The Art & Science of Amplifying World Changing Ideas
Part 1 | Part 2 (You are here) | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
You’re in part 2 of a series on the Art & Science of Amplifying World Changing Ideas. In part 1, I made a bold claim.
There are 3 key barriers to building influence:
Not knowing or operating within your Stage of Visibility
The tricky transition between scopes of influence
Underrecognition.
Read on to get the download on what to do about it.
Behavior Change
When people talk about improving the visibility around your work or ideas, they usually mean you should get more of it. Or if they’re especially enlightened, “more, at a higher profile, in front of the right people.” But as with many things, more isn’t always better. After all, you can have all three of these without breaking through and changing behaviors.
(See my client who was on Oprah. It did nothing for their work.)
And at the end of the day, whether or not you are ultimately interested in impact, growth or both, we are looking to change behaviors (vote today, donate now, sign here). So how do we get there? How do we get from visibility to behavior change, especially with how loud the marketplace of attention has gotten and how often doing all the right things leads to…crickets? Or worse yet, lipservice?
Inside the Black Box
Behavioral Science has a lot to say about the drivers of behavior change. I could spend years breaking down the minutia of it for you. Instead I’ll give you the one sentence executive summary: In order to change behavior, you need influence.
That influence can be environmental, cognitive, social or something else. It can come in all shapes and sizes. But at the end of the day, that is what is required.
Ultimately, influence translates attention into outcomes. So if exposure to your ideas regularly translates into some approximation of the outcomes you want, then you have a fair amount of influence.
With that, we’ve got a piece of the puzzle.
Influence drives behavior change.
Influence → Behavior Change.
But we’re not done. Because influence has required inputs too.
I’ve actually already mentioned one.
Attention.
I know this word comes with a lot of baggage. But all this means is that in order to have influence, someone or something must be or must have been paying attention to you. Attending to you. Noticing. It’s a simple fact of brain chemistry.
This is where visibility comes in.
For our purposes, visibility is simply your ideas being seen in the right light by the right people.
It’s not being everything, everywhere all at once.
It’s not social media stats or press mentions.
It’s not even panels at prestigious conferences.
It is a process.
Your ideas gain attention. Then they maintain that attention and then finally, as influence takes over, they translate that attention into the outcomes you want.
And with that we have another piece of the puzzle
Visibility → Influence → Behavior Change
Naturally, there is one more piece.
We’ve actually been discussing it the whole time.
Afterall, something needs to be attended to in order for behavior change to take place.
And that something is a brand.
Another word with a lot of baggage.
Another word that is often misunderstood.
From a scientific perspective, a brand is simply a system of ideas that influences the behavior of others.
Said another way, a brand is a type of influential real estate in someone’s head.
Any memorable assets used to communicate those ideas are branding.
Your ideas are your brand.
And at their core, brands teach others how to treat you. That is true of everything from a Mom and Pop shop to any nation state currently at war (take it from someone who has advised both).
When they are structured appropriately, brands can teach others to treat us in ways we intend.
Brand → Visibility → Influence → Behavior Change
And with the final piece in place, we can start to make some decisions.
What do we actually do?
In order for a brand to lead to the kind of behavior change you want, it has to be built for the kind of influence and visibility you need.
Let’s return to our 3 key barriers to building influence:
Not knowing or operating within your Stage of Visibility
The tricky transition between scopes of influence
Underrecognition.
Brands, by definition, are meant to influence behavior. But if a brand isn’t intentionally built for the kind of influence your behavior change goals require, then exposure to that brand won’t necessarily lead to behavior change. And in the rare case it does, it often isn’t the behavior change we need or intend, at the scope, scale or magnitude we want.
To have the kind of influence that moves systems, as in the kind that drives systemic or social behavior change, you need to pick a scope of influence that reflects that goal.
The same goes for visibility.
If you want the kind of visibility that actually moves power, policy, and resources, then you need to select a stage of visibility that reflects that goal.
And then move towards it.
Here’s what that means on the brand front:
A brand built for influence—rather than just likes
A brand engineered to neutralize underrecognition
More specifically, a brand structured to influence specific kinds of behaviors while consensually neutralizing cognitive resistance.
A brand that’s impossible to ignore, for short.
Taking everything together, here’s what we know:
Remember this from Part 1?
If we are after systemic or social change, then we need to develop and deploy the capacity to influence groups—the second scope of influence—at a minimum to make that happen. Leveraging the second scope of influence means your brand needs to reach at least the third stage of visibility.
And in order to do that, your brand needs to be Impossible to Ignore—my personal, actual, measurable standard for a brand that can neutralize underrecognition.
Visibility Engineering™
To shape your industry, field or sector, to become a coveted voice in the rooms decisions are being made in, to ensure your ideas are catching on in the communities you’re looking to serve, the answer isn’t more attention.
The answer is the kind of influence that moves systems fueled by the kind of visibility that actually moves power, policy, and resources. All driven by a brand that is impossible to ignore.
Said another way, the answer is your impossible to ignore brand making the journey between its current stage of visibility and the stage your behavior change goals require.
I call the process of making this journey, and the methodology I use to make that journey possible, Visibility Engineering™
As with any journey, there are 3 general phases:
Map out the journey—where do we need to go and what do we need to do there?
Make sure you have the necessary infrastructure—will this require a 4 wheel drive Jeep or will a sedan do?
Move out.
Once you know what stage of visibility you are in and which one you need to reach, the mapping phase can begin.
Here, the focus is less on trying to gain more attention and more on mapping the invisible landscape of influence around your work and the behaviors you’re trying to encourage. How power, attention, and momentum actually move and why. That’s what makes it possible to understand and eventually articulate the distinct role your organization or initiative can play in reshaping the narrative or system at play.
With the journey mapped, you then want to make sure you have the infrastructure necessary to make the journey. And you want to do so understanding that the infrastructure you need will need to shift as your stage of visibility and scope of influence does.
I call this infrastructure your Ecosystem of Influence. Think of it as your influence engine.
This influence engine has three parts:
Platform—the obvious reason to pick your system of ideas. Building or refining your platform is a matter of impression development and management. Of intentionally positioning how you and your brand are perceived. Of making sure all of the decisions made around your platform are anchored in the motivations and realities of your intended audience or public.
Circle of Recognition (h/t Angela Basset)—The network of actors in and around the behavior you are trying to influence. Establishing or designing your Circle of Recognition is a matter of influence development and management. Of structuring your web of partnerships and stakeholders so it amplifies your ideas in ways that change behavior—rather than only in ways that share information. Your Circle of Recognition is how you'll amplify your ideas.
Decision Architecture—Your attention management system. Designing or refining your attention management system is a matter of building systems or flows that lead to certain behaviors. Of programming subtle prompting or guidance for all of your stakeholders or partners. Guidance that encourages action and consensually neutralizes cognitive resistance. It’s ultimately this system that will bring you and your brand towards its visibility tipping point.
Finally, the third and final phase: move out. This is where you activate your ecosystem of influence and start making the journey from your current stage of visibility to the one your goals require. And with your ecosystem of influence in place, this part of the process actually becomes pretty straightforward.
You select a project that will move you forward, like Beyoncé did here.
You mobilize your Circle of Recognition around said project (like Beyoncé did in the piece linked above).
Your decision architecture ensures the necessary behaviors are encouraged.
You move forward. Rinse, repeat.
And there you have it.
The solution.
That’s how you overcome the 3 key barriers to building influence. That’s how you amplify a world changing idea.
Now that you know what to do, you’ll likely have noticed that you can’t actually start the the process without knowing what the 5 stages if visibility are.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what we’ll be tackling next.