The Cure for Indefensibility: Include the Evidence of Experience

Have you ever presented an idea to someone and they immediately rejected it simply because it didn't match what they believed to be true? Well, that, my friends, is a possible indication of one of the big errors of idea ignorability: indefensibility. And by that, I mean where somebody doesn't feel like your claim, your point, your idea can actually do or does actually do what you say it does. Indefensibility is the third of three avoidable errors, all tied to idea coherence. How does something make sense to somebody's head, heart, and gut about a new idea? What makes idea coherence tricky is that it happens nearly instantaneously, and it has two primary meanings. Whether or not something is coherent to somebody— does it make enough sense for them to be able to comprehend, to grasp the whole? Indefensibility signals an issue with the coherence with someone, with the beliefs, views, prior knowledge, experience, paradigms under which somebody's currently operating. The last one, irrelevance, is a little bit of both. Irrelevance means I don't understand it. I don't see why this is coherent to me. Why is this relevant to me? And therefore it is not coherent with me and what I care about. The whole reason why we're talking about these three avoidable errors and how they roll up to idea coherence is because idea coherence, both to and with is key to successful sense-giving. In other words, giving someone the information they need to make sense of something. And when sense-giving is successful, persuasion, coercion, manipulation is not necessary. So this brings us back to defensibility. Defensibility means to ward off attack. So when something is indefensible, it is therefore open to attack. It can't defend against the kind of attacks that somebody's mind automatically will attempt to wage against the idea, attacks on whether or not it aligns with somebody's prior beliefs, whether or not they believe you, whether or not it sounds feasible, whether or not they care. If sensegiving is successful, then the support for the idea, the internal sensibility of the idea, is already there and the attack has no purchase. Defense becomes the absence of the need to defend, not preparing for the fight, making the fight unnecessary. What gets in the way of that kind of defensibility? Two things. Number one, you offered a claim. You said your idea could do something or that your idea is something, but you didn't offer any support. Number two, you offered support, you offered evidence, but it was support or evidence that the audience didn't agree with. The audience's experience of both is because I can't quite make sense of why you believe what you believe, or I can't understand why you would possibly think that supports why you believe what you believe, I can't support it. And worse, I don't think you can either. Yeah, not a good place to be in with your idea. So what can we actually do? Number 1, make the because explicit. You may recall that one of the keys to comprehensibility, understandability, graspability of an idea is making sure that it matches up with people's internal structure for how they make sense of ideas. And one of those key ways is with if, then, because. If I throw a ball up in the air, then it will fall because gravity. As humans occupying the same space in the world, we often, but not always, have the same underlying understanding of the because. So if you're talking about your idea with people who are already persuaded, who have, and you are sure they have, a very similar background and point of view to you, something, by the way, I don't think you can necessarily rely on, then it's possible that you can just say, if you want this, do this, and someone will go, okay. Even if that's the case, I highly suggest you provide the because anyway, because why not make sure that your idea is as strong and defensible as possible? So solution number 1, make sure that you articulate the because underneath your claim. Why is it that you believe that those 2 things are connected? Why do you believe that's the right way, the best way to accomplish a particular outcome? Why is that the way you do what you do in your particular way. There are reasons for that. And that leads us to the second thing that you can do to solve for defensibility of your idea, because not all becausees are created equal. Becausees typically fall into, I would say, one of four categories. Number one, stories and metaphor. Our solution will be successful because we are the Uber of whatever this thing is. If somebody has the same understanding of that metaphor and the same interpretation of it, maybe that's going to work. And in fact, metaphors and stories are really useful for helping make something concrete. But it is possible that not everybody has the same starting understanding or the starting internal interpretation of what being the Uber of something might look like. So it's still safer to back up that story or metaphor with something else. Now, one of the ways to back it up is with data, evidence, facts. This is a favorite, except for the fact that we live in a time of alternative facts. And if those facts don't align with somebody's prior understanding or prior belief, the facts don't land. You may have experienced this yourself. So facts and data useful, but again, it requires a very similar worldview to start. A third form of support is often beliefs or values. We should do X to accomplish Y because it's the right thing to do. Obviously, you think it's the right thing to do or else you wouldn't be recommending it. But if the people that you're talking to don't also agree that it's the right thing to do or don't see why you think it's the right thing to do, then again, we've got an issue. So could you add more support with stories and metaphor or with data? Yes, possibly. The problem is that A, all of those becauses require buttressing from other because forms, and B, there's still