"The Way Forward" Podcast - Episode 1 | Ben Wise

Hi everyone, I'm Professor Stephen Friedman and this is the Way Forward Podcast. Ben Wise is a 15-year industry veteran who's had successive sales and leadership roles in places that you may have heard of, like, I don't know, Google, where he's currently head of programmatic media. And he works with the largest marketing and advertising agencies across Canada. He's also active in his community where he serves on the board of the Daily Bread Food Bank. He advises multiple startups on sales and go-to-market strategy. And he volunteers in various mentorship programs helping students and young professionals Most interesting though is Ben being the co-founder of Captivate along with his partner Darren Chew. And their mission is, I love this, to bring the best of the psychology of persuasion out of the stuffy and dusty, dusty to blow off the dust of those academic environments and make it useful for everyday work.

Wow. Hi. What a wonderful introduction. Take you everywhere with me as my personal hype man, if you don't mind. Starting with family dinners with my wife. So she thinks a little more fancy of me.

You know, I've always been like a choice guest at a family dinner. You know, some people might think, oh my gosh, there's this guy who's working for this tech company. And lo and behold, he ends up in this totally— I mean, I don't think it's unrelated, but some might think it's unrelated. So I'd love to get, I'd love to get a little bit, a little picture of your journey and how you got interested in helping others with psychology of persuasion and decision-making generally.

3 or 4 years ago, my partner Darren, uh, came to me one day, said, I've been researching these psychology techniques that are really helping me out in my sales pitches. So he came in, he presented for 15 minutes, people loved it. Like, it's, it's a topic that, that resonates, it's super valuable, it's easy for people to start using these, it's not a lot of work. A lot of the psychology behind it is new to people but it's also really easy to understand and relate to because you see your own behaviors and like, hey, you know what? I did make that weird decision for what seems like a completely irrational reason. Now I understand why that happens. Or my client really likes this but won't sign on the dotted line. What's going on? Why can't I get it over the line? And then you explain the psychology behind it and you're like, oh, that's— that makes sense. Now I know how to overcome this.

Totally. It is so powerful to see people reflect on a theory and see it. And they say, holy Moses, look at that. I'm seeing it in action. And this sort of, you know, I don't want to overblow it, but I'm going to call it an epiphany anyhow. People sort of sitting back and saying, yeah, right. It's a good word. Oh my God. I could really use this. That's the stuff of moving things forward. And I also think, I think two things about this. One is that. It's incredible to get a chance to see something come into action. But man, it's pretty cool that people out there, to me, this is always amazing, are willing to say, "Oh man, I got to get better at this. I see the challenges that I have as an individual in my sales and marketing tactics and approach, and I want to be better." And so, it becomes for you guys meta persuasion. You're persuading them to buy into the ideas of persuasion. And oh my God, now my mind is blown.

Persuasion inception. I love it.

Yeah.

I, I think also part of it is that like so much of the specific tactics of how this comes to life are such small little changes. Yeah. We're not, we're not saying for you to put this into practice, you need to read this 500-page textbook and go through this course and practice the thing for hours and hours. Like it's, oh, when you make your ask, instead of phrasing the words this way, phrase it this way.

Yeah.

Just change that a little bit. When you're kicking off your meeting, add this sentence or a sentence like this based on this concept. One sentence, and you're going to be like, your chances of success will go up.

I really love the idea of getting people to buy into it and try it. And you know what? This reminds— this makes me think of another question that I had. When you look at— and you mentioned that like a lot of it is stuff that people haven't come across. It's two things. One is they haven't come across some of these ideas before. Um, but they're not like, you know, mind-spinning. It's not like you're saying to them, read a textbook, is what you said. It's actual stuff you can say and do. And I really love that. What's frustrating to you about sort of the way business people commonly approach persuasion, you know, and how could somebody maybe turn that around?

