Why and Who
Why must you make an active effort to persuade other people to think and act as you wish? Should not the technical merits of your engineering speak sufficiently for themselves without having to pull a lot of non-engineering psychology and language skills into the act?
In the first place, the technical merits of your engineering designs are not absolute. No one will question your conclusion that a current is 17.5 A, or that a stress is 14,300 lb/in2. However, suppose that you choose to couple a lever to a distant load by a mechanical linkage and that a first technical competitor (who may be your boss) says that an electro-mechanical servomechanism would be better and a second technical competitor says that a sealed hydraulic coupling would be best? There are many judgmental (i.e., nonmathematical) considerations in making the decision, including reliability, maintenance, preferred manufacturing processes, management and customer prejudices, and so on. If that mechanical linkage is important to you, you had better marshal a persuasive case that it is the best, or one of the competing systems will prevail.
In the second place, there are conflicting motives other than the desire to choose the technically best. Your competitor may seek a decision which allocates budget to another department. Your marketing department may seek a decision which aids in an immediate sale or contributes to its long-range sales hopes. Your manufacturing managers may resist adopting a technology new to them, with consequent problems of changing labor skills and overcoming their own conservatism and insecurity feelings. Your engineering management is concerned with maintaining a steady backlog for the different portions of its staff. Your customer, if you are negotiating the features of the product, has a complex of motives different from yours, and sometimes your "customer" is actually several people from different departments, all with different wishes. This is the real world in which you must work.
In the third place, there is human entropy. Human activity tends to diffuse and to peter out unless the humans involved are continually persuaded to toe the line set for them. We all know about the formal authorities and responsibilities of job descriptions and organization charts. But if you want something done, keep an eye on it and persuade the people to do what they have been instructed to do and are paid to do but may or may not be doing with goodwill or at all.
Always remember that people believe what they want to believe, often for reasons of which they are not really conscious, regardless of where objective logic may lead. They may justify their beliefs with all the techniques of prejudiced journalism: selection of facts, selective emphasis, distortion, choice of words which imply good or bad, errors, and outright lies. You must persuade them to believe what you want them to believe if you wish to be successful.
On whom must you practice the nonacademic engineering arts of persuasion? On everybody who can affect the results you wish.
Unless you are working on a one-person project or detail assignment, your work must mesh with the work of other professionals whose rank is close to your own. You should cooperate with them, and you should persuade them to cooperate with you. We know they are paid to do so, but to varying degrees, depending on the personalities involved, there will be either persuasion or neglect and conflict.
You have or will have assistants assigned to help you. These include other engineers, drafters, laboratory technicians, model makers, vendors, and secretaries. They have been assigned and are paid to follow your instructions, to help you, and to abide by your decisions. To one degree or another they will actually do so. But in the real world you will find that they do so faster and with less resistance, evasion, and misunderstanding if you also persuade them to want to do so.
You yourself are an assistant to your own managers or bosses. You like or dislike many of the things they tell you (or do not tell you) and many of the instructions and authorizations they give to you (or do not give to you). In fact, you may or may not like them or different aspects of them. You will be more successful if you persuade them to tell you and instruct you what you wish to be told and instructed.
Sooner or later you will deal with your company's marketers. You can and should learn from them a tremendous amount about the world outside the company which will influence your designs. Conversely you will have product ideas which are new to them, and you probably have a greater depth of engineering knowledge than they do. You have an opportunity to succeed in promoting your own ideas and yourself if you persuade them to accept and advocate your ideas.
Your factory management and its manufacturing engineers may have a strong influence on what your top management decides to make or not make and certainly on how it is made. They, too, are useful targets of your persuasiveness.
Your customers are the ultimate persuades. As sales types like to say, "Nothing happens until someone sells something to someone." Your own contact with customers may be through your marketing department, may be in the form of proposals written by you and requested and delivered by your marketers and, if you are lucky, may be directly face to face with your customer. The ultimate purpose of marketing and sales people is to persuade customers to issue purchase orders.
Customer persuasion can be divided into solicited and unsolicited persuasion. Solicited persuasion occurs when a customer asks you to propose or quote on a product which the customer specifies. The specification is more or less detailed, and asking you is usually preceded by missionary work by your marketers to persuade the customer that there may be benefits in asking you. The federal government advertises solicited requests for proposal or quotation in its Commerce Daily and sometimes awards contracts to companies which respond with low bids but which they have never heard of before.
Unsolicited customer persuasion occurs when your company develops a new product and then persuades customers to buy it. It also occurs when you submit an unsolicited proposal to a customer (often a government agency) to perform a piece of research or to develop a new product designed especially for its use.
How young engineers fresh from school believe that if they do good work its merit will persuade others to use it. They are absolutely right.
The most persuasive of all the arguments in selling engineering ideas and work is their intrinsic value. The remainder of this article deals with situations and techniques in which self-evident merit alone is insufficient to overcome the resistance of the persuadee.
When you persuade, use 100 percent facts and 0 percent snow. People are so bombarded by advertising that they are trained and sensitized to any phony sales pitch. You can put a pretty picture on the cover of an engineering proposal; it will attract attention, but it will reduce and not enhance the effectiveness of the proposal. On the other hand, good typography, plenty of appropriate graphics, good paper, and, above all, good English will lend credibility to the proposal.
Make your own behavior more likable. People are more willing to be persuaded by those they like than by those they dislike. Observe your behavior. Do you irritate people or please them? Do you express interest in the affairs of others? Are you sarcastic, discourteous, and offensive to the feelings of others? Do you dress in a conventional way? (Sorry, but it can help.) Do you normally scowl or smile? Do you "argufy"? (This is an informal word for arguing a lot just to win, not because the argument is valid and useful.) This paragraph is not intended to be an instant psychoanalysis. It does not inquire into why you might do any of the anti-persuasive things. But it points out harmful practices which you can become aware of and, by direct self-discipline, change to increase your professional success.
There are two sentences which instantly soothe your adversary and increase your own prestige at the same time: "I don't know," and "I was wrong." These are not just confessions of human fallibility but are demonstrations of your own integrity. It should be a matter of professional pride not to fake knowledge you don't have and not to stonewall a position in which you no longer believe. In return your associates will think of you as non-phony, the reverse of the tag often pinned on the unconventional.
In communicating to people not trained in engineering, use analogy. Everyone has some understanding of cars, airplanes, household appliances, and the statics and dynamics of their own bodies. Each has special knowledge, some of which you share (e.g., manufacturing technology with manufacturing people). You can explain the principles of your ideas, perhaps not the details or the mathematics, by comparison with the knowledge already shared.
Show that your design benefits the persuadee. We are all motivated largely by what we believe is our own self-interest regardless of our instructions, salary, and duty. If you demonstrate that what you want is in the interest of the persuadee, you will tend to persuade him or her to want it too.
Appeal to the emotions of the persuadee. Show that your design benefits the persuadee's self, group, company, or country and associate yourself with that group, company, or country. This is easier said than done, but the great leaders of the world became great by doing just this.
All people are different, so suit your persuasion to the individual responses of the person you are persuading. If you want something desperately, hide the fact and appear casual; people are sometimes perverse.
