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Marketers and communicators know the difficulty in getting others to think differently. Often, the target audience is external: potential members, customers, the press, legislators, and so on. However, in the opening general session and a morning learning lab at ASAE's Marketing, Membership & Communications Conference today, attendees learned some lessons on helping those closer in—colleagues and volunteer leaders—to think differently.

Daniel Simons (pictured at right), coauthor of The Invisible Gorilla, And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, illustrated the many ways in which we assume—wrongly—that what we see is what we get and that the way we think is the way others around us think. He shared the somewhat famous selective attention test video that gave his book its name, and he urged association professionals to "break the systems" that they're used to in order to discover new ideas. Normal human beings often fail to notice the unexpected and are only aware of their own minds' fallibility when they are confronted with hard evidence of it, he said. In other words, you don't know what you don't know.

Simons gave audience members the ability and awareness to question their assumptions, but returning to the office and encouraging colleagues to test their assumptions may be a difficult task. I followed up with Simon for advice, and he recommended sharing an exercise like the video above with colleagues to at least open their minds to the need to question assumptions. He said the toughest challenge comes with questioning causes that we all assign to events. "People infer causal relationships," he said. When X happens, "it's natural to want to find a cause."

This context proved to be handy knowledge entering a learning lab titled "Have You Killed Your Sacred Zombie Cow Today?" immediately after the general session. C. David Gammel, CAE, executive director of the Entomological Society of America, shared some strategies for stopping old programs or processes that are no longer valuable. A common example is a management process for which the condition that caused it no longer exists, yet the process continues. In this case, Gammel recommended challenging that cause and bringing to light that it has changed or stopped. Again, data or hard evidence can help make the case.

Simons also discussed "the curse of knowledge," by which we assume that others know what we know. The key to breaking that curse, he said, is to put yourself in the same frame of reference as your colleagues or members (or whomever you're trying to persuade). Only then will you be able to understand what perspectives they have and what causes they're inferring and thus be able to challenge them.

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