I, I mean, I think the biggest thing that I see, and, and thinking back to kind of my early sales career, was we're when you're planning to persuade someone, you come at it very logically. Mhm. But the other side of the table is not receiving things logically. They're receiving things emotionally. So I could give you all the right proof points, all the data, all the stats, but they probably made a snap decision based on some sort of emotional reaction, and then they're just going to like confirmation bias the rest of the time of like, well, if I decided yes, I'll find the data points that I like to support that. If I decided no, I'll pick out the flaws on why I want to say no. But we come at it with like this, you know, we think the person on the other side of the table is just going to listen to our value prop and our logically laid out arguments and the facts and supporting statistics of why this makes sense. And that's just not how the brain works. And what's fascinating, people like when we go and talk about this on a stage, a lot of time people will be like, okay, I can see how that works with consumers, but I also work in B2B. And so I'm selling to a corporation, so they are logical. And it's like, well, actually corporations are staffed by humans. It's not the corporation sitting on the other side of the table. It is a human on the other side of the table. And humans are not logical. Humans are emotional. So even in B2B, and I, I, I always laugh a little bit when I hear that pushback. Cause they're like, well, I'm selling to a company. The company's logical. It's like, well, you're selling to a person.

Yeah, exactly.

People are not.

No, they are not. And it's one of the most challenging things, I think, not just at the levels that you're working, but man, I don't even have to tell you how challenging it must be with students. And we teach about this concept called, it's like in a textbook, but it's called bounded rationality. And it's really just the idea that we have incredible limits, human beings, on our abilities to be rational. And it's always interesting how people either, I don't know, they don't want to accept it, or oftentimes they're like, well, that's the other people are like that. I'm, I'm logical.

I had a, I had a great conversation with a friend once where I was explaining this idea of like emotional decision-making. He's like, I could see how other people are like that, but not me. I have a physics degree from a top-tier university. And he started going, so I'm not like that. And he was getting— the irony was that he was getting so emotional about it, right? He was so emotional about saying, no, I don't make emotional decisions.

One of the things that's challenging about teaching people this stuff is you got to show them how they might be making mistakes, but also have them not feel crappy about it, which is tough because it's hard to say to somebody, hey, look, I know you think you're not being emotional with your decisions, but what do you think this is coming from? The stuff you're saying, that's what it is. And I think that so much of it is humanizing the fact that we do emotional decision-making. You know?

Yeah.

Making it—

That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. No. But it is reality, and you have to accept that as reality, I think.

Yeah. It's like when you ask people, do you—

As a step, for some.

Yeah. When I'm with, like, you know, depending on the sector, and I ask them about their biases, and, you know, they think they don't have any.

Yeah.

It's only the evildoers.

Yeah. Right? And I think that this comes down to like having a bit of self-awareness, right? And, and maybe it's because I've got more gray hairs than probably a lot of your students that like over time you build some of that awareness as you go through life. And it can be humbling when you realize some of the, some of the mistakes you've made. But sometimes like the, you know, the best teacher is experience and it's, it's a tough lesson and it takes time. There's no, there's no silver bullet, right?

And that, and that again comes back to how important it is to be for, for us to get the right audience so they're ready to be receptive to that message. And also for me, I think about, and I'm sure you do too, how much gratitude I have towards the opportunity to teach somebody something like this and have it actually have an impact. That is so amazing. If you were to give someone advice on, okay, so you're in a place right now where you're, I know you want to learn, but it's hard for you to see how you make decisions irrationally/emotionally. How can we tell them, teach them how to turn that around without making them feel crappy?

Well, first, have I got a newsletter for those folks.

Okay, good.

The one, like, turning point for me was I read a book called Thinking Fast and Slow by Danny Kahneman. I love him. And he has an incredible amount of research on just kind of this idea of the emotional versus the rational in the way that we make decisions. And I think when you see all the studies, when you see all of those things, like, it, it was very eye-opening for me. It was probably like the most influential book I've ever read for myself because it just changes the way you look at things. And once you, once you're looking for that, you start to see it in yourself, you start to see it in people around you. You know, the, the number of like funny things that you can see where people say something or people have this firm belief or like— and once you kind of have that psychology behind it, you're like, I can see why you think that, but also why it's wrong. And then you— and then, but thankfully now we've all got a phone in our pocket so we can Google it within 4 seconds. And I'll be like, here's why it might not make sense.

Right.

That probably does not help them overcome, but it's also fun to see it yourself.

