CHAPTER 8

Strategies to Move Your Human

A BRIEF RECAP: KNOWING what drives a person will give you the foundational information for getting what you want. Your first task is to find out where he is in terms of belonging and differentiating; that is, where he fits in the hierarchy. You have the tools to understand what the possibilities are for him moving up in the hierarchy—in most cases better than he can.

Your range of options takes shape as you decide whether to help him differentiate in the group, perhaps raising him to supertypical status or downgrade him to plain old Joe. From the moment you make that decision, your entire plan to get what you want reflects whether you will move him up or move him down. By up or down, we do not mean only between tiers but also within a tier. Your target, who is barely belonging, has a need to firm up his position. Will you take the approach that threatens to remove him from the group entirely unless he cooperates, move him squarely into the group in exchange for his cooperation, or a combination of the two? Your target, who is fully differentiated to the point of being supertypical, has risen above the tier for belonging, and may climb the stairs to self-actualization. Do you take the approach that differentiates him even further—the kick-him-upstairs move—or reduce his differentiators by pointing out that the emperor's new clothes are really just skin?

At this juncture, we can't tell you what you are likely to choose, because every situation will be dependent on what you know about your target—how he views himself and the world, his strengths and weaknesses, and where you are in the group. What we can tell you is how each tool works in the context of the different strategies:

• Bonding
• Fracturing
• Homogenizing
• Overdifferentiating

At the same time, we can show you how each of these works in concert with paring options, isolation, illustration, and association.

Bonding and Homogenizing

Bonding is the positive use of finding commonalities among people. It points to the things you have in common, good or bad, and invites someone to come closer by suggesting, “You and I are so much alike that I can't be a threat to you.” Even clichés such as “Misery loves company,” “Strength in numbers,” or the feeble “Redheads need to stick together” capture this gravitation toward those with whom we share some feeling, trait, or cause.

Homogenizing is a negative use of finding the commonalities among people; that is, the negative use of bonding. The preacher is no different from the congregation: he has the same human drives and frailties as the rest of the congregation. This can be the preacher caught philandering or the boss making mistakes in a presentation. Whatever the genesis, the outcome is the same. By deliberately homogenizing, you push the target back closer to the center of the group, and away from supertypical status. Through the use of the tactics we described in the section on paring options, you can apply the following strategies.

Illustration

How effectively you illustrate what you know about the target has a tremendous effect on the quality of outcome, whether the intent is to bond or to homogenize. You can carry out the strategy by asking straightforward questions, forcing a behavior, or by parallel questioning to draw the person to divulge information publicly and unintentionally.

• Bonding through illustration. Illustration relies on the tactics you learned in Chapter 4. Whether you opt to use direct questioning or parallel questioning to get your target to divulge information is dependent on what you know about her personality from modeling her. Once you decide, you then go about questioning or bringing up topics in an obtuse way that you know she will comment on. In some cases, all you need to do is issue the invitation, and she will do the rest. You are, after all, creating an opportunity for her to bond—one of the most powerful of human drives.

  Ellen DeGeneres does a great job of humanizing people for several reasons; for example, she points to ways in which they have commonalities with other people. Many interviewers focus on what makes the celebrity guest special or unique, whereas DeGeneres has a talent for illustrating the link between the celebrity and the audience. Oprah Winfrey was her guest for a game show–style session called “Ellen's Burning Questions.”¹⁶ Oprah's answers to the questions put her in direct, hilarious connection with the audience. One of the burning questions was “Favorite word that begins with O?” Ellen said hers was “Oprah.” Oprah said hers was “Oreo”—as in the ever popular cookie. The question, “What's something that makes you feel good?” got the answer, “Rolling in the grass with my dogs.” We even found out that Oprah had recently stood in line at the bank. She was depositing a check for two million dollars, but heck, the point is that she stood in line at the bank like the rest of us. Ellen found a fun way to spotlight the person named Oprah, not the star. When she finished the segment, the star had gained connection and power with the audience because they saw that, for all her supertypical status, she is still a human being who snorts when she laughs hard and sings off key.

