I was in New Orleans, at the bar at Pêche, about to wreck a platter of raw oysters. Next to me sat the actress I was helping to write a comic memoir covering her life on Broadway, television and film. She even had a fusion country album to her credit. Hell of a CV, I thought. “Comedy is the only thing a computer can’t do.” She said, tossing back a briny one, “this is job security for me.”

This was before OpenAI happened, so she was pretty prophetic as well. Of course, ChatGPT and the rest of it did happen.

Artificial Intelligence, however else you feel about it, is brilliant at certain logical tasks like calculations of definable inputs, detecting patterns and placing it all into logical narrow context models on a vast scale. Like the early days of the internet, we know that it’s a game-changer even if no one quite knows how the game has changed. It can tell you what people across a wired world are doing, but not the why. Often the why doesn’t matter, but it pays to be aware that while AI is a moonshot of unprecedented magnitude, it can get lost on the dark side of the human thinking – exactly the blind spot where effective human communication happens.

If you have a standard press release, a document designed to simply convey information, then crank-up the bot. It will knock out 90% of a job in 20 seconds. This is what predictive Large Language Models (LLMs) are made for and they are great at it – what advertising sorts call “cheap talk.” You are still left with a pragmatic user problem: Any logical model you use will put you at precisely the same point as everyone else using the same model. Everyone will reach the same conclusion, with the same blind spots, and do it at blinding speed. This is a big problem if you want to your messaging to resonate, motivate and stick. Or, more practically, you want to dominate a market.

There is a deep-rooted, evolutionary reason why nothing predictable ever really delivers much impact. Successfully hack that reason and you like funny gal and her dazzling CV, have achieved job security.

A Note on Terminology:

This Insight is a deep-dive into effective communication, which means understanding the difference between the two modes of human thinking - “conscious” and “unconscious” – and the way that the two work together. Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for his work on the subject memorialized in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. He identifies them as System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow). In Hare Brain, Tortious Mind, Guy Claxton uses “intuitive” or “undermind” and “deliberative mode” or “d-mode” for the same. Jonathan Height memorably uses the metaphor of the Rider and the Elephant; in which the rider thinks that he’s in charge – and is, up to a point. Yet, if the elephant gets spooked, randy or has lively indigestion, it’s going to do what it’s going to do and leave the rider to cook up some post hoc rationalization about how whatever just happened was all part of the plan.

While colorful, I’ve largely settled on terminology coined by Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Olgily, in his book Alchemy: “logic” and “psyco-logic.” To use his own brilliant definition, “Logic is what makes a successful engineer or mathematician, but psyco-logic is what has made us a successful breed of monkey.”

You’ll Never Hear the Winning Argument

The purpose of leadership messaging – to a person, an audience or a market – is to make an impact and hopefully persuade them to do something and heed your call to action. Making a strictly logical argument is fine, so long as both the message and the audience are operating purely on deliberative logic. Unless you are an engineer or a scientist entirely occupied with a professional question, that is shockingly rare when dealing with other humans. IBM dominated a market for decades not because of quantifiable superior technology, but largely due to a hazy rule of thumb that cropped up in corporate procurement: No one ever got fired for buying IBM. Not long ago I heard this about consultancy McKinsey, but AI may be changing that as well.

That being the case, hedge your bets. Focus on messaging that delivers information both logically and psyco-logically. If you can only manage one, you’re better off hitting below the belt - go for psyco-logic. Yes, the facts stand for themselves, but unless they register on a deeper, intuitive level those facts are going to stand alone like a friendless idiot while your audience moves on to something stickier. The reason for this is pretty simple even if its not obvious: There is a huge difference between “information” and “meaning.” It is roughly the same difference between “price” and “value.” The quip He knows the price of everything and the value of nothing is generally meant as a vicious insult.

This matters because humans just are not as irrational as advertised. That’s just something economists, quants and poly-sci sorts say when their models don’t work. The human subconscious has a logic of its own but of which we are largely unaware. You can “think” about things in the subconscious for an alarming amount of time without the logical level ever knowing what you are chewing on. To push the metaphor, the pre-occupied rider may have missed the black mamba lurking in the weeds, but the elephant didn’t. It doesn’t really care what the rider thinks, it’s going to create distance from the uncertainty, even if it can’t articulate why. The end result is that we rarely ever hear our own winning argument: Humans are very aware of our logical reasoning, but largely unaware of our own, or anyone else’s, psyco-logical calculations.

This sounds more esoteric than it actually is. To bring it very down to earth – most adult males know the reference to the raging argument between the brain and the privates. The sitcom Seinfeld featured a hilarious bit with the two facets of Jerry playing chess with the brain, predictably, getting bested. Women, I understand, frame the tension as between the head and the heart. Probably because they aren’t cleaned up cave-bears.

