How to change someone's mind when both sides have dug in

Recently I thought about what kind of person I want to be, what I want to stand for, and who I want SUE, our company, to help people become. It resulted in a manifesto I wrote about the 'stubborn optimist'. I believe Behavioural Design can help people who believe in progress, who want to do things differently, who see opportunities instead of threats, realise their goals. You can read all about it here. It was sparked by all the negativity in the media that surrounds us. I feel it is time for more optimism, and for people to have the will to push on when things fail. And I guess one of the basic needs is to shed our judgmental mindset. So this newsletter is about a fundamental design question that drives stubborn optimism:

How do you design a conversation where opponents stop seeing enemies? And how might the same thinking help in any room where people have dug in?

In searching for the answer I landed in Ireland. The question was abortion, one of the things Irish people disagreed on most bitterly. Ireland could have started with a referendum campaign: the slogans, the shouting, the two sides talking past each other. It did something else. In 2016 it picked ninety-nine ordinary people, chosen at random, like a jury. Young and old, men and women, rich and poor, from every part of the country. Some firmly against. Some firmly in favour. Some unsure. They sat down together over five weekends. They heard the same balanced evidence. They talked it through in small groups, everyone an equal, no one performing for a crowd. And people changed their minds. Not because someone won the argument. Because the room was built for listening. The assembly voted for change. Then the whole country voted. It agreed.

The minds did not change because of better arguments. They changed because of how the talking was organised.

The behavioural science here is about how the design of a conversation shapes whether people can hear each other at all. Put people on opposing sides of a stage with an audience and a scoreboard, and they perform their positions and harden. Seat the same people together as equals, with good information and time and small groups, and the dynamic changes from winning to understanding. The hostility was never simply in the people. It was in the structure of the encounters they were having.

This is Behavioural Design applied to disagreement itself. You do not plead with people to be more open-minded. You design the conditions, equality, real information, the right scale of conversation, in which open-mindedness becomes the natural thing, and let the structure do the work that exhortation cannot.

You cannot plead people into open-mindedness. You can design the conditions where it becomes the natural thing.

So how do you put this to work, well beyond national questions? Here are three practical moves:

• Change the shape of the conversation, not just its rules. A disagreement staged as a debate produces winners and losers. Seat people in a circle as equals, give them shared information, and the same dispute becomes a search for understanding. The format does much of the work.

• Shrink the room. People posture in front of an audience and listen in small groups. When you need a real exchange, break a large, performative gathering into small, equal conversations where there is no crowd to play to.

• Give people the same facts before they argue. Much conflict is two sides reasoning from different information. Start with a shared, balanced briefing, and you remove the ground on which a lot of the hostility grows.

And I want to end with an invitation: become a stubborn optimist. Shift your focus to what is going well instead of what is going wrong (a lot of exciting things are already happening, we just don't always get to see them). I would love you to visit my stubborn optimism page. And I would love to meet people who have an interesting story to share, about ideas, architecture, services or products that are all about progress. Please do get in touch.