• Homogenizing through illustration. Use homogenizing to take away your target's special powers, such as Lex Luthor uses kryptonite to turn Superman into a regular man. When someone is supertypical in one area, he is going to be equally subtypical in another. A quick review of the pantheon of Greek gods shows petty, vain, and conniving gods with supernatural powers. Does it surprise you that humans would invent gods that represent this aspect of human nature?

  In its simplest form, homogenizing is pointing out the everyday human frailties of the god, such as being in your workplace or community. In its most insidious and complex form, it is causing the supertypical to disclose something that makes him mundane or even subtypical. The range of possibilities is endless. Humans love to see shooting stars fall back to Earth. Turn on the entertainment news; there is a new story about celebrity burnout every day.

At her lowest point, Lindsay Lohan was a prime example of creating an arena for the spectacle of destruction. Build it and they will come. The easiest way to get a supertypical to divulge information that proves she is not so super is to start a conversation in which she thinks you admire her, and then work your way into the details. If you tell her she is grand, and she's the pretentious type, for example, she will gladly tell you how grand. As you question what she does on Saturdays and she tells you about her singing gig, you ask about how her husband takes that, and she tells you she is recently divorced—a fact she was concealing from her coworkers. You may be able to stop right there.

On a more positive note, through illustration of the superpowers of the rest of the group, you can also cause the super-typical to feel rather average. The effect is he loses a bit of his bravado, which in turn makes the rest of the group bond more closely to him and homogenize him.

Whether used to bond or homogenize, illustration is a great tool because you are using the person's own words and deeds to establish commonality. Your words can never have the power that the words and action of the target do.

Isolation

In the discussion of the interrogation cycle, we noted that most soldiers are not held captive with their entire unit because the nature of war fragments the group. In an interrogation, the source is removed from his insulating group; therefore, he is physically separated from the folks who give him his sense of self-image. The result is that all self-image inputs come from the interrogators. Interrogators have used manipulation of self-image harshly when pointing out a superficial scratch as “looking bad” over and over. The prisoner became so obsessed by it that he paid little attention to anything else.

For you, the equivalent use of isolation doesn't necessarily involve physical separation, but as we previously described, it does mean taking away the positive reinforcement of self-image.

• Bonding through isolation. By reforming a group into subsets, you can easily skew the norm of the larger group. You've seen a version of this occur naturally many times as a group goes from focusing on a single topic of conversation to splintering into multiple conversations. Some people will suddenly start showing off their knowledge of the subject, and others will suddenly be left out. Let's say you instigate this in a department meeting by breaking the group into special teams. You can give the subset a new member who has not yet established his belonging in the department and set the task for the subset to his strengths. He thereby gets a chance to create real value and belonging; when he returns to the larger group, the snowball effect will give him leverage to feel as though he belongs. Sound familiar? It may even allow him to begin to differentiate. This happens all of the time in corporate America when subteams are created arbitrarily and someone rises to the occasion. The difference here is that you use the tool of isolation to create an incubator for the personality of the person with whom you are trying to bond.
• Homogenizing through isolation. In much the same way the new guy found belonging, you can create specialty teams of a group where the supertypical's magic holds little sway. You could isolate him to the big pond where the barracuda live, for example: “I've asked that you give the department's presentation at the board meeting, Ralph.” When he returns from the ocean to the gold fish pond a couple of pints of blood low, he might feel more like teaming with the people there. His big realization may be that he is really not such a big fish after all, or it may be that he suddenly realizes other people in his little pond have talents, too. Either way, you inflicted heavy doses of reality on his self-image. You are, in effect, applying the Landrum factor through action.

Association

With Maslow's hierarchy and the matrix of satisfaction in the forefront of your mind, you're going to make some practical use out of your knowledge of why and how options to fulfill needs can be limited. First of all, every choice you make limits later choices. So if you get baptized Mormon, your chances of becoming the Roman Catholic Pope go away. Every association you make, whether with a group, a belief, or an action, limits possibilities for your future. Although the tools of illustration play into how you apply your knowledge of someone's affiliations or connections, the use of association as a strategy will cause the group to see the outsider as more like them and accept him. Or it will do the opposite: they will see that the silk purse is just a sow's ear.

