Why bridging differences is hard and how to be more influential

Australia’s recent referendum – the lead-up, the result, and the aftermath – are an unfortunate case study of how not to influence, particularly when influencing across people differences.

I’m not going to pretend to have all the answers for how to lead such important change, but I would dearly love to see a few constructive lessons learned from this recent experience, and this is my contribution to the learning.

I admit upfront this article is long, and that's really unfashionable, but crikey, this is a complicated issue and deserves some consideration.

We need to explore what happened, why it happened and discover what are the best next steps to take us towards a more inclusive, cohesive society. We need to resolve to learn from this failure.

Amy Edmondson begins her Introduction to ‘Right Kind of Wrong’ with a quote from Winston Churchill that I think is particularly apposite in these circumstances:

‘Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.’

We are not a racist society, we are one in which reconciliation between Indigenous Australians and non-Indigenous Australians can - must – continue to evolve and progress. We need positive leadership right now so that we recover and continue to make progress.

?Why failure isn’t failure and how to learn to be better

Amy’s book is a wealth of insights and perspectives on ‘failure’ which have great value here. Read the book!

The referendum was a complex situation, and a high-stakes one. When complex problems occur in novel contexts Edmondson recommends practicing cautious action, combined with careful experimentation.

In hindsight, that looks pretty wise – but not what happened.

The reality of moving quickly ahead with such a significant ask as to change the Constitution – which Australians are notoriously reluctant to do – seems more suited to a low stakes situation where a more casual approach will do.

Failure doesn't have to mean failure if we learn from it.

Without a growth mindset, we tend towards self-protection, which shuts down opportunities to learn and means that we don't make progress in such important areas as reconciliation. Admitting to let alone learning from failure can be pretty confronting but that's no reason to avoid it.

I would dearly loved to have seen the Prime Minister address the country immediately after the result was known to apologise for not listening, for moving too quickly and to hear him pledge to listen more, to learn from what happened and to keep the momentum going.

We underestimate the power of differences to divide us.

One of the elements that made the Referendum so high stakes was that it highlighted differences between us. We are hard-wired to categorise and to differentiate between categories, and that means we put people in groups:

You are like me, not like me.

You’re bad, I’m good.

You’re wrong, I’m right.

You’re male, I’m female.

You’re black, I’m white.

You’re racist, I’m not.

You get it. We do it all the time. It’s default mode. It takes effort to disrupt this pattern. It takes a lot of effort to bridge category differences.

No matter our good intentions, uniting people who look different, have different experiences, think differently and have different beliefs is incredibly hard.

I think that the challenge of this is not well understood. The referendum campaign seriously under-estimated this, and I'll stick my neck out and say that many of those advocating diversity do too.

How to build bridges to influence across the faultlines that divide us

The social divisions that seemed to widen during the Referendum campaign drew into sharp relief how difficult it is to create a real sense of belonging and inclusion for everyone.

They come at a time where we have never been more concerned with diversity and inclusion, and yet paradoxically we are experiencing declining social cohesion as well as trust in governments, according to the recently released 2023 Scanlon Foundation Research Institute Social Cohesion Report (data for which were collected in July and August 2023).

For the 86% of us who believe that the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is very important to our nation, how do we bridge the faultlines and help to unite rather than divide?

What can we do to reignite the momentum towards greater inclusion? We can start by understanding more about faultlines and how they disrupt our good intentions.

Subgroups create ‘faultlines’ and divide us even as we try to unite.

We have an affinity bias, that is, it is more comfortable to interact with people who are most like us. There's a lot of team-work research that shows that when diversity is first introduced into groups, eg, one or two women join a male-dominated team, social identity for existing members may be disrupted, subgroups form, and faultlines occur.

Faultlines occurred throughout the referendum campaign, between Indigenous and non-Indigenous subgroups, and predictably along various political divides, as well as between different Indigenous Australian subgroups. Focusing attention on the existence of subgroups can interfere with information sharing and may create tension and conflict. When we draw attention to subgroups, it widens the faultlines as it makes us focus on what divides us rather than what unites us.

