Tamsen Webster describes herself as “part message designer, part English-to-English translator, and part magpie.” She is also a consultant and author who helps leaders enact large-scale change. Her latest book, Say What They Can’t Unhear explains how to drive lasting change through effective communication. That is the focus of our conversation.

Show notes

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. We get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

If you're enjoying the show, please rate or review us in Apple's podcast directory.

This episode's transcript was produced by an AI. If you notice any errors, please get in touch.

Transcript

Jorge: Tamsen, welcome to the show.

Tamsen: Ah, I’m delighted to be here, Jorge. Thank you so much for having me.

Jorge: I’m delighted to have you. Folks tuning in might not be familiar with you and your work. How do you go about describing what you do?

About Tamsen

Tamsen: It took me a while to figure it out, perhaps ironically, but I have settled on the fact that I am a message designer—and particularly a persuasive message designer. I help people help other people make transformational change.

Jorge: Ooh, there’s so much there. I love the idea of a message designer. I want to ask you about the word persuasion…

Tamsen: Yes.

Jorge: …in there. What form does the work of a message designer take?

Tamsen: All sorts of forms. As it turns out, I see it in a number of different ways, so I do a lot of collaborative work with folks, really helping to understand what it is that they’re about, what it is that they’re trying to get across, what it is they’re trying to accomplish. That’s a lot of consultative work.

As a product of doing that work for so many years, I’ve developed a number of frameworks and approaches, philosophies, principles—hint, hint—about what’s necessary for that work. So, it takes a lot… it has a lot of forms. And part of the reason I’m so passionate about it is that I see it as a necessary business and life skill, and I don’t think it’s one that we’re taught. And actually, I know it’s one that we’re not taught. Even in professions or areas of life where you think you would be—like lawyers—it’s not taught.

And again, just as a product of the life I’ve lived so far, I have started collecting things that made making a case for something better, easier, more powerful. Finding the words for something better, easier, more powerful. I need a blank page; I despise a blank page. They threaten me with… yeah. Ooh, don’t…

So a lot of this, as many things do, started with solving for my own neuroses, frankly. So it was just like, “Okay, someone’s asked me a question.” I absolutely was someone who would freeze up or just babble for three minutes or thirty minutes without coming up with an answer. And I didn’t like that because, in my mind, the ideas were clear and powerful and life-changing. And then the words that came out of my mouth were slop.

And I tried all the things that I think other people do, like presentation skills and all of that. And I said, “You know what? Actually, this has a lot to do with my day job,” which has always been marketing, branding, that kind of thing. And saying, “I actually think this has much more to do with how clear I am on the thing that I am trying to say, and then once I am clear on it, how do I speak about it in a way that other people see it in the same way I do?” And from that was born the other way that I tend to describe what I do, that essentially a message designer is simply, in my case, an English-to-English translator.

Jorge: Ooh, I like that: English-to-English translator. How did you come to this work? You hinted at having a background in marketing and branding. Is that what your formation was in?

Tamsen’s Journey

Tamsen: Some of it, yeah. I mean, I think that my first great love was actually in change and how do you make things different than they are now, and how do you do that in a way that you don’t have to redo it?

I allude to it in the book, but my first interaction with that was when I was 17, and I had my first panic attack that landed me in a hospital. And if you’re familiar with panic or you know anyone who’s had a disorder, then you know that once you’ve had a panic attack, you really don’t want another one.

And it took me 17 years to figure out how not to have another one. But I did, and I got to that point, and it’s now been—actually, it just happens to be—17 years since I’ve had one. So I started very early just figuring out, how do you change things? How do you get people to do something different?

I held that separate in my mind from the things that I was doing in school and then in work. In school, I started in marketing because that seemed like a creative outlet in business because, frankly, I wanted to be employed. And the work there was essentially about getting people to do something different, to change minds.

In the work that I did after, the majority of the early part of my career—the first 15 years of my career—was in nonprofits. So these are places with resource constraints, sometimes fairly severe resource constraints. And so all of a sudden I had this question: Okay, then it’s now really important that whatever we do first works, and that we don’t have to undo it.

And I just, again, started to pay attention to that. And then I think one of the things that’s perhaps unexpected about where some of the best lessons came from was from a different big change that I was able to make, which was as part of a mode of adapting and trying to settle my anxiety and panic. I turned to food.