You know, it's interesting that you say that, but I always suggest to my clients when I, you know, I'm on the corporate side of the work that I do, they say, you know, how can I prime up my employees to hear the message that you're teaching? Anything about emotional intelligence or motivation or any of the things that I teach about. And what I always suggest to them is to send them something that someone has written. I would love to send them that particular book, which I'm a huge fan of. And of course, you know, he just passed, I guess, last year. And it's funny how when you read it, like an expert, somebody like you can get up there and say, hey, I know what the hell I'm talking about. But somehow when we say, oh, by the way, it's not just me, it's here's this, you know, fancy person who's amazing. And they read that and then all of a sudden it's like, wow, yeah, well, I guess it's got some legs now that it's, you know, it's funny.

Yeah. I think that idea of priming is just so incredibly powerful. I think reality of like so much of how we make decisions comes down to the context in which we make that decision. As a lot of times, and I've done this with clients where like a client is doing something and it's like, That makes absolutely no sense. But then, but then I have a friend that also works at that company and I call him up and I say like, I think this is ridiculous, but I'm probably missing something. What is the context that I'm missing in which that decision that I think is crazy? What is the context where that decision makes sense? And then he explains some of the internal stuff to me and I was like, oh yeah, you know what? If I was in his shoes, I probably, or I probably would have made that same decision. Because a lot of it is like, is the priming and anchoring around like, what are the facts that you have access to? What are you seeing? What is the surroundings that you are making that decision? We do something in a lot of our speaking. We split the room in half and we ask, they have a one-question form. And the question is, how many days is the orbit of Mars? Nobody knows the answer, but like everybody guesses. But in one group, we tell them the orbit of Earth is 365 days. How many days is the orbit of Mars? The other group, we tell them the orbit of Jupiter, which is like 4,000 and something. And, and if all— if that's the only data point you have, like every single time the Jupiter group guesses Mars like 4 times higher. And, and it's just like, oh, you have a, a different set of information. You're making your decision or your guess in a different context. And so you guessing 4,000 and you guessing 500, neither of those are are silly. You're just making the decision in a different— you're making your guess in a different context. And if you can start to like shape that context for people, that becomes extremely, extremely powerful.

It is so powerful that the— for those that don't know, this is, uh, the framing bias that you're describing. And, um, that's really great example, by the way. I've seen it been tested in a number of ways. You know, it's, it's unfortunate because One of the things that I find frustrating is that we are living in a world where there's a tremendous amount of belief in the— I'm going to call it the magical power of the gut. And well, yes, my friends who study nutrition will say the gut certainly has influences on our lives in ways we don't know before, but I'm going to say decision-making is not one of them. We're learning about the gut biome, but that's more biology. But once you get into, you know, the gut is really just a, I call it like we've got a fancy, we've got the magical word for bias. We call it the gut or intuition. Then we have the evil word, you know, it's bias and demonic prejudice. And there's no question that those things are bad. Anyway you slice it, it's still an emotional decision. It's like if you spin a roulette wheel and you guess correctly, You know, do you say, see, I was right? Or do you say, or I was lucky? I was lucky, right? It's exactly the same.

Yeah.

And, uh, that's— I'd love if you do that with people. That is such a cool activity.

Yeah. And I mean, it's just so real time. And yeah, you know, I'll be honest, every time we do it, I'm nervous that like, what if this is the group that The answers don't, and it's yet to happen. Every single time it's worked exactly as you'd expect it. And so like when I practice, I know roughly what the numbers are going to be because it's always roughly the same numbers. So if you listen to this podcast and then you end up in a speaking thing where I do this activity, please don't ruin it.

Right.

Please just guess the high number, the low number, if you know my trick.

So one of the things that when I was reading your newsletter, one of the things that really drew me in was the idea, and this is what really caught me because I love these lines. Winning an argument is a terrible idea. And I really love that because A, it's counterintuitive for some. B, as somebody who has, you know, let's call it had interactions, debates with people, it's so interesting that when you reflect on them, you're like, yeah, you know what? I'm pretty sure no one's ever won an argument. You know? So why do professionals think that argument is such an important thing. What is that?