A well-known example of this comes from the gender diversity world, and the introduction of women into male-dominated symphony orchestras. The increased presence of women led to declines in orchestra member satisfaction and social functioning. This of course can threaten the proposition that diversity brings value, because, well, sometimes it destroys it. In the orchestra case, when the proportion of women increased the initial dissatisfaction plateaued or reversed. Women become more familiar as colleagues, and this is one of the critical features of inclusion, the necessity to create connection across faultlines.

Familiarity breeds connection.

Thankfully, differences aren’t a guarantee of faultlines. Whether or not faultlines are created depends on how people feel about diversity, and on how salient the diversity is and this is largely moderated through the way that leaders engage people in change.

The leader's role in managing faultlines

Leaders play a critical role in managing faultlines by reducing the salience of subgroup differences and here are three tactics that do that.

1. Create an overarching identity

Diversity salience is reduced by creating an overarching frame or identity that unites the group.

One way to do this is by providing meaningful rewards to group members on the basis of their collective rather than individual effort. Rewarding a group or team based on team outcomes decreases the salience of inter-group differences and emphasises the collective identity of the team. What do we all gain from working together? How do we all work together to achieve our goals?

Another is to create common ground, in this case generating a clear, shared purpose for better Indigenous Australian engagement in governance and for reconciliation; this helps people to know why it's happening and to recognise its value.

It helps to create buy-in to explore how this benefits everyone. It helps to create an emotional connection to the purpose of governance changes.

When the gain from doing this is clearly articulated, people put more effort into understanding each other and work more constructively across difference.

As a part of this we need to state the case for how it will benefit us all, in this instance.

Many diversity advocates claim the case for diversity has been made and that’s true in the abstract. There is plenty of research to show the social and economic benefit of greater diversity.

However, each new ‘claim’ needs to have its own 'case', even if seems really obvious to its proponents.

That it's obvious to you doesn't magically make it equally obvious to everyone. What kind of diversity do we need/have? How will/does it help us live better lives/increase social cohesion/work better together.

It may seem tedious to need to do this, and maybe we feel like we’ve done it all before (OK, we have!), but we do still need to do this because whenever we are working across sub-groups – which these days is almost always – we need to be clear about what unites us at this point in time. Otherwise our differences are likely to divide us.

Three ways the referendum campaign failed to create an overarching identity

There were three mistakes the campaign made that prevented broader buy-in:

• They neglected to have a clear overarching frame that everyone (or at least the 86% of us who believe that the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is important) could see themselves in,
• They failed to take a bipartisan political approach when it should have been multi-partisan, and
• They relied on a reference group that comprised only Indigenous members and so didn’t appear to represent the broader Australian society.

As much as this might irritate those who believe the case is made and this action is overdue, it didn't work. Support from business came too late, and wasn't personal enough, in my view. Creating a broader proposition to be promoted by a more representative reference group or groups would have enabled greater buy-in across demographies before taking the whole country so rapidly to what was a dangerously momentous decision point.

One thing that’s been learnt the hard way in gender equity is that women can’t make it happen on their own. The issue has to be broader, everyone needs to see themselves as both part of the problem and the solution, otherwise it’s seen as women seeking their own advantage.

It’s baffling to try to follow the logic on that, but it’s clear that the approach has to be one of gender-balance, not women. The majority group is the one that needs to change, to buy-in to the value of increased rights and power, or we go round and round in circles, disappointing everyone in the process.

Without this common ground in the campaign, we started to see a ‘moral high ground’ stance creep into play, which only created greater division.

I’m right, you’re wrong.

I’m better than you, you don’t get it, you’re racist.

It takes quite a bit of courage, tenacity and humility to resist this trap.

Create common ground, avoid the moral high ground.