So by the time that I finished my graduate work, I was overweight and all of that. And so I, the first big change I was able to make was to lose 50 pounds, which I’ve now kept off for 25 years. And I decided to pay that forward and help other people do the same program that I had done, which happens to have been Weight Watchers, or what was called Weight Watchers at the time.

And the first thing I did was like, “Ah, I know all of this stuff. I know how to do this. I know I’m in marketing, I’m in communications. I’m just going to use that on these people.” And that, let me tell you, did not work. So I learned pretty quickly and I started to do a lot of research on my own about where does motivation come from? What is all this about? How do people make decisions? What drives them?

And then, because I was moonlighting as a Weight Watchers leader, and I did that for 13 years, I had a lot of opportunities for trial and error and discovering what works when you’re talking one-on-one to someone, when you’re talking to a small group—30, 50, 100 people at a time. What works to make sometimes fairly sophisticated concepts of cognitive science make sense to them? How do we change their behaviors? Again, not just once, but permanently.

And so I started to learn quite a bit and then when I, what I did was I started to say, if it works one-on-one, why wouldn’t it work in my professional life? Why wouldn’t that be? Because where it really came down to is fundamentally, I don’t believe that we can create change at any kind of large-scale level—market, organization, whatever—if it doesn’t happen at the individual level first.

Jorge: You alluded to the book. You’ve published a book. It’s called Say What They Can’t Unhear. Yeah.

Tamsen: That’s correct.

Jorge: I read the book, and I told you before we started recording that I loved it. I got a lot out of it. I wrote a little kinda like takeaway phrase—what I got out of the book or how I would summarize it. And I just wanna bounce it off you to see if this kind of resonates. I said,

Tamsen: Please do.

Jorge: It’s a how-to book that shows you how to tune a persuasive message for maximum resonance.

Tamsen: A hundred percent. Fully yes.

Jorge: So, let’s dive into that. And I’m glad that you brought up the word ‘persuasion’ because I wanted to talk about that. To give you a little bit of context, my background is in information architecture, which is related, right? We’re language people.

Tamsen: We are language people, yes.

Structuring for Persuasion

Jorge: And one of the distinctions that I’ve made in the past is between structuring language for informing versus structuring language for persuading, right? And, the informing path. Richard Saul Wurman, one of the people who codified this field, talked about making it possible for people to find their own paths to knowledge.

Tamsen: Yes.

Jorge: But I wanna make this conversation about—at least in part—persuasion because I think that’s a different approach. How is persuasion different from regular use of language?

Tamsen: So I’d say persuasion is different than the regular use of language because it is fundamentally aimed at action or change, right? A change in thinking or a change in behavior. Not just an expansion, but a transformation. There’s a learning theorist named Robert Kegan who talks about the difference between information and transformation and information you are adding information into the form of the person that you’re doing. So that to me is instructional, that’s informational. But transformational, you are changing the form of something.

And to me, I think that’s where persuasion comes in. You’re changing the form of something, either the way that someone sees it or the perspective from which they’re coming from, or the form in which that understanding takes in the form of action or behavior. To me, it is fundamentally about a shift, not just in awareness, but in interpretation and in meaning, all towards action.

Jorge: So change is at the heart of it, right? Like it’s helping… What I’m hearing there is that it’s helping folks move from state A to state B, right? Which is a better state. You cited the example of Weight Watchers. Your book came to my life at a propitious moment because I am working with a client right now where they… I think that these folks would fit into the description that the phrase “digital transformation” brings up in a lot of people’s minds. It’s an industrial company, and they are doing a lot of stuff, a lot of information stuff manually, right? So they need to become more digital.

And in doing the research with these folks, there is a lot of kind of entrenchment in the way that things are currently done. And as someone who comes to this with this mindset that things can be better, you want to move them from state A to state B. And part of what I liked about your book is that it provides principles for how to do this right. There’s this framework you present of these four types of stakeholders ranked by their willingness to change. And I saw them in my interviews. Can…

Tamsen: Oh, I bet. I

Jorge: …can you describe them for folks?

