory information that you fail to see it, bam! You are lunch or a pancake.

Pattern Monster

Moving slowly had the tendency to remove one's DNA from the gene pool, so our brains evolved to think fast. With so much sensory information hitting us at one time, we needed a way to manage it and focus only on environmental anomalies that might be dangers or opportunities.

The human brain is a pattern monster. It is a master at grabbing the billions of bits of information in the environment around you, interpreting the patterns, and behaving appropriately (in most cases) in response to those patterns.7

If your brain did not leverage patterns for decision making and adaptive response to the world around you, you'd be unable to function. Every bit of information would require analyzing before a decision could be made. Instead, the brain uses mental shortcuts (heuristics) to cut through the noise and make quick decisions.

A basic understanding of how these mental shortcuts work is crucial for controlling your own behaviors and influencing the behaviors of others. Let's begin with two facts about the brain.

1. It is tasked with keeping you alive and, therefore, focuses on things in the environment that are unexpected and could pose a threat while ignoring things that are the same (patterns) to ensure that it does not miss the former.
2. It is lazy, preferring the path of least resistance or cognitive load when making decisions, which also contributes to keeping you alive. When the brain sees a pattern, for example, that is similar to other patterns, instead of taking the time to analyze whether the two things are different, it assumes they are the same and uses that shortcut to make quick decisions.

Pattern Painting

If suddenly there was a loud noise nearby, your attention would be torn from these words and pulled toward that sound. Then, your brain would begin scanning your surroundings for anything out of place that could potentially be a threat while preparing you to deal with that threat. This is your fight-or-flight response. For the moment, a part of your brain called the amygdala has taken control of your emotions and behavior.

Think of the brain as a Russian nesting doll. The big doll on the outside is the neocortex. This is your gray matter – your rational brain. The middle doll is the limbic system – your emotional brain. The smallest doll is your cerebellum or autonomic brain – it manages all the little (but still important) things, like breathing, so you can concentrate on thinking.

All three brains are connected to the amygdala, which is housed in the limbic system.

The amygdala is the hub that processes all sensory input, connecting the rational, emotional, and autonomic parts of your brain and is the center for emotions, emotional behavior, and motivation. Fear and pleasure are the language of the amygdala, and it exerts a massive and compulsory influence over your emotional behavior.

To avoid wasting precious resources on things that don't matter, the amygdala focuses on and responds to environmental disruptions – different, unexpected, new, what it deems important to your survival, both physically and socially. This simple cognitive shortcut of ignoring boring patterns and being alert to anything that disrupts patterns is a key reason for our success as a species.

Salespeople who disrupt expectations pull stakeholders toward them. They paint boring sales patterns with bright colors. Pattern painting is how ultra-high performers (UHPs) flip the buyer script and change the game. Different is sexy. Different sells. The amygdala loves bright, shiny things.

Throughout this book are examples of how UHPs paint common patterns to disrupt expectation and differentiate themselves.

When your sales behaviors fall into an expected pattern, you will not differentiate and you will not garner attention. You do not create fear or promise pleasure. You are not interesting. Your dull colors are easy to ignore.

When you look, act, feel, and sound like every other sales rep who calls, e-mails, provides a demo, presents, pitches, challenges, or walks through the door, your stakeholder finds you boring and shifts into their reflexive buyer script. The buyer script is rote. Habit. The same thing the stakeholder says to every salesperson. It allows the buyer to remain emotionally detached and to keep you at arm's length.

Mental Shortcuts

A heuristic is a mental shortcut our brains leverage to make quick decisions in the thick of complexity – a path to an outcome that incurs the least amount of effort and cognitive load. Heuristics help you solve problems faster than you would if you methodically weighed all the options.8

They're also thought of as rules of thumb. For example, a simple heuristic is “Where there's smoke, there's fire.” These cognitive shortcuts are intuitive and occur at both the conscious and the subconscious levels. There is nothing you do or decide that is not impacted by your brain's desire to use these mental shortcuts to make things easier.9

Likewise, heuristics are in play as stakeholders decide if they like you, evaluate your proposal, assess the risk of moving to the next step, determine if you are trustworthy, and compare you to your competitors.

While heuristics aid stakeholders in working through complex problems faster, they also lead to cognitive biases that result in emotional decision making. Rational, objective analysis is pushed aside by the lazy brain looking for an easy way out. The irrational buyer is born.

The power of the subconscious mind and how it holds sway over our emotions, behavior, interpersonal interactions, likes, dislikes, perceptions, and decisions is something every sales professional must understand and learn to leverage. We'll be confronting how heuristics, cognitive biases, and emotions impact decision making throughout the book.