2. Advocate pro-diversity beliefs

Leaders can also use the power of their position to advocate pro-diversity beliefs to encourage others to be more open, which helps us to face differences with a more open mind. The Prime Minister did this quite well, and certainly came across as being the champion of the Voice.

However, as the situation became more complex, he seemed unable to deal with the complexity, generally repeating his existing arguments, even though they weren’t effective. Other leaders joined him, but tended to exhort people to vote as they recommended without listening and understanding and responding to the concerns that were being raised by voters.

Rather than being seen as misinformation or disinformation, patiently listening to and addressing concerns would have helped. Rather than focus on other politicians and what they were saying, attempting to connect with the broader public could have made a difference. The approach needed to be as above party politics as it could be - they were a real distraction.

When the going gets tough, we often default to getting tougher too. Albanese fell into a classic leadership trap: focusing on the work that had to be done, and the timelines that were set, pushing through rather than pausing to listen to the people he needed to influence. He emphasised a leadership style that not only didn’t cut through, but seemed to alienate some. (See more on why below.)

3. Focus on individuality not sub-groups

Finally, what's called cross-cutting, that highlights individual differences while reducing the salience of subgroups, is another effective tactic. It might sound a little counter-intuitive. Cross-cutting involves identifying as many kinds of diversity in the group as possible. It makes the categorisation of people into major sub-groups - us and them - harder to do, which interferes with the automatic processing that can lead to bias.

Cross-cutting increases the chance of overlap between people, which reduces comparison between subgroups. If people are seen as members of multiple groups, such as race, gender, age, place of birth, cultural background, thinking style, handedness, etc then a large race-based faultline is harder to create and sustain. We’re still working with differences here, but not large, highly salient or threatening subgroup differences. We can minimise what divides, and maximise what unites us.

Redressing the unbalanced playing field for Indigenous Australian communities and improving their life/social/economic outcomes, ensuring increased opportunity and expecting success must remain a priority. Eighty-six percent of us care about it, despite the referendum result. Yet the emerging understanding of faultlines presents us with a dilemma that played out in the wrong way in the referendum campaign; how do we pay attention to gender/race/cultural under-representation, differences in social and economic outcomes, and imbalanced leadership without amplifying faultlines, and thus dividing us further?

Diversity and difference may set people apart, yet these three tactics when employed by leaders can also promote diversity as a source of inspiration for most people. Using these tactics requires the same capabilities - self-awareness, including the capacity for self-reflection, humility, honesty and curiosity - we need to employ if we are to learn from failures. And not coincidentally, these same requirements underlie the best approaches to influencing others to take your point of view.

How to persuade people to take your point of view

I'll finish up with a reprise of my thoughts on how to influence others to your point of view, largely influenced by the work of neuroscientist Professor Tali Sharot .

1.????????? Don’t start with facts, even though you really want to!

The most common mistake we make when we try to influence others is to wield facts. The challenge is that sharing your facts with others who have different views won’t motivate the action you seek.

If we believe something, we find it hard to comprehend that others don’t also believe it. We find our own knowledge and beliefs appealing and expect that others will too – and we get a burst of pleasure when we tell others our opinion or provide them with information. But that’s not how it works for them.

Starting with facts (‘what I know’, ‘what you should believe’, ‘what I want you to do’) tends to entrench people’s existing beliefs. If they have no emotional investment in you or your logic, they may rationalise your position away.

Worse, when presented with facts counter to those they believe in, people are motivated to seek out confirmation of what they already know. They create counterarguments, causing a rebound effect, otherwise known as confirmation bias. They find new facts to invalidate or counteract yours to confirm their own. There was a lot of this going on in the campaign.

The currency our brains use to assess new data and make decisions – emotion – is very different from the currency we believe our brains should use – logic.

The use of logic ignores motives, fears, hopes and desires. This is why people’s established beliefs and practices are very resistant to change despite the logic of new information. So, what we need to do to influence others is to create an emotional reaction and connection first.

