Seek out swingers, not glory hounds
THE subtle art of influence often goes unrewarded and, in a society fixated on headline-chasing and credit-grabbing, it can also go unnoticed.
Making someone believe a brilliant thought was theirs is a timeworn strategy. “For it to succeed, it must be his idea”, is a cliche among women working in traditional, maledominated hierarchies.
And I suspect we have all met the person who repeats what someone else just said, a bit louder and with a stamp of authority. And then blithely accepts the accolades as the source of inspiration.
This boorish behaviour — frequently mistaken for leadership — is generally unconscious. A simple case of “I see that idea, I like it. I’ll take it as mine”. Rarely is it questioned at the time, although it typically elicits a few eye rolls.
Planting a seed can be an artful act without fanfare.
Norman Maier was an experimental psychologist interested in exploring how people solved problems. In 1931, he came up with a puzzle that Malcolm Gladwell described in his book Blink.
Maier attached two ropes to the ceiling of his lab just far enough apart that, while holding on to one rope, you couldn’t reach the other. The challenge was to tie the two ends together. Some objects were available to use, such as extension cords, poles, clamps and weights.
While most people worked out quickly that using an extension cord or a pole would bring the two ropes closer, Maier was looking for a different, simple and elegant solution. He would keep asking participants to come up with new solutions, until they ran out of ideas.
The elegant solution he was seeking was to attach a weight to one rope and set it swinging. That allows you to hold one rope, then grab the swinging rope when it comes towards you.
Throughout the experiment, Maier would wander around the lab until, when people had run out of ideas, he would “accidentally” brush against one of the ropes and set it swinging. Within a minute of this apparently accidental clue, most people would then come up with the solution.
When the participants were asked afterwards, very few of them realised they had been given a massive clue by Maier setting one of the ropes swinging. The remainder had stories about how they came to the solution for themselves.
As Maier wrote: “They made such statements as: ‘It just dawned on me;’ ‘I just realised the rope would swing if I fastened a weight to it;’ ‘Perhaps a course in physics suggested it to me;’ ‘I tried to think of a way to get the rope over here, and the only way was to make it swing over.’ ”
One psychology professor reported: “Having exhausted everything else, the next thing was to swing it. I thought of the situation of swinging across a river. I had imagery of monkeys swinging from trees. This imagery appeared simultaneously with the solution. The idea appeared complete.”
We do not always know where ideas come from but in a culture of blatant trumpet blowing, there is no shortage of people putting their name where it may not belong.
Genius and generosity are all around us and not everyone desires fame. Many people set the rope swinging for others without a need for glory. Rather than listen to the professor, watch for those planting seeds. Stephanie Asher is a management consultant, professional writer and speaker. Twitter: @stephanieasher1