5 Winning by a NOSE: The Structure of Persuasion N AN ORGANIZATIONAL SETTING, PEOPLE WRITE for one of three reasons--to inform, to evaluate, or to persuade. For each of these purposes, there is a structural pattern that will produce the best results. You can think of these structural patterns as templates for deliv- ering content in the right order. Keep in mind, however, that these are not templates created by English teachers or document designers. Rather, they arise from the brain of the reader. They are part of our innate men- tal apparatus. The human brain is hard-wired to look for content in a specific order, depending on what purpose we will make of the message. If you use the wrong pattern in organizing your content, you will get the wrong re- sults. It's like trying to drive a nail with a screwdriver--you might even- tually get the job done, but it's going to be a lot harder than it has to be. In Chapter 2, I asked you to read an executive summary and make one simple decision: is it worth keeping or not? By asking you to make a de- cision, I established intentionality in your reading process. You were ap- proaching the task with the goal of making a decision, so you were looking for certain kinds of content in a very predictable order. If I had given you a different challenge, such as reading the executive summary to determine how many factual statements the bank made about itself, you would have looked for a different pattern. And you would have ap- proached the task differently. Information doesn't create momentum toward a decision. Persuasion does. Unfortunately, people are often most comfortable providing infor- mation, particularly when they are speaking or writing to an audience that knows almost as much about their topic as they do. (See Figure 5-1.) That doesn't work. We have to move out of our comfort zone and into the persuasion zone--a different structural pattern and a less-expert au- dience. I American Management Association www.amanet.org 25