It's because it feels good to win, because it is glorified on TV and movies. Like, watch any law drama, right? And the, the hero wins the case. And, and they don't just win the case, they like beat down the other side with this trick that they figured out. And the other side is, they're the loser and the winner is this hero, right? But of course, that is TV. That's not the real world. In the real world, most things are not just a one-off interaction. Most things are going to be a, like, ongoing relationship or an ongoing partnership. So if I think about, like, working with one of my clients now, if I were to win the argument today, when I go back to them next week with another pitch or another proposal and they're like, well, you really bummed me out last week, what are they gonna say? They're gonna be like, oh, you know, it doesn't even matter what I propose. They're gonna have their backup and they're gonna immediately think that. And so I was actually, you know, listening to another podcast that, that studies successful negotiation. So what they say is in a lab setting where it is a one-off interaction, being angry, being forceful, being aggressive is really effective cuz it, it ends the negotiation and somebody wins.

Yeah.

If you're listening on audio, I'm doing air quotes, somebody wins. But in, in the real world, you are going to have repeated interactions with that person, and if you beat them, every following interaction is going to be much, much worse. And the best negotiators in real-world situations don't win arguments, they find common ground, because they know that the, like, single most important thing in that ongoing partnership is the human-to-human relationship.

It's funny because what you just said right now would convince anybody, I think, that maybe winning an argument's not so— because it's like, I know this sounds crazy, and it's crazy because it's so incredibly true, Ben. If we end up, whether we agree with it or not, whether it should or shouldn't, if we end up annoying people, making them feel crappy, they don't want to buy shit from us. No.

Yeah. Right. I mean, imagine going to customer service somewhere where the customer service agent wins your argument and you don't get what you want. Great for the company in that one instance because they have a little more money, but are you going to ever buy something from them ever again? They, they won the battle. But they've then lost the customer.

Absolutely. This is so— what a great— I love talking about this. I think we could talk for hours. So, I know we're not rational decision makers. And of course, we talked a little bit about how this can be a frustration. It can be a challenge for people to realize and recognize that they're not rational decision makers. And we know that winning an argument is one of the biggest myths about persuasion, as you just pointed out, right? It's funny. I get students often will put up their hands and say, my argument is, and I always stop them and say, who's arguing? Yeah.

We're just talking. It's funny that they are kind of in the mindset of that.

When you're teaching, that's one of the pieces of magic is, you know, in trying to persuade people about persuasion, you got to get— I was just telling a client this the other day. They were asking me, you know, what's your big philosophy of education? And I say, you gotta make sure people feel good about themselves. 'Cause no one wants to learn from somebody. No one wants to buy from somebody. Nobody wants to be hired by, work for, work with somebody who makes them feel small. Whether it's true or not, whether that person's right or wrong, this or that, it doesn't matter.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, your feelings have way more impact on your behavior than anything else.

100%.

So if, if you are, if you are impacting somebody's feelings, in a negative way, yeah, you are, you're screwed. And then I think another key part is like, while we do make a lot of like quick instinct decisions, we then spend a lot of time rationalizing that decision. I've heard people tell me like they got a certain phone because they really like the extra megapixels on the camera and the processor is this much faster. It's like any camera over 6 megapixels, which is everything Every camera in the world now.

Yep. Think about the language that we use in business, right? Root cause, benchmark, all these kinds of things that are like drill down. And like, again, it's this idea of— I like the term, I use it all the time, is the best answer. Or, you know, my colleague, he calls it good enough. And it sounds terrible to say because you want to be great, you know, but good enough.

Yeah. And I think a lot of thinking back to like, and this is going back a little while now to when I was in school. The idea of like you're striving for perfection and you can get 100%, um, and you work your butt off to do really well. But I would tell my team, like, I would take 5 projects at an 8 out of 10 instead of 1 project at a 10 out of 10, because going from 8 to 10, that last little bit takes as long as the next 2 projects to get to an 8.

Absolutely.

There, there's a point where like you need to say, this is good enough, let's get this out. Let's, let's test it. And you can always iterate on a lot of things later. It's not like you're, you know, stuck with that forever. And I think when, when there are decisions where you are stuck with it for a long time, in which case, yeah, you probably want to take a little more time. Hiring a person on your team, like, you need to put the extra steps into that because that is a very hard decision to reverse.

Wait a second, we just want to use our gut in the second interview, which I'm sure people do.

Sure. Like, that is a really hard one to remember.

