Last month, a director I coach walked me through a proposal she had spent three weeks building. Market data. Cost model. Risk register. Three scenarios with sensitivity analysis. It was, by any professional standard, excellent work.
The steering committee thanked her and asked her to come back next quarter.
She wanted to know what was missing from the analysis. Nothing was missing from the analysis. The problem sat somewhere else entirely, in a part of the process she had never been taught to think about.
Patrick van der Burght has spent 25 years working on that exact gap. He is a founding member of the Cialdini Institute, ranked fourth globally among Cialdini Certified Trainers, and a business partner of Dr. Robert Cialdini, whose book Influence has sold more than seven million copies and was named the number one business book by Forbes for 2025. Patrick trains teams at Google, Apple, Canva, Westpac, and Cisco. He came on the ProductiviTree podcast to explain why smart, prepared professionals keep losing decisions they should win.
His answer is uncomfortable and useful. You are not being ignored. You are talking to the wrong part of the brain.
Your best argument is aimed at the wrong 5%
Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 for work that overturned a comfortable assumption. Economics had long treated people as logical actors who weigh evidence and choose the best option. Kahneman showed that this is not how decisions happen.
He described two systems. System 1 is fast, automatic, and always running. It costs almost no energy. It works through rules of thumb built up over a lifetime. Expensive equals good. A busy restaurant equals decent food. Someone who knows more than I do is worth listening to. System 2 is slow, conscious, and analytical. It looks at everything available and reasons its way to an answer. Kahneman called it the lazy controller because it would rather not get involved.
Kahneman’s research suggests that System 1 is responsible for about 90% of our decisions. Patrick says the working figure today is closer to 95%, and it keeps climbing. The reason is environmental, not biological. Our brains have not changed. Our conditions have. Attention span in the 1980s ran around 20 minutes. Today it sits near seven seconds. More decisions arrive per hour than any of us can process consciously, so we lean harder on shortcuts to get through the day.
Now put yourself back at the desk with the proposal. When you plan how to convince someone, you are consciously thinking. You are inside System 2. And System 2 produces what System 2 knows how to produce: reasoning, justification, evidence, structure.
You then hand that to someone whose System 1 is running the decision.
Patrick’s point is that this mismatch does not usually produce a no. It produces something worse and harder to see. It produces uncertainty, and uncertain people postpone. Let me think about it. Let me check with my partner. Send me the deck, and I will review it. If you make a thousand pitches and land a hundred, it is tempting to file nine hundred as rejections. A large share of them were never rejections. They were people who could not find a shortcut to a decision, so they made none.
That distinction matters because it changes what you fix. You do not need a better argument. You need information that System 1 can act on.
Where persuasion ends, and manipulation begins
Every professional I have asked about persuasion raises the same objection within about ninety seconds. It feels like a nicer word for manipulation.
Patrick draws the line cleanly. Manipulation removes choice. You trick or pressure someone into a behaviour they did not choose. Persuasion gives options and lets a yes surface when it is genuinely there. The decision comes from inside the other person.
The practical test is what happens when you leave the room.
If you rule by force, and Patrick includes contracts and formal authority in that category, the behavior holds only while someone is watching. When the boss goes away, the mice play. If the decision came from within, there is nothing to police. The person is following their own choice, and your absence changes nothing.
That is the argument for ethical persuasion that lands hardest with leaders. It is not primarily a moral argument, although the moral case is solid. It is an operating cost argument. The compliance you have to supervise is expensive. Commitment supervises itself. This is the same reason accountability breaks down in most teams, even when the process design is sound.
Patrick is blunt about what unethical persuasion does inside a company. He points out that most people do not want to lie for a living. When a manager asks staff to run tactics they find dishonest, it damages how those people see the manager, and turnover follows. The cost lands twice. You lose the trust, and you pay to replace the people.
The seven principles of persuasion, translated for work
Cialdini’s seven principles are called universal because they hold across languages, cultures, and countries. That is unusual for a soft skill, and it is what makes them worth the study time. Patrick’s flagship course runs for about twenty hours. This is not a discipline that takes a decade to learn.
Here is each principle, with the workplace version rather than the sales version.
Reciprocity
We give back the behavior we receive. We also dislike being seen as someone who takes without giving back, so we go to great lengths to restore balance. In practice, you are far more likely to agree with someone you feel you owe.
Businesses know this and get it wrong constantly. The free ebook behind an email form does not trigger reciprocity. Patrick is direct about why. A gift has no conditions attached. Name and email first; download link second. It’s a reward. It might be a fine lead magnet, but it is not generosity, and it does not create the feeling of debt that reciprocity depends on.
