In early 21^st century Western society, we pride ourselves on being rational people.  After praising reason and rationality for the past few hundred years, we like to think of ourselves as efficient decision-makers; always choosing the path that makes the most sense.

But do we really?  I first came across the idea of heuristics in Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness (a great book I’ll talk about here one of these days).  Essentially, they are decision-making shortcuts that our minds use to navigate through the day.  For example, the Wikipedia entry on one of these heuristics says “The availability heuristic is a rule of thumb heuristic, or cognitive bias, where people base their prediction of the frequency of an event or the proportion within a population based on how easily an example can be brought to mind.”  In other words, you might think that there are a lot of Italian restaurants in a certain area just because the first two restaurants that come to your mind are both Italian.

Why is this important to know if you are selling something, or indeed, just advocating any kind of change?  Because when you are trying to influence someone, they don’t look at the information on a rational level; they use these heuristics to help them make a decision.  This is why it’s hard to change the status quo, because one of these shortcuts leads us to believe that what has been around for a long time has always been that way.  Even if you rationally look at this belief and realize it’s BS, it still lingers.  This is the source of the dreaded line that salespeople fear, “I don’t see a reason to change, it’s just always been like that and it seems fine.”

So if you’re selling a change of the status quo or the usual way of doing things; understand that you have to not only give them the facts and figures, but you have to be able to appeal emotionally to the non-rational mind.  If you’re selling online advertising, for example, and your client is stuck on TV commercials because they’ve always done TV commercials, you have to show them that TV has been around for only 50 years, which means that it hasn’t been used forever, and it’s possible to change.  And you have to do it all without making the customer feel stupid – remember, they think they’re being rational.