2.???????? Suspend your ego - connect with others to understand their needs

You won’t change someone’s mind or beliefs without understanding who they are and what they already believe, and why. Use warmth to create a personal connection, show you care and spend time understanding the other person at a human level. Then you can understand and address their needs and motivations.

Start by managing your own emotions and ego. Focus on creating a positive connection: be optimistic and calm. Manage any feelings of impatience. I’m not sure that the PM did so well here. He had a great idea that we should all adopt: when people asked for more detail he seemed reluctant to give it or to treat the requests as legitimate. It doesn’t matter how legitimate or otherwise you believe people’s responses to be, if you want to influence them and they want to know something, the best advice is to respond as compassionately and fulsomely as you can. Forget your own sense of rationality and go with emotion.

Emotion is contagious: it transfers between us (for better or worse). When we show warmth and empathy to others, we create a reciprocal response, as we unconsciously mimic the emotions of others. Strong appeals to emotions and powerful speeches can cause our brains to ‘click together’. In other words, people feel the same response no matter their personality or experiences: they feel like they ‘click’. When they click, people process information in the same way and are more likely to agree.

It’s important at this stage to put aside areas of disagreement, of which there may be many, to focus on areas of agreement. Finding common motivations, what unites us, is important to do first (see above!).

3.???????? Avoid fear: it freezes

If our attempts to influence others evoke a fear response, people freeze.

Whether it was a case of information, misinformation or disinformation during the Referendum campaign, freeze responses became increasingly common. When they freeze, people avoid conversations about the topic and won’t share information.

The prospect of an uncertain future can cause avoidance. The more uncertain the future, the more we tend to avoid it and focus on what is rewarding for us right now. Warnings and threats also limit people’s sense of control and take away their sense of agency. That works if what you want is inaction, but not if you want people to do something, or to change.

Unfortunately, there were times when uncertainty increased and threats and warning came to dominate campaign discussion.

4.???????? Increase people’s sense of agency by offering choice

If you want people to be influenced by you, make it rewarding for them. Expect a better future and emphasise what needs to be done to achieve it. Give them a sense of agency and control. That way they’ll want to enrol in what you offer.

You can overcome the instinct to control by giving others a choice. Being able to choose is enjoyable: we love having choices.

Having a choice, even if it’s small, gives people a sense of control, which is motivating. Giving people responsibility and reminding them that they have a choice increases their wellbeing. Even after decisions are made, there is value in continuing to remind people of the choices they made, to reinforce their sense of control.

Remove choice and people feel coerced: you create anger, frustration and resistance. Provide choice and people feel a sense of influence over their world.

There wasn’t much opportunity for choice during the campaign – while various collaborative activities were held in the lead-up, such as the development of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the reality is that relatively few of the voting public were involved in its development.

5.???????? Now share facts

With a warm connection and a sense of agency, people are much more open to hearing new facts. Even at this point, though, it’s not just about the facts. One of the most powerful ways to engage people to listen to new information and different viewpoints is to harness their curiosity. And what are people most curious about? What it means for them. People want to know about themselves, and a positive message induces hope, not dread.

These five influencing tactics strongly suggest that the movement towards a greater and more formal Voice for Indigenous Australians might have started (recognising that there has been much prior work on reconciliation) in a different place, one that gave the broader community a chance to be involved and to make choices about it.

Where to from here?

Unfortunately the referendum seems to have setback social cohesion. To minimise the amount of setback, recover from it, and to give Indigenous and all Australians greater hope for a more inclusive future, it’s imperative that we come to a reckoning on what we did well, what went wrong, and more importantly, what we’ve learnt about how to be better in the future.

I call on the PM to lead this learning process, engaging with a broad range of stakeholders who can take stock, and then show us how we can take reconciliation forward with renewed positivity and energy.

#inclusion #influence #leadership

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