Four Kinds of Stakeholders

Tamsen: Sure. So the ones that we love are the actives. Those are the folks that get it immediately. A lot of times, you don’t have to do any other explanation of what you’re trying to do. They’re your advocates. They’re your cheerleaders. They’re the ones that may even be doing a lot of your persuasion work for you. They get it. They want the outcome. They want how you’re approaching it. They’re great. The good news is you don’t have to do too much for them except equip them to help share whatever you’re doing.

At the opposite end of those folks, which we all know, are the antagonists, and they do not want what you are doing, and/or they do not want how you’re doing it. So generally, it’s they don’t want either. They don’t agree with either: “I don’t agree with why we’re doing this; I don’t like how we’re doing it.” But an antagonist can be someone with whom you agree on the ends of what you’re trying to achieve, but not the means as well. Those folks aren’t necessarily hopeless. That’s part of what I try to get across in the book. It’s not that they are awful people. It’s just that, at this point, you haven’t found any kind of common ground with them. And that needs to be the first effort if you’re trying to get as many people on board as you can.

The middle two — and there are two; I fought with some people on this in the writing and editing of the book — are the indifferents and the ambivalents. And sometimes people think of those words as being the same, and they are not. The indifferents are people who don’t care. They literally do not care. They don’t want or not want what you’re talking about, the change. They don’t really have a firm opinion, and it’s not because they are slackers or lazy people. Again, it is just, for whatever reason, it’s just not important enough to them to care. They’re not hopeless either, but your job with them is to figure out, “Is there a way to make this important enough to them to care?” And if you subscribe to the principles in the book, is there a way to do that without threatening them and without just basing it all on extrinsic rewards, which are less likely to last over time?

So that leaves you with the ambivalents. And the ambivalents are just endlessly fascinating to me because they do care. The issue is they care about something else just as much. Meaning, they want what we’re trying to do. They want the outcome, maybe, of what this change would represent, but they also want things to stay largely the same. So in other words, we’ve got these opposing forces happening within them. And so they can appear indecisive; they can appear to be flip-floppers. But what they are also, and this is important if you’re trying to steward a change in an organization or just with your client, this also means that they are actually quite attuned and open to information. They are very much, to the point we were just talking about, looking to learn so that they can decide for themselves which direction is going to feel most aligned with them long term. They’re looking for information to tip them one way or another.

And that’s part of the reason why paying attention, very close attention, to how you are presenting a change in the first place comes into such play because it’s sometimes very subtle things that people take as information, both for or against, why the change you’re asking for does or doesn’t make sense for them.

Jorge: Did I get the sense that the ambivalents are the ones where we have the most opportunity or the most play? Is that, is that a fair read on that?

Tamsen: Yes, because they’re the ones closest to making a decision. But I firmly believe that we have an opportunity to influence all of them, because a lot of times the biggest barrier to someone believing enough in a potential change to act on it actually isn’t a preexisting belief, it’s a lack of understanding. It’s a lack of understanding of what would make this work, it’s a lack of understanding of why you believe in it so much, it’s a lack of understanding of how it connects to what they believe in and value. And it’s one of those things where it seems like such an obvious thing, and yet we skip over that a lot.

It’s like having a favorite child, like don’t! So it’s not, “Oh, the ambivalents, they’re the best.” But it is part of why, because all of them can be moved one way or another. It is why, fundamentally, as I say towards the end of the book, in a lot of ways, the approach that I have seen work over and over again isn’t really about persuasion at all. It’s actually about presenting your best case from your perspective based on beliefs and desires that you share with the audience. Period. You’re doing your best work to figure out what that is, and then letting them decide whether or not they agree. It’s certainly the fastest way to understand where you do, where you either have more work to do, or where there’s opportunity, where there’s friction.

A lot of times though, we just skip to the how. We skip to like, “Okay, we’re doing this. Let’s talk about implementation.” And for anybody to do anything long-term and not go back and rationalize a way why it maybe wasn’t such a good idea in the first place, like in order to keep that from happening, it has to be something that they feel right about emotionally and intellectually, and they continue to feel right about it over time. And that can only really happen if we’re tying into things that are rarely brought up in most business persuasive communications. A lot of times we’re just saying, “We have a problem, here’s a solution, it’s gonna give us these benefits, so let’s go.”

