Wednesday, March 30, 2016
This segues out of the last entry Frustration entry and some responses to it. I'll reiterate the definition of hassle from there as it's a vital concept in Persuasion.
Everyone has a certain amount of metal energy, or ability to think about stuff. We'll call that Focus – it's a limited quantity and is precious. The amount of unallocated focus that is present in anyone at a given time is, F(u), and is particularly linked to anyone's ability to take on new tasks.
We all have LOTS of things we're interested in – family, sport, food, fashion, collectables, politics, physics, computers, TV, whatev^lots. We are happy to spend Focus on those interests, and will switch from one to another fairly seamlessly. Interests is not a static list and can change over time.
If somebody wants you to spend some of your Focus (F) on something that isn't on the Interests list – it's Hassle (H). Hassle will be worked around, and delayed, and passed off, and maybe complied with, but only if you have to. Hassles are the things we only do under duress and is proportional to the perceived amount of effort the task will take. It takes encouragement or threat in appropriate amounts to get hassle done. Its intimate link to Frustration was discussed last time. A given task is made of parts that relate to an Interest (I) and a part that doesn't relate to any interest (X) – note that this Interest Ratio (IR) goes to infinity if there isn't even a small bit of Interest in the task.
For the Engineers in the audience, for a given task
H = (I/F(u)X) = (IR/F(u)) – the version with the X in it leads to acronym pronunciation perilously close to territory best avoided.
The cleanest way to motivate someone is to convince them that the action lines up with their interests almost perfectly making I>>X and IR approaching infinity. That is a doctorate level activity achieved mainly by magicians and con-men. Example: painting fences with Tom Sawyer. That's beyond Persuasion and into Manipulation so is out of scope for this discussion.
Persuasion is the art of overcoming Hassle. From last time, Persuasion is made up of Encouragement and Threat or P = E|T. The amount of Encouragement and Threat needed to Persuade someone to complete a task, or from last time, R(E|T)si - with the terms being the Required (R) Encouragement and Threat (E|T) for successful implementation (si). In a much less clumsy nomenclature, and since I couldn't think of a punny acronym, this can be simplified into Rp - Required Persuasion.
Rp = (IR/F(u))^FQ
For a simple-ish illustration we'll look at a timely real world example and assume the Frustration Quotient (FQ) is 1 (in the real world, it's well greater than one). Taxes.
There is very little Interest in the filling out and compiling information associated with Tax time. I have a slight interest in the beauty of Mathematics, but arithmetic is only barely Maths, and it's only a slight interest, and there is quite a bit of stuff I don't care about at all – I mean who keeps track of charitable donations and receipts and stuff... The result makes for a big X and teeny I so X>>I.
With my assorted health issues, I have a relatively small amount of Focus (that I apparently use writing fairly pointless rambling missives to the world, a strange Interest) so the measurement of H is going to be a big one. It may not be quite as large for most people, but the actual doing the taxes part is pretty much universally a large Hassle.
So what will it take to file the damn forms?? Persuasion. The implicit persuasion around filing taxes comes in three major forms – Fines, Jail and Refunds. In Canada, you don't have to file a return every year if you are due a refund. This is a brilliant trick that takes advantage of people like me for whom the Hassle associated with taxes is large.
In my case, I have a sister who is an accountant (CGA) and will do most of the icky stuff for me, if I just get her the information. Since 2013, I am due refunds, so I still haven't filed (effectively giving the gov't of Canada an interest free loan). So the Encourage aspect of Persuasion, in this case a "less than a life altering" amount of cash, is insufficient on its own. Note that the absolute value isn't the point, it's the perceived value of that cash and that's a very personal judgement.
Now my sister, being the wonderful, caring and remarkably tolerant of her little brother person she is, reminds me fairly often to get her my info, so the Persuasion value includes a (small-ish) threat value of letting my sister down and periodically raising her blood- pressure. It's only slight, as she doesn't care that much either. Still not enough.
Last year I underpaid my taxes by accidently making a bunch of money on that stock market thing, so will have an amount owing at the end of April. Now we are into a period where the fine/jail threat gets added in. That threat volume increases with constantly increasing amount of irritation to my sister the less time I leave her to file. We have now hit the threshold where the total Persuasion is sufficient to get me off my butt and I'm compiling the required information.
So to recap, to complete an activity involving an effort not well correlated to my Interests – taxes – I required a volume ofPersuasion comprising both negative (sister's blood-pressure/fine/jail) and positive (bribe, caring about my sister's blood-pressure and my own freedom). Only when the PERCEIVED mass/value/whatev of that Persuasion overcame the mass/value/whatev of Hassle did I take action. Note that the effort required in this case was actually pretty small, but I thought it would be harder - the reality of the effort isn't the key value – it's all perception. And it turns out that banks sometimes do useful stuff in the background, making your life easier – who knew??
When you bring the Frustration stuff into the mix, the required Persuasion thing can totally run away from you. See last missive…
