Getting commitment Cialdini-style

Another topic in a conversation I had today was about getting commitment to actions - particularly getting them from people who aren’t necessarily that inclined to commit to something, either because they’re reluctant , or because they’re not particularly engaged in the situation. There was a piece of psychological theory that I’d come across which described exactly the technique to help in this situation, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was called.

Quite by chance, I came across this article from Arizona State University, which described almost exactly what I was thinking about:

Consistency, according to Robert Cialdini, can be extremely effective in setting up good rules for people to follow. “The key,” he says, “is to prompt them to make an initial public commitment that is consistent with the rule.”

This leads to the restaurant owner and his dilemma.

The restaurant was having problems with large numbers of patrons who neither honored their reservations nor called to cancel them. Rather than take a dogmatic approach to solving the problem, the owner came up with a simple yet profoundly effective solution.

He had the receptionist change her usual request when taking a reservation over the telephone. Instead of saying, “Please call if you have to change your plans,” she rephrased the statement as a question. She began asking, “Will you call if you change your plans?”

The question caused the patron to commit to calling if he or she could not keep or needed to change their reservation. The no-show rate at the restaurant fell from 30 percent to 10 percent.

The context of the conversation I was having was about getting a project handed over into a support environment once it had been delivered, and the reluctance that a support function often has toward taking over new responsibilities. The specific problem was ensuring that the support function understood how to run the new system - and not being caught out by someone nodding and agreeing, but not actually understanding what it was they’d agreed to.

The implication of Cialdini’s theory is that rather than asking “do you understand that”, you need to frame the question so that their understanding is played back to you - perhaps something along the lines of “so how would you go about doing X?” The same principle gets used in aviation - when an instructor hands over control to a pupil, they’ll say “you have control” - to which the pupil has to reply “I have control” before the instructor releases the controls. There’s an explicit feedback loop in place.

[The book referred to in the article is here.]