something deeper and stronger that can support it. And this is the fourth category of because, and it is my favorite and generally the most defensible, and that is the audience's own experience expressed as an axiom or a foundational principle. To use one of my favorite examples from Leadership Contract and Vince Molinaro, if we want to execute a strategic change successfully, then we need to We could say that's the right thing to do. We could say because it's the data. We could talk about a story or an example where somebody did that and it was successful, or somebody didn't do that and it wasn't successful. The time it would take to support all of those things with each other is often time you don't have. This is where we rely on that audience's own experience as evidence stated as an axiom. So we want to scale accountability to achieve this successful outcome. Why? Because accountability is the ownership of outcomes. That is a self-evident truth, an axiom, a foundational principle that is anchored in the audience's own experience. Their brain can quickly check and say, yeah, tracks, makes sense, let's move on. Once you have that axiom, that self-evident principle, like accountability is the ownership of outcomes, then you can layer on a metaphor, a story, the data, the evidence, because you've anchored it in the strongest evidence of all, somebody's own experience of the world. You don't have to convince them because they already know that thing is true. The reason why this kind of defensibility is so important is, as my dissertation coach Leonard Naka says, there is a big difference between having an idea and having to defend it in public. That's why these two solutions, making sure your idea has a because and making sure that first because is anchored in somebody's own experience work so well. You're presenting your idea with its publicly coherent support, which also allows you to do one other really important thing, and that is to arm the person you're talking to to be able to make the case to someone else. Let's call it the without you test. If your idea can't survive and be perceived as defensible without you physically present to be charismatic, to sell, to fill in the missing blanks, then that is the second most common place where your idea will fail. The first is on first contact with that first audience. But if that person can't transfer the coherence of your idea to somebody else, inclusive of its relevance, its comprehensibility, and its defensibility, they probably won't even try. Because if that person says to themselves in the moment, Yeah, I agree with you, but there's no way I can sell that up the line. Why did either of you just spend time doing that? Seriously. The best case, of course, is that you are there with your idea and, and you can give it all the extra goodness that it deserves. But more often than not, you have to send your idea out into the world on its own, and often in the hands of somebody who is not you. Now, you may be saying to yourself, I've made sure that this is relevant to my audience. I have made it comprehensible. I have based it in the evidence of their own experience. What happens if I do this amazing sense giving and somebody still doesn't agree? That's okay. Defensibility is not the same as agreement. It's giving people enough information to show that there's enough common ground for them to keep exploring together. That, yeah, sure, sometimes it may convince somebody right there and then, but More often, because people have this what's known as commission bias, or as my friends Ted McKenna and Matt Dixon say, a fear of messing up, FOMO, the more that you can keep that conversation going in a legitimate permission-based agentic way, the better for both of you. So there are 3 outcomes when defensibility holds. Number 1, they follow the support, they agree, and you move on to the next stage of information sharing and building that mutual understanding. Number 2, they follow your explanation. They grasp that whole, they see the support, they understand those principles are true, but they just may not feel either that those principles apply in this situation, or it is possible that they don't believe that accountability is the ownership of outcomes. They have a different preferred definition that makes your position not make as much sense to them. What I have seen over and over again through years of experience using this approach is that even when that happens, when you you understand each other, you just don't agree, the separation is clean. You part friends, maybe not necessarily friends, but there's no further battle. Nobody gets all up in arms. It's just, yeah, I don't see it that way. And whether we're talking about interpersonal communication or sales or pitching, I have found over and over again, the sooner you can figure out where the no is and where it's coming from, the better for everyone. It either says, Hey, we've got more to work on either internally or with each other, or this is a gap that we're just not going to be able to close because we don't agree on some of the basic principles of how this work happens or how it should happen. So taken altogether, an idea has to be coherent in order for someone to be able to make sense of it. Someone has to be able to make sense of an idea in order to be persuaded, understand it, grasp it, interpret it, decide to act on it. Ultimately, it comes down to remembering, is this idea coherent to itself, to them, and coherent with them and what they already know and what they already believe. If it doesn't pass that test in private, there's far more work to do before you ever try to defend it in public. But if you have all that, your idea has a chance, and I would say a much better chance, to actually survive, actually land, and actually succeed to move on in people's consideration. Exploration, or decision to adopt. And isn't that why we have the ideas in the first place? So go forth and make the defense of your idea unnecessary.