Building on something we were talking about earlier with the antagonist, sometimes people can agree with you on the end, and they just don’t agree with you on the means. And sometimes they would agree with you on the means if they understand why you believe in those particular means. So it’s one of those things where part of how I got to this particular aspect of the work was paying attention to the prevalence of storytelling and communication and persuasion and in information these days. And having written a book on story structure, very deeply interested. And yet, even though I believe very strongly in my own approach to that, I could see whether it was using my structure or somebody else’s, that you could have a perfectly architected piece of information, a perfectly architected story, perfectly architected communication, and it still wouldn’t work.

And I was deeply interested in that because a lot of times, and I believed this too, that people were saying that story, that’s it, that’s the answer. As long as we tell a good story, you can get people going. I was like, I can see that that’s not always true. Why not? And you know what stuck in my head for whatever reason is an old storytelling maxim that a story is an argument. And I was like, that’s true for fables and fairytales; they’re clearly an argument for or against a particular way of action. And in Aesop’s case, they tell you what they want you to take away from it.

What if that’s true? If they are an argument for something, what is an argument based on? It’s based on premises, it’s based on principles, it’s based on beliefs. So I was like, “Oh, ho, ho, ho.” So I was like, then again, just from an observational standpoint, I could say, all right, yes, we make decisions based on story, but the ones that we agree with are the ones that are based on beliefs and principles we agree with.

And so it was really that insight that kind of unlocked it. Like how to finally explain what had been up to this point a very intuitive approach to other people, which is to say, this is what it is: we actually have to identify what are those deep-seated beliefs that are behind why we not only believe in this change, but why we believe in approaching it this way. Because that is actually where the true alignment that leads to long-term agreement actually happens, is in those deep beliefs.

The Role of Beliefs in Persuasion

Jorge: What you’re saying here is bringing up a thought about the traditional way of persuading that you’ve been alluding to. This notion of, I’m gonna introduce the word rational, which I know you didn’t say, but some kinda like rational argument, right? Like you have point A and point B and point C, and they look at what they add up to, right? Like it makes sense, right?

Tamsen: Yeah.

Jorge: That is a story, and you can craft it, right? Like you can craft it so that it’s, so that you’re saying the right things in the right order. But it’s only one of the stories that is in play. There’s another story in play, which is the internal story that the person has playing in their mind. Like you’ve alluded, you’ve talked about beliefs, and part of what I’m hearing here is that the challenge, at least in part, is finding some degree of alignment between this internal story, this internal set of beliefs, and the change that you want to drive them towards.

Tamsen: And even that rational, seemingly, supposedly logical argument. So, I would argue, and I say this in the book, that kind of like point by point, it’s logical, it’s not rational. Like the true, the internal story also has its own logic, and if it doesn’t work, if that internal logic doesn’t work, then someone will not agree, not long term. But the internal logic isn’t rational. Again, it may be logical, it’s not rational because that logic, what’s filling in the logical framework, are beliefs, which may or may not be based in reality.

They are, however, what is true for that particular person, and so that’s why it’s so important to surface that story in my mind. It’s why it’s so important to surface that story first, so that you’re essentially getting to a point where you’re explaining your argument, your philosophy for this change, in such a way that you are trying to establish whether or not it’s even possible for someone else to agree in principle before you ever introduce any evidence about this, right?

So, I could tell you until I’m blue in the face about how many times change efforts fail, or how often we communicate in the day, or what part of your brain is devoted to X, Y, or Z. Fine. Maybe, that will work. But if I really want to find out how likely it is that we’re going to move together in this new direction, it’s a heck of a lot faster for me to say, if you’re interested in building kind of buy-in. And if you’re interested in getting people to believe enough in your things to act on it, then I believe that there are two things in play. Number one, that every decision has this kind of story, this kind of internal argument behind it. That every action we take ends with this kind of internal argument in our heads. Second thing that I believe on that is that the arguments we agree with are based on beliefs we already have. And so this whole approach, the whole book, is about how you build an argument and make the case for building buy-in for ideas by building an argument based on what people are already bought into, the beliefs and desires they already have. Can I support that with evidence, and evidence-based science, and statistics, and…? Yes.

But if we don’t agree, if you don’t care about getting people’s buy-in, the book is not for you. Nor is my work. That’s fine. I can be okay with that. It’s just you want different things outta life. That’s okay. If you don’t believe that we operate on these kinds of internal stories, conscious, unconscious, however they may be. Again, no amount of evidence is going to shift your opinion quickly on that. And most business people, most leaders, most entrepreneurs, don’t have time to “let’s sit down and change this primary belief you have.”