The version that works is the cheese sample in the supermarket. Given freely, no strings. And the effect does not depend on whether you liked the cheese, because it was never about the cheese. It is about behavior. You were good to me, so now I want to be good to you.
Reciprocity also has an unusually long shelf Life. Help someone properly today, and they may still feel the debt years later. At work, that means the useful question is not, “What can I get from this person?” How can I genuinely help this person right now?
Liking
We like people who are like us, we like people who like us, and we like people who like us and say so.
Patrick cited a study on email negotiations between two universities, in which 30% of difficult contract talks ended in deadlock. Negotiators were then told to open by sharing personal information before touching business. Hobbies. Favorite food. What do they do on weekends? Reciprocity kicks in, the other side shares too, and common ground surfaces.
Deadlocks fell from 30% to 6%.
The critical detail is what drove the result. It was not the volume of information shared. It was how many similarities the exchange uncovered. So the preparation task is specific. Before an important conversation, find out what the other person actually cares about, and let genuine overlap surface in the conversation.
Unity
Unity arrived in 2015 after further research and got confused with liking constantly. Liking is about similarity. Unity is about we-ness, the feeling of belonging to the same group. Same university. Same hometown. Same team.
The workplace application Patrick gave is one of the cheapest changes on this list. Say you have five tasks and five people. The default move is to go to each person individually and assign one task with a deadline. The work gets done.
Instead, bring the five together and say, “Here are the five things and the deadlines. Sort out among yourselves how you will get this done.” Now they have to co-create. Co-creation builds unity, and teams that build things together become more loyal and more forgiving of each other.
Same tasks. Same deadlines. Same people. One structural change, and you get team cohesion as a by-product instead of leaving it on the table.
Social proof
We follow the actions of others, especially when there are many of them, and they are similar to us. Around 98% of online shoppers say detailed reviews matter when deciding what to buy and where to buy it.
Reviews and testimonials are where almost everyone stops. Patrick’s point is that social proof has far more to offer, and the similarity dimension is where the leverage sits.
Say you are presenting to a company director who is a mature woman. You could show five testimonials from happy company directors of assorted ages and genders. That is social proof, and it works. Or you could go through your testimonial bank, pull the ones from other mature female directors, and present those. The principle is identical. The effect is not close.
Most professionals collect testimonials and never sort them. Sorting them by audience costs an afternoon and pays every time you present.
Authority
We follow people who know more than we do about the topic in question because, most of the time,, that is the right call,, and none of us can know everything.
The mistake here is almost universal. You want the other side to know your credentials, so you work them into the conversation yourself. Master’s degree, this university, twenty-eight staff, fifteen years in the field. What your audience hears, at a level below conscious thought, is that you are full of yourself. You lose authority and lose people’s liking at the same time.
The fix is to have someone else raise your credentials and have it happen before you speak. That is precisely what a master of ceremonies does at a conference. From your first sentence onward, your words carry the weight they deserve. Do it at the end instead; an organization will never get there, because the conversation ends with “we have enough.” We will come back to highlights.
Inside an organisation, the move is to start introducing colleagues properly, with the thoughtful detail that raises their expertise, when you bring them into a meeting or a client conversation. Reciprocity does the rest.
Consistency
We feel real internal pressure to stay true to what we have said and done before. We judge people harshly when they contradict themselves, and we do not want to be judged that way.
Patrick flagged this as the most misunderstood of the seven. People read Influence and conclude that consistency means they should be consistent. Send the newsletter every week. Follow up reliably. That is a good professional habit, and it is not what the principle says. Persuasion is never about you. Consistency is about your audience staying true to what they stated or did earlier.
At work, that gives you two practical moves. First, look for what the other party has already committed to publicly. A mission statement. A stated priority. Something they said in a previous meeting. Bringing that to the surface accurately makes alignment much easier. Second, and this is the ethical version, get people to tell you what matters to them before you propose anything. Then build a proposal that genuinely fits. Saying no to something that matches what you just said you wanted is hard, and it should be, because the fit is real.
Scarcity
We value what is rare, what is running out, and what is available only for a limited time. Loss of an opportunity moves us more than the prospect of an equivalent gain.
This is the most abused principle online, and the abuse is expensive. Patrick mentioned an Australian footwear brand fined by consumer authorities for showing a sale price next to an original price the product had never been sold at. That kind of thing surfaces eventually, and the reputational cost outlasts the campaign.
Genuine scarcity is different and useful to the buyer. Two rooms left at that rate is information that helps someone decide whether to book now or think it over. The principle has not weakened. What has changed is our caution in settings where we have been burned before.
Why fake scarcity stopped working on you
I told Patrick that countdown timers and low stock warnings have almost no effect on me now. He