• Bonding through association. Through your knowledge of the person, you can find common ground for the barely belonging. In some cases, it is nothing more than the fact that he knows someone they know. In others, it may be association with like people or social groups. Jack and Susan are both parents of sixth graders; they share similar experiences thanks to developmental psychology. If both have suffered through implementation of some major initiative at work, they have common ground. It does not matter how minuscule the commonality of association; it matters how similar it is. In addition, the more ritual a commonality involves, the more powerful it is: two women who are deacons of separate church denominations will share more than two people who have been to Graceland. The key is to associate your target with something that has meaning to the others in the group. At her first meeting with coworkers, Elizabeth volunteered that she wore a pink wristband because she was a breast cancer survivor. Everyone at the table—men and women—knew someone who was also a breast cancer survivor.

  People also commonly engender bonding through association by joining professional groups in which members have shared goals and skills. Based on what you know about your target, you can bring out something much more interesting and more obscure that has meaning in the setting.

• Homogenizing through association. When you know about an association that reduces the elevated status of the supertypical, you point that out to homogenize. A prime example of this plays out on the daily news when we see families of the rich and famous show up again and again with ordinary problems. Halle Berry's dad was abusive to her mom. Michael Jordan's son got into a fight and was arrested for disorderly conduct. It is tough to be better than everyone else when you are associated with regular folks with run-of-the-mill problems (as well as some unusual problems) that ordinary people face.

  In an example much closer to home, you may know that your target, John, has hung around a well-known philanderer. You ask John if he's seen the guy recently. John responds that he saw the guy right after he got back from his vacation in Cancun. With eyebrows up in a look between surprise and shock, you say, “Oh yeah? I heard that Cancun trip caused his divorce.” No matter how supertypical John is, his soft, white underbelly has just been exposed.

  Just as in establishing charisma, too much bonding and showing similarities to other people takes away the magic of the supertypical. By walking the knife's edge, you can gain the respect and authority of those around you. People of high esteem and reputation are walking on a different knife; that edge marks the difference between being human and being more than human.

  Envision belonging as a radial, just as you envisioned personality types in a radial diagram. Positive outcomes occupy one side and negative outcomes occupy the other. You move your target around through isolation, illustration, and association to shift him from barely belonging to a solid member of the group, to supertypical status and all the way down to monkey.

Fracturing to Differentiate or Overdifferentiate

Fracturing is about showing difference—not a negative or a positive difference, just difference. How you use each of the tools will determine how the differences are perceived.

• Fracturing to differentiate. This is a positive application of differences—pointing out areas where a member of the group has strengths that allow him to rise like cream. This application relies on bringing strengths to the fore—things that cannot possibly alienate others, or at least that's the plan.
• Fracturing to overdifferentiate. By overdifferentiate, we mean going so far in any direction that others in the group cannot identify with the person, or that he can no longer sanely identify with the group. This does not necessarily mean the differentiator is negative. Maybe it's something simple: he got invited to the boss's country club because he went to college with the boss's daughter. That alone could make him so distinctive in the group he is in that the group can no longer fulfill his need. Clichés in English such as “You can never go home again” are rooted in this principle.
• Fracturing through illustration. To sell a product, you have to know why it isn't like other products, even if it's just cheaper. Using the tools you learned in Chapter 4, you need to draw out little-known facts about your target to find out what makes her different. Whether you ask difficult questions only someone with his skill set could answer or you use approaches to provoke an outburst in a meeting, masterful use of the tools is requisite to applying this strategy.
• Differentiating through illustration. When you ask questions, tailor them in such a way that they make him appear to be a solid member of the group with insights the other members of the group do not have. (Leading questions can help here.) Whether the information involves a past job, hobby, or other extracurricular activity, create a spider web of links from him to the skill set. Use thought-provoking parallel questions to get him to the point that he sees the correlation and brings it out, or simply ask him what he would have done in his past job. The skill set is about allowing him to be the hero and showing how he is supertypical in some way without taking it to the point of a brownnoser. This healthy fracturing will differentiate him but help him not to go too far.
• Overdifferentiating through illustration. In our modern world of anything goes and “there is no right or wrong,” people can easily forget the fact that something can be too different. Regardless of what they portray in public, many people are much more conservative than they let on. We do not mean in a political sense, but rather they tolerate fewer deviations from the norm than they care to admit out of political correctness.