And then again, if you don’t believe that you make most of your decisions based on what you already agree with, as a mental shorthand, because that’s what your brain has time for, fine. Again, it’s not gonna work. But by putting that out first, it does a couple things. A, it makes my, I just, I’m leading with my case, I’m just putting it out there. I’m not playing any games with trying to lure you in to go, “ha! Now I’m springing some change on you. I’ve just, I’ve told you what I’m all about.”

The second thing I’m doing there, and this is really important to me personally, is that I am putting the risk of the change on myself, not on you, the person that I’m asking to change because I’ve now put myself out there and said, this is what I believe. Do you agree? Not “I’m asking you to do something different. Trust me, it’ll be good for you.” That puts the risk on you. I may be convinced, but if I don’t tell you information that’s gonna help you feel comfortable with it, you’re not gonna go.

And the third thing is, and I think this is important for anybody in that position of selling. And again, whether you’re selling an idea or selling a product, service, new direction, the faster you get to yes is important, but so is the faster you get to no. So if I put that out there and you’re like, “I’m not sure I agree with you about this every decision has a story piece.” Okay, great. Let’s talk about that, and maybe it’s at least a place to explore and understand where the division is happening rather than just rejecting the change outright and saying, “tough, we’re gonna go ahead with it.”

So again, a lot of this is, I warned you before you started recording, I can get all fired up about so much of this. But this is, it’s just something that I feel deeply about because a) I’ve seen it as being the only set of approaches that works reliably to produce changes that reliably last. And it’s also just more humane, which is important.

Jorge: I think one of the reasons that I love the book is that it helped me reframe the concept of persuasion in that I think that, like many people, I suspect that many people have an idea that persuasion is about coming to the conversation with the argument, with the message. It’s “I know what’s best and I’m going to tell you what it is, and you can accept or not.” And part of the message that I got from this book is that if you really want to be successful, you have to really grok the other person’s internal world, right? You really have to know who you’re dealing with. And that’s a very designerly approach, right?

Tamsen: Thanks. I just came to it naturally, but yeah, it’s one that made sense to me, so I was like, let’s figure this out.

Jorge: By the way, I must say these skills are fundamental for anybody doing any kind of work, right? Like you talked about selling, and I think a lot of people hear selling and they go, “oh, I don’t like selling.” You have to be good at this if you want to have any kind of traction in the world. How can folks become more adept at reading other people’s internal stories?

How to Read Others’ Internal Stories

Tamsen: I am gonna say something that on the surface is gonna sound trite, but I wanna get in there deeper, and that is to listen more deeply. What I mean by that is, sometimes when people say, “Oh my gosh, how could I possibly understand every person’s internal story?” I can say, “You can’t, right?” But there are certain things that we can reliably count on. I talk about one of them in the book, and that is that everybody wants to be seen as smart, capable, and good, or nearly everybody wants to be seen as smart, capable, and good. So, by framing how you talk about change by starting with that as an assumption—that the person you’re talking to is already smart, capable, and good, not that they will become smart, capable, and good if they were to make your change—you already speak to one of those pieces of the internal story.

But one of the things that I’m deeply passionate about, and passionate enough that I’m pursuing it in my doctoral research, is there are sets of beliefs that sit below things like identity politics and other in-group out-group kind of things, and above what are known as primal beliefs, which are very unlikely to change quickly over time. Basic beliefs about the world, about, let’s say, whether it’s safe or dangerous or something like that. But somewhere in between are these beliefs that generally we agree on, and sometimes that means doing the work to say, what is the simpler concept underneath this complex one? What is the universal idea that this specific example is illustrating?

Meaning, I work a lot with scientists, and I remember one sat down, and I was like, so, you know, what is this? What is this—in this case, it was a talk—what is this talk gonna be about? And he said, it’s about the homeostatic regulation of criticality in the brain. I’m like, you cannot say that to start. I’m not gonna tell you that this is not about that. I said, but we cannot start there because, the audience that you’re speaking to, that’s a whole bunch of words that they don’t know. But I was introduced, thanks to my husband, you and I were talking about him also has a book. He found this principle that he knew I would love, called Gall’s Law, that any complex system that works is based on a simple system that works.