Psyco-logical Hack for Sticky Messaging

Consider any movie quote that you, and everyone you know, can reel off confident that anyone within earshot will get the reference. They’re almost all from comedies. To date myself, I had a friend in college with whom I simply couldn’t watch Caddyshack because he knew, and quoted, 75% of the lines a spilt-second before delivery. He was, by his own admission, an indifferent student and could have never memorized, say, “Invictus” which is a lot shorter than the screenplay for Caddyshack. And neither could I, for that matter. And there is your secret sauce to effective messaging:

1. He enjoyed the exercise, and so

2. learning the well-constructed rhythm and the banter of the dialogue was simple because…

3. the incongruity to normal speech and thinking patterns inherent in comedy gave the “message” stickiness. We’ll get to how this works later.

4. He had entirely too much time on his hands. True, but that’s hardly relevant here.

Most professional subjects admittedly don’t lend themselves to comedy or simply aren’t funny. Neither is getting hunted by a great white shark. The only line you likely remember from Jaws is a bit of comic relief: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” It isn’t a really a joke, but what sticks is its incongruity – a quirky bit of relief that is out of sync with an otherwise tense situation. What I really mean is wit, which has many of the same elements as comedy, but has a point rather that a punchline. Both involve what we might call lateral approach to your message, that is outside the obvious thought pattern. Which is exactly what makes it work.

Human intuition is, like AI, primarily a pattern recognition engine. Unlike AI, its very good at picking up relevant data that is hard or impossible to quantify. Unfortunately, we can’t query the subconscious like we can with AI, so it largely runs on auto-pilot. When the autopilot runs into something quirky or clever that deviates from the expected pattern - even in the way the information is framed - the message gets sticky because it gets kicked up to the conscious for further review. Information then, is what you say. Meaning is often how you say it.

A Word on Fear

Fear is great at capturing attention, but is actually terrible for any messaging that involves much information. In studies where subjects are shown a 99 smiling faces and a single angry one, humans focus on the angry mug. Flip the ratio to one smile in a sea of fury, and we will generally miss the happy face unless we consciously seek it out. This makes evolutionary sense because to survive we need to be attuned existential threats more than to a hilarious story about a fishing trip. But with anything that effective, there is a cost: The same fear that snares attention also stops the brain from absorbing new relevant details. Your intuition doesn’t want to analyze the situation, only remove itself from the threat. If you’ve ever had that tremor that caused you to step back onto the curb as the car comes hurtling by you’ll know that the reflex worked – and you’re still alive – because you to involuntarily stepped back without spending time or mental capital on whether the truck was a Ford or a Chevy. Use too much fear and your audience disengage without knowing why.

True, in binary, external messaging it is sometimes it is more effective to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) around an alternative than it is to sell yourself. The IBM mantra mentioned above is a good example of this in business to business. Politicos successfully deploy fear because they aren’t really trying to get a message across, they’re just trying to get you think the other guy is the devil.

Know Feel Do

How do you deploy this hack in your messaging? A bit of emotional intelligence and wit is crucial in professional messaging, but like anything else you need to know how to use it. So use a professional messaging hack called Know - Feel - Do. Not only does it work, it comes in three easy to remember bullet points:

1. Know: What the audience needs to know.

2. Feel: How the message should make them feel.

3. Do: A call to action, or what is it you want them to do?

This clever little formula was developed at by trail and error but if you need it certified, there are mountains of research and data to back it up: Emotional messages spread further, and stick with us longer, than facts alone. Humans instinctively attach meaning to messages that hit on a psyco-logical level. Understand that you still need facts. The first third of the formula, Know, involves delivering them. Be straight forward, but keep it succinct - don’t force anyone to memorize “Invictus.”

The last third of the equation, Do, is also pretty easy – it’s just giving orders. Some of us are better at it than others, but we all know how to do it. And secretly, we all love it.

It’s that middle third of the equation, Feel, that gives us so much hell. Our resistance here is due to it all sounding so emotional, and it is, but not in the traditional “irrational” sense of the word. The Feel is just a psyco-logical conduit for carrying what the audience needs to Know over to what you want them to Do. None of which changes that fact that both you and your audience have been trained from birth not to trust our feelings head on. The trick is to come at the Feel laterally. Don’t barge through the front door, but sneak in through the kitchen – and bring pie. Emotionally charged watchwords work as a sort of emotional nemonic device – attaching a plainspoken phrase to a larger idea or activating emotion.

Watchwords are so context dependent that it’s more effective to tell you what not to do than to tell you what to do. For example; the word “loyalty”, when said it out loud and head on, gets very slippery. Dangerously so. Some instinctual trust-for-mutual-benefit has underpinned human groups since the beginning. Yet, probably because trust and loyalty are such psyco-logical baselines, there is no logical way to establish either. So coming out and using the word will only send up red flags that the listener can’t quite put a finger on. We just know that something is not right. This matters because the default human reaction to undefined uncertainty is to do nothing. You’re better off using watchword concepts like the Team, Ownership and Achievement which places the listener’s sense of self into some greater context, in which she has a stake and will reap a share of the rewards, not just for herself but for her people (whomever that may be.). Anything that successfully builds on the concept of Team has the added benefit of, to be completely Machiavellian about it, creating mechanism to diffuse blame. Remember the IBM mantra? Blame deflection was the underlying trigger for what has been called the greatest marketing catch-phrase of all time. Evolution wasn’t wired for optimization but survival – being part of something larger is a way to hedge against a worse-case, catastrophic outcome. “Well, they can’t fire all of us….”