People Act on Emotion and Justify with Logic

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio set out to prove that emotions guide decisions. His somatic marker hypothesis10 changed the way science viewed human decision making. Damasio studied people whose limbic system – the emotional center of the brain – was damaged and not working properly. In these subjects, however, the neocortex or rational brain was in normal working condition.

He discovered that people in this condition shared a peculiar commonality. It was almost impossible for them to decide. They could objectively discuss the logic and rationality of different choices but when asked to make a choice they found it difficult and sometimes impossible to choose. Without their emotions to guide them, they agonized over even the simplest choices like whether to have a ham or turkey sandwich for lunch.

Damasio's work demonstrated that emotions are central to human decision making and that we often apply logic after the fact to avoid the pain of cognitive dissonance. This is not to say that we don't make rational decisions. We certainly attempt to make decisions that are in our best interest.

What Damasio proved, though, is that for humans, decisions begin with emotion. We feel, and then we think.

Cognitive Dissonance
When you attempt to hold two or more contradictory beliefs in your mind at the same time, do or think something that violates or is incongruent with a core belief or value, take an action that is inconsistent with a prior commitment, or are confronted with information that directly contravenes something you believe to be true, it creates mental stress and emotional discomfort. This is cognitive dissonance.
Humans have an overriding desire to be consistent in their thoughts, beliefs, values, and actions. To achieve this comfortable equilibrium, we constantly seek dissonance reduction, much like hunger causes us to seek food to comfort a growling stomach.11 Dissonance is so emotionally painful that people will, in many cases, deny facts, deny evidence, and rationalize anything to protect a core belief.
When stakeholders are placed in situations where they must make a decision, they're being bombarded by conscious rational choices, emotions, and subconscious cognitive biases. Some of these biases, emotions, and rational choices are opposing and contradictory, creating a state of dissonance. It is your ability to deftly maneuver and navigate this emotional minefield that opens the door to influence.
Triggering Cognitive Dissonance
Situation: The stakeholder is working with a vendor that is providing bad service. You challenge the stakeholder with evidence that his current vendor is screwing him over.
Dissonance: The stakeholder originally chose and committed to the vendor. The stakeholder believes, like most people, that he makes good, rational decisions (egocentric bias). You challenged his judgment by showing him that he made a poor decision. The stakeholder is forced to either accept that he made a bad choice, blame external circumstances (attribution bias), lie that he knew the vendor was bad all along and had no other choice (hindsight bias), or defend his decision, turning you into an adversary.
Result: He digs in his heels because the need to be consistent with his self-image and past commitments is powerful. Instead of agreeing with you, he argues back, making the case with the few good things the vendor has done for him while ignoring the damage the vendor has caused (confirmation bias).
Most of his justifications are irrational. Yet the more you argue, the more he becomes anchored to his position. (You cannot argue other people into believing that they are wrong. This is the reason direct challenges often fail.)
Your challenge creates psychological discomfort. Because you are the genesis of the pain, you become an unlikable adversary. When you are branded unlikable, win probability plummets.
A Better Way
Gaining an understanding of and leveraging cognitive dissonance is one of the keys to influencing stakeholder decisions.
Rather than a direct confrontation – either with empirical evidence or with badmouthing a vendor that is clearly doing the wrong thing – create awareness with an artful question:
“John, could you tell me what you like most about ABC vendor?”
Average salespeople feel like this is a suicide question. “Why would I want them to tell me what they like about the vendor? Isn't that defeating the entire purpose?”
To influence the behavior of stakeholders, you must manage your disruptive emotions (in this case fear), have empathy for the pain of cognitive dissonance, and have an acute understanding of how the human mind works.
When you ask most people what they like about something, you trigger the negativity effect or bias. Most people will respond with a few positives and quickly shift to negatives. Humans are more attuned to negatives than to positives. We look for what's wrong or out of place, rather than what is right – it's just what we do.
All you need to do is prime this behavior in your stakeholders by asking them what they like most. This has the added effect of disrupting their expectations, thus pulling them toward you, and causing them to become more engaged.
In this case, there are obvious negatives, making the job of getting John complaining about the vendor and offering up a litany of its failures and shortcomings much easier.
When John expresses his dissatisfaction on his terms, he becomes committed to making a change, and the probability that he will make the change increases because his actions must be consistent with his new beliefs about the vendor so as to avoid dissonance.

10

Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994; rev. ed., Penguin, 2005).

11

Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962).

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