And I was like, this is what I do. An idea is a system. A narrative is a system. It’s a system. The whole idea of talking about homeostatic regulation and criticality in the brain, fundamentally, that’s about maintenance and performance. And if we can articulate that and we can talk about how when it comes to the brain, a computational system operating at ideal optimal performance levels, that a) there is an optimal performance level, it’s known as criticality, and b) just like the thermostat in your home, when you move off of optimal, we need to do something to maintain it. That maintaining it is known as homeostatic regulation. Now we’ve established this common understanding of a very complex idea.

And I think the same thing is true about people. And that’s what I’m really fascinated by, is again, you don’t have to understand everybody in every way. And even though my husband is a researcher, I don’t believe you have to do deep, deep research before you engage in this kind of process to get started. Because there is this range of beliefs that most people, and the people that you want in your organization, the people you want for clients, the people you want for customers, would also agree is true. And that’s what we’re trying to articulate.

So, when I say listen deeper, I say listen for those simpler concepts that are sitting underneath, perhaps a more label-y way to talk about something or a more expertise-based way, or a more industry way of talking about something. Listen deeper. Try to say what else is it like, and then try to figure out what is true about both things, right? So it’s all right, when I said, “Okay, scientist guy, when you’re talking about homeostatic regulation of criticality in the brain,” like what is it like? “Oh, it’s like a thermostat.” Fabulous. So now let’s break down what it is, what is the same about these two ideas that we can actually use as a jumping-off point to help people understand and therefore agree with, in this case, what he was arguing for, which is why do we sleep? And he’s arguing that we sleep because we need to maintain the optimal performance point of our brain criticality.

Jorge: What I’m hearing here is a plea for empathic and perhaps compassionate persuasion, right? This is the notion that you’re not, we’re not trying to shove a message down someone’s throat, you’re trying to align and find common ground, right, and find our common humanity.

Tamsen: Yep. Absolutely. Which I think we could use more of. And I think many of us don’t like to be in the position of persuading. We don’t like to be in the position of selling because it feels so us and them. And I’ve just seen over and over again that if we can find a way to say, “Hey, are we fellow travelers on this road? Is there something that we are both trying to get to? Is there a place that we both wanna go?” Great. Super. Do we both believe in that endpoint enough to figure out how we can find a shareable path to travel? Great. Does that mean I’m asking you to be a different person? No. Do I have to change who I am in order to get you to agree? No. I am telling you based on really starting from that perspective of any change, any idea, any innovation, it’s first realized in the words used to describe it and in the words used to present it, and that, unfortunately, is also where a huge number of them fail.

And I look at that and I say to myself, like, and this is part of what drove me to write the book, that is a solvable problem. If it’s just the words or just how we’re presenting it or just what we’re putting into those words, that is a solvable problem. We know how to solve that. We’ve solved it in other fields. We just haven’t mapped over some of those concepts into business, which is nominally what the book is about, of course. But you have caught on that I feel deeply that this applies all over the place. But it is one of those things where I also wanted to put it into language that you could read it and go, “Okay, I get that this is written for leaders, but I also see how I can apply this to myself, to people I love, or to my kids.” It doesn’t work with dogs, as I say in the last chapter, but…

Closing

Jorge: And I have to say, the way that the book is structured, it makes these principles very practical because there are specific instructions on how to apply them. So thank you for sharing this with us, Tamsen. Where can folks follow up with you, learn more about the book, etc.?

Tamsen: The best place to learn about the book is littlechangebook.com. That’s usually easier for people to remember than its title, but they can go to saywhatheycantunhear. It will send them to the same place, but littlechangebook.com. To see all of this at work, they can land on my website, tamsenwebster.com, and sign up for a newsletter where I talk about message design every two weeks. That’s also where I play around, and people, for instance, who are on my newsletter started to see these ideas get worked out starting about 18 months ago. I love involving people in that process of what’s working for you and what’s not, and that’s what I hope to continue. This has been a pleasure. Thank you.

Jorge: I want to encourage folks to check it out. I think it’s a book that’s going to help a lot of folks. Thank you for the book. Thank you for sharing with us, Tamsen, and I hope we can talk again at some point.

Tamsen: I do too. Thank you so much.