For example: You want your team to Know the details of a new company initiative, and what you want them to Do is put their backs into the effort for the big win. You can carry on about market share growth and vertical integration all you want, but all the team is going to hear you say is “You have got a lot of long hours ahead for the sake of my annual bonus. And I’m making a big deal out of this because that beach house isn’t going to buy itself. I’m not getting canned for this, but you might.” While it’s plenty authentic and honest, I wouldn’t recommend it.

What you need them to hear is that “We are going to excel, build something that will open up opportunities for the team, and I’ll provide air-cover from the CEO and any high priced consultants he hired while in a mood. Bonuses all around!” Understand that the bonus here isn’t necessarily monetary. A nice bump in status might get you further.

For your message to stick, your audience needs to Feel they are part of something they want to be part of, are somewhat in control, have a degree of ownership and will be taken care of. This last point is crucial and, incidentally, is how you convey “loyalty” without saying it. Slippery, maybe, but there is nothing illogical about it.

Why It Works

The Know and the Do are easily delivered to the logical, deliberative mind. In fact, that what it’s made for. As we’ve seen, it’s two thirds of the formula. Your brain’s logical system, however, is not a super computer no matter what your mother told you. It can process about 6 bytes of data a second; that’s the stuff of vacuum tubes. It’s not very efficient, either: the conscious brain consumes a lot of energy for that middling output. Because the modern world throws out 100X more data than the logical mind can process most of it gets dropped to make room for the next wave. Some of it is lost. The good news is that a lot of it is recorded in the subconscious, basically a vast pre-conceptual trove of patterns learned experientially over a lifetime cross referenced with evolutionary instincts that have evolved over millennia.

The psyco-logical blind spot is that once a similar situational pattern is recognized, intuition doesn’t spend much energy chewing on it. A quirky disruption in the pattern gets the idea thrown upstairs for some logical deliberation. And now you’ve thought about it completely. Unless the two work together, both are likely to let the matter drop and move on. Humor, wit or any sort of emotional incongruity is a simple hack to trigger the movement between the two which causes some back and forth to ask, “What do you think about this?” Which will give your facts the emotional charge and meaning to carry over and activate your call to action.

So What?

At an oyster bar in New Orleans, the quick-witted actress and the ghostwriter sat eating oysters and talking about job security. AI hadn’t broken out then, but we knew it was coming, and we felt it was soon, and were pretty sure that we needed to do something about it. You could hand your communications to AI – it can certainly write faster than I can – but that was not the concept we were groping with that afternoon. It’s that easily quantified logic is pretty cheap to come by these days, but

A) it will place you squarely in the center of the pack, and

B)…without meaning, it won’t stick your indistinguishable message will be lost anyway. So

C) …it will be like you never existed.

Our psyco-logical calculations are largely hidden, unless a message is framed in a way that humans want to hear, and feel it when they do, the two sides of the brain won’t work together and the message will be lost.

The subconscious is much more influential that we realize. We like to think that our conscious, logical mind is calling the shots, but it’s really just trying to play catch up most of the time. And in a world were we are all subjected to a firehose of out-of-context information, it isn’t really doing a very good job of it. So frame your message in a way that addresses your audience, team or market on a psyco-logical level - it’s the one calling the shots anyway. After that you can start giving orders all you want. Don’t get clever with the order, though.

If you take nothing else away from this Insight, remember that in a world where everyone can create content at scale:

the message that sticks is the only one that counts.

The 4717 provides lateral thinking on global markets and effective messaging in a world of consensus blindspots.  From project management to global market trends, our research, analysis and briefing services gives you insight to tear things up.

Our communications team tells your story, your way, and we tell it well. From research and framing to ghostwriting reports, white papers and presentations - the 4717 makes sure that your story is pitch perfect, focused, and remembered. Whether it’s a road show, a product launch or forward planning.

About Richard Murff

Richard Murff is the founder of the 4717. As a geopolitical and market analyst, his feet-on-the-ground experience includes delivering humanitarian, NGO and geopolitical insights and reporting across Latin America, Iraq, Ukraine, Libya to name the more violent places. His experience and clients have spanned finance, international entrepreneurial programs, airlines and tech.

His books include Haint Punch (novel), Drunk as Lords, updated and revised paperback of Pothole of the Gods: On Holy Wars, Proxy Wars and Fake News will be available soon.