  Asking questions that push a topic to the edge provokes both revealing answers and behaviors. Craft questions and approaches to lever someone to a point of overreacting or sloughing off something important to the group as “nothing more than nonsense.” One over-the-top example is using a leading question to imply judgment: “Don't you think that parachuting off that bridge while kids were walking home from school constitutes reckless endangerment?” The effect is to separate him from what is acceptable for the group.

  This strategy works especially well when a well-respected person has an opinion not based in fact or claims some guru's thoughts as his own: “If the geodesic dome is such an energy-efficient model, why don't we see more of them now that we're painfully aware of the cost of energy?” You offer him the opportunity to explain, encouraging him if he sounds intelligent—to a point—and then switch to critical questioning. Then, you can choose to rescue him or let him flounder.

  Either way, your work is done, and he will either need to establish himself as a member of the group or find belonging elsewhere.

• Differentiating through isolation. It is often difficult to have someone seem special in a hostile pool or one populated by uniquely talented fish. In some cases, a super-typical has used precisely the same talent that an average guy in the room possesses to rise to the level of supertypical. Unless the supertypical is well balanced, she may see the new guy as a threat and intimidate him. His safety net is having the ability to enter a smaller pool where he can comfortably belong. If you make that happen, you create a buffer between the new guy and the paranoid supertypical. Ways to do this can be a contrived meeting change that inadvertently removes the supertypical from the environment, or an invitation to the new guy to participate in something of which the threatened supertypical would never be. Both of these isolate your target to allow her to shine.
• Overdifferentiating through isolation. Some things that are perfectly acceptable in some groups are just too much in others. Using military language in corporate America could make someone run out of the building. By adeptly maneuvering your target to feel as though he is safe and among friends, you can often get your target to disclose facts that he would not in armed camps. This works well in life and in comedy. Both rely on the fact that humans are creatures of ritual, repeating the same things over and over involuntarily. In the comedy Guess Who, Ashton Kutcher is dating Bernie Mac's daughter and is at her house for Thanksgiving dinner. Intensely disliking the fact that a white man is dating his daughter, Bernie Mac baits Kutcher into telling “black jokes,” luring him with the message, “Come on, you're family now.” Eventually, Kutcher falls into repeating joke after joke until he crosses the line.

  This phenomenon of turning on the tap happens all the time when people project that acceptance means someone is exactly like them, and will accept them, warts and all. That's rarely true.

• Differentiating through association. People differentiate through association all the time by name-dropping or telling you where they went to school. A friend from New Jersey often says that living in Princeton makes people feel smart; you get credentials by saying, “I'm from Princeton.” Manipulating associations can make someone appear to have more or less value to the group. When he is a solid member of the team and knows the boss's brother well, that might be enough to raise him up—unless the boss's brother is similar to former president Jimmy Carter's brother, Billy, a self-proclaimed alcoholic. Every association the person has, whether voluntary or accidental, can make a tremendous difference. Look at people such as Anderson Cooper, the son of fashion designer and author Gloria Vanderbilt, which makes him the great-great-great grandson of the business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt.
• Overdifferentiating through association. Overdifferentiating through association has been used to drive guilt or innocence in courts all over the United States. If you hang out with unsavory characters, what does that make you? You could be Charles Manson or you could be Mother Teresa. The key here is how the spin is handled. By associating your target with someone who is outside the realm of understanding the group, you move the person to a point of isolation, and maybe closer to bonding with you or another group.

  In a very public way, this has occurred to George Alan Rekers, the Baptist minister who was a leader in the anti-gay movement until he was caught in a Miami airport with a male escort, and former Congressman Anthony Weiner who was notorious for his sexting scandals. Association with unsavory individuals or concepts leaves a person grasping to belong. As he tries to belong, he forgets all about being supertypical and tries his best to hold on. In the case of the self-actualized, he tries to maintain his reputation, similar to President Clinton while he was embroiled in the scandal involving White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Some rise again, as in the case of Clinton. Not usually, though.

  Whatever your strategy, make it a success from the start by building that 3-D model of your target. Keep refining your understanding of his need in terms of the hierarchy, where he fits in his group, how you can characterize his self-image, and his sources of pride and shame. You can only get the desired results if you base your plan on data. Ideally, you will create a map for his success that leads you down the road to yours.