Kenneth Berger: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's such a great approach. It's very not scary to say that. It also, I think, highlights something I wanted to touch on is I think people have a lot more influence and power than they think they do. Say a PM on a team disagrees with a plan for a product. People actually care about your opinion and you could actually change things. But just telling them, "I think this is a bad idea." And you often don't. Is that what you find, that people have a lot more influence than they think they do? Anything along those lines that comes up? You're giving me deep goosebumps because I think this is a really underappreciated thing in terms of asking for what we want because especially in the PM world, we're trained to look for data. We're not just going to state an opinion. We're going to say, "Oh, the AB test said this. Or 30% of our users do this, or the ROI on this is X." And data is great. We love data for a reason of course. And I think people forget about exactly what you're highlighting, that your relationships matter, and that just your opinion because you believe something or because you want something often that's enough. Because guess what? You're in a relationship with these people you work with. They care about you. You have some sort of leverage with them. And I think that often people go the other way and say, "Oh, I've got power. I'm going to try and leverage it." But actually, if you go the other direction and you're humble and you say, "I know I can't make you do anything, it's not my call to make. But man, this is really what I want. I'm just going to put it out there and ask." That I think it feels really vulnerable and uncomfortable to not lean on data as a sort of way of saying, "No, no, I'm right, so you should believe what I believe." But just say, "Actually, I don't know that I'm right. This is just what I think and I hope that's enough on its own." Do you find that that's actually a crutch a lot of times to people not saying anything is they don't have that data? They don't have evidence and they just, "I shouldn't say anything. If someone asks for why I don't have a great answer, I just think this is what should be."…

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