And you know what, and they'll tell you when I hear it all the time because I teach recruitment and interviewing, they're like, yeah, but I had that, I had a feeling about them. And then I had it again the next time I met them.

Oh, the good old double feeling.

That's so much better than a single feeling, right? But, but, you know, people say, no, this person is X because I've known them for 3 years. You know, so I know their behavior. And I'm like, really? Okay. So show me the spreadsheet where you're keeping track of their behavior. Well, they don't have that spreadsheet because they haven't been keeping track of it. And they're keeping track of the parts of the behavior that confirm their opinion from before. And of course, that makes a lot of sense for a human being. You know?

Yeah. It feels good to be right. Oh, shit. And so finding the data points of why you are right is a very natural thing to do.

There's no question that it feels fabulous. It's so much better than feeling that you're being wronged. Oh, God. If I was to ask you, let's say we're talking to a young professional or we're talking to an emerging leader, how could somebody take some of these ideas and make them a big part of their career and their leadership, like the next level of their leadership or the next level of their career in a real practical way? Would you say?

Yeah. I mean, I think I'd love to say, oh, here's the easy answer. Just do X and you'll be perfect by tomorrow.

We could never say that now. I think what we've talked about.

No, no. Yeah, yeah. I think the reality is like adding a better understanding of psychology will help you. Like that is a, you know, an objective statement, as objective as humans can be, I guess. But I think like anything else, becoming more persuasive, becoming a better communicator, becoming a better leader, becoming a better influencer, it takes practice. And you just need to be conscious and deliberate about that practice and commit to doing it. And as you said, like a lot of people have that growth mindset where they wake up and they want to be better at what they were doing today than they were yesterday. And learning these techniques that I talk about a lot through Captivate are one way to— it's not the only way. It is one great way to do that. And if that is the path you want to take, then Great, sign up to the newsletter. I will talk your ear off about all these amazing tactics. But with anything, it is about actually using it and practicing it. Yeah. And the more you do that, the more it just becomes natural to you, the more it becomes part of your toolkit. And that's actually one of the reasons why we do our newsletter monthly. Yes. As opposed to more frequent, because at the end of every one we say like, okay, we go deep on this tactic and then at the end of it we say, here's your monthly challenge. To put this into practice in the following month. Do ABC, find an example, change the way you're framing it, and, you know, watch the result as an example.

Yeah.

And so to help, we, we give a very specific, like, here is a checklist. Yeah. Next time you have a meeting where you need to convince somebody of something, where you need to persuade, here are the 5 techniques we talked about, and here's a one-sentence prompt of how to put it into practice, just to remind you.

Yeah.

Pick one or two. You don't need every technique in every situation.

You can't do them all.

Start to see how you build them in. No, no, you can't do them all. There's too many. They don't fit in every situation. And so the more you have, you know, the more diversity of choice you have, which is great. But just as you go into something, step back and think, okay, these are some techniques I might want to try. I'm gonna pick up anchoring. How am I gonna add anchoring into this conversation?

So I don't want anyone to walk away from what Ben just said and think to themselves, oh, so practice makes perfect. No. Can we call this, Ben, maybe you like this, because this is what I'm thinking. Practice makes me suck a little bit less at this.

That's nice. That's an interesting way of saying it. I think what my kids learn in school is practice makes progress.

Nice. Oh, I like that.

Which maybe rolls off the tongue a little bit more than makes me suck less. But the same idea. And no one should strive for perfection because that's not something that exists.

Incremental, being okay with that incremental, even if it's only a tiny bit.

Absolutely.

I like a 2% improvement so much better than a 0% improvement.

Oh yeah. And it compounds over time. Yeah.

So you've talked to me a little bit about what people could learn from the newsletter, some really great examples of the ways in which you lay out the tips. And I love this. I love checklists. I think those are amazing. And I'm particularly impressed at the emphasis upon not trying to do 20 things. I think about so many other ways that we practice learning something new and this idea that, okay, well, now that I've read the book, I can put it on my bedside table and now I've learned it. It's why I cringe when I hear that the goal of anything is awareness. I find it very upsetting because I don't know about you, I'm aware of a whole lot of crap that I do nothing about.

Yeah.

And so I love the idea of trying something small each time and reflecting, keeping track of what you tried. I think that's amazing. So people can learn more about your work by signing up for the free newsletter.

Yep. I would say that the Substack newsletter, captivate-newsletter.substack.com, and connect with me on LinkedIn. I post a lot on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there and try to respond to everything on, on there as well. So those are probably the two best places that people are looking to learn more about what we're doing and to connect.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, so now, as you know, because I told you about this before, I've got some rapid-fire questions.

Bring it on.

You ready for my rapid-fire? Something I'm going to try to do for everybody.

Yeah.

What superpower would you prefer? Would it be, you know, you could fly or you could be invisible?

Flight. I think it— the idea of flying just sounds so much fun.

Doesn't it though?

The adrenaline would be great. Yeah.

I wonder if there's some deep-seated reason, something that we can read into depending on—

Yeah, I wish I was— I was going to say I wish I was a bird. I don't actually wish I was a bird, but I do wish I could fly. I don't want to eat worm salt. Yeah. Yeah.

You're going to time travel. Where do you want to go? Past or the future?

Oh, I would go back 15 years and tell myself to buy Nvidia stock and Bitcoin.

Okay. Smart. Smart. That's a real—

It's a little self-serving, but— And then I would take earnings and I would donate a lot of it to Daily Bread. I'm assuming I could go back and then return. If I couldn't return, I've got future, definitely future. I just think things progress and no matter what's going on in the world, the arc of history is towards progress over time. And so life 100 years from now, I'm sure is just going to be better than life now, which is better than life 100 years ago.

Oh my God. I love it, Ben. I love that you said that, by the way. Like you, I'm an eternal optimist. I mean, to me, The progress we've made already in the world is just so incredible. And it's easy to get down when you see the news and what's going on in the world today. And there's no question that there's bad things, et cetera, if you look at the short term. This is also something I learned from Danny Kahneman. It's like, your only comparison is when you start looking. But the broader your view, the more optimistic you can be. And I'm a big believer. Like you, that, man, things are just getting better, you know?

Yeah, yeah. It's funny because that's such an example of the emotional versus the rational, because the emotional sees these stories and, you know, take the, you know, there was a plane crash at Pearson recently. Not sure when this is going to air, but you see that and you have this emotional fear of flying because that's terrifying. Yeah, you could picture it viscerally.

Yes.

Even though this, that even though you are like infinitely more likely to be injured or killed in a car crash, you are more likely to probably, I would have to double check my facts, but you're probably more likely to die from a coconut falling out of a tree and bonking you on the head than in a plane crash.

100%.

Do people avoid going near coconut trees? Probably not. But it's again that emotional versus rational.

Okay. My last question, which to me is my personal favorite. Um, cake or pie?

Pie. Strong pie. Um, to the point, with my kids, when we eat pie, I sing a little pie song, which is really just repeating the word pie to a cheesy tune. Um, 100% pie. But you have a strong answer too, I'm guessing, based on the way you phrased the question.

It's also pie.

Okay.

Yeah, by a long shot. Yeah, I love pie. I make my own pie, and like you I'm not going to, because one day I think my kids might listen to this. So I'm not going to embarrass them by singing my several songs about pi. But I mean, pi rhymes with so many words that it just becomes, you can't stop. And then there's dad jokes on top of it.

Oh, it just, it spirals. It spirals. This has been a very fun conversation.

Yeah. I thought so too.

Yeah.

So the biggest thing I ever learned from Danny Kahneman's work, and it's not even, it's the number 2 is all the things that we talked about. But the part that is— that I think was the most important to me, and I think it sounds very important in your work too, is the opportunity to do two things in sequence. One is say, hey, you know what, I make these mistakes all the time because I'm imperfect and I'm not a rational thinker as much as I might think. And the second one is the most important. Same with that person. They are also that way and they may not know. And so my takeaway is kindness. We have to also be patient with the challenges that other people have of learning it. When you see the faults in other people and then see them in yourselves, don't just look at them, wag your finger, I learned the ways and you need to too. Be patient with that person. Be kind to that person. Help them get better. Thanks to everybody for listening. And we'll see you next time on The Way Forward. The Way Forward is supported by Canada's number one business school, the Schulich School of Business.