3 Simple Concepts - What Formula One Racing Can Teach us About Creating Buy In
Wouldn’t it be great if we could just do something the first time we’re taught how to do it? Or if we could absorb all the information that is there when we hear something the first time it’s said. Why do we need to hear it over and over?
And more important, how do we get ourselves to buy in to it and have the quality attention needed to focus for the length of time needed to learn or build that new behavior over time? There are three concepts worth considering that influence the answer.
We can only hear something from where our current level of experience and skill allows us to hear from.
If I don’t have any experience with serving a tennis ball, the only things I will hear in the first explanation are about where to stand and how to toss the ball and maybe a bit about the swing.
If, on the other hand, I’ve served a tennis ball hundreds of times, I will pick up different nuances in those same areas, but also go on to comprehend the detail around the swing techniques and ball impact goals.
Same message being filtered through different levels of experience resulting in different applications.
When we hear something new, we must take some sort of action on it to gain a new level of understanding about it.
If we do nothing with the information we hear, then no new knowledge is acquired, it remains information only. When we hear that information again, we hear the exact same message again because we have the same frame of reference, nothing has changed since the first time we heard it.
It’s only when we've tried to use the information in an applied action, that we have an experience of the information which then transforms our previous level of understanding around it.
Action taken on information produces knowledge.
In sports or physical activity when you're in the learning mode, it’s repeated cycles of learning and doing the action that gives you the skill to hit the ball, throw the frisbee etc. This is how we teach our mental faculty as well as our physicality (nervous system) how to perform the new action, what sort of timing is needed, and why.
Intellectual information also requires action.
For messaging to be absorbed, it must be acted on in some way to produce an outcome from what’s shared. If you've ever taught or been a student of any kind, you know this is true. Taking notes during class or in a meeting improves your ability to retain the information and improves your absorption by making you focus on the most important elements to be recorded.
Intellectually the action is in our ability to respond and behave or think differently and therefore produce a different outcome.
To leverage this understanding when you're trying to change your behavior or the behavior of your team or company, your message must be clear on what type of actions people need to take.
After working in the change management space for several years I’ve experienced this to be true many times. I recall one project where we literally gave the message on where find up to date information every meeting, we must have been close to repeating it 100 times by the end of the six months.
Even then, we still had people asking where to find it and suggesting we should create somewhere that people could go to find it!
A message needs to be repeated 6-8 times before it is retained, and even then, retention is not 100%.
Building my business online, I'm learning a lot about content writing and how to build a strong “call to action”, or CTA, in your copy. The goal of good copy is to inspire action.
This makes good sense in any messaging (emails, updates, employee communications) and especially messaging that needs buy in from the audience. Without it there's no anchor for your mind to retain the information.
It's just purely information. And we get bombarded with it literally, from the moment we rise to the moment we go to sleep - our attention is a commodity that is heavily competed for.
In hindsight, applying this logic to our project above, a productive action our team could have taken rather than just restating “follow this link”, would be to invite people to click on the link in the meeting, wait for them to do it, and then describe the options they see. Or have some other incentive for them to follow the call to action right away.
‘Attention span’ should be renamed to ‘Why should I care’ span
You can get people to spend their attention on something using gimmicks, flashy incentives, or tactics, but is it quality attention?
Attention given to a “shiny thing” is very different than attention given with focus. You don’t need to look farther than social media to see how quickly we move on from the formulas and gimmick trends designed to attract our attention.
When it comes to behavior, the real challenge or goal is to get people to regularly spend quality attention repeatedly and commit to that over time.
To get people to give quality attention repeatedly over time, they have to care - that’s buy in.
Once they care they will act.
As Simon Sinek so famously said “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
In the absence of action, your what (your product, service, idea or philosophy) doesn’t really matter. The onus is on the receiver of the information to do something with it to receive value from it.
Our why needs to go to the heart in some way to compel someone to care enough to take an action from it.
Formula One - A great example of how these concepts come together
The Formula One Racing documentary series on Netflix, Drive to Survive! It takes you behind the scenes into the lives of the drivers and teams as you follow them along from race to race with a front row seat to the experience.
I never watched Formula One Racing prior to this show. Now, after watching all three seasons, we are taping the live race again this weekend.
The sport has gained two new fans without changing a thing, they merely approached Netflix to film their actual experience of competing throughout the season.
It’s compelling, exciting, dramatic and the teams are full of personality. The longer I watched, the more invested I became in the teams, the people in the sport. I started to care about what happened to them, who would win next. Simple. I bought in.
As Luke Smith points out in his Crash article, “That was the true magic and success of Drive to Survive. It didn’t focus on the on-track action, the overtakes or the battle for the championship. Instead, it made the drivers the true stars. It humanised the heroes of the sport. It meant that newcomers to F1 became fans of the people first, and the sport second.”
In summary
Quality attention span is really generated through caring – the why you are doing it.
For information to move to knowledge we need to take repeated action. If you are taking people on any type of journey – learning, transition, philosophical, cultural – they need to be moved to act on your information over time.
To be moved to act, they need to care. When they care they will give you their quality attention as you need it. This is buy in.
The reason they care (the why) must be present in all your information, either directly or indirectly, to continue to earn high levels of buy in and progress on the journey. This also builds and maintains trust.
Remember, the next time you go to hit send on that email or publish your project update – just because you send or publish doesn’t mean the information is received.
Ask yourself - is the action you want your audience to take clear and why should they care enough to take it. Are you focussed on why it’s great, or are you trying to get attention by creating a show around it instead?
Would you like to learn more on how to gain buy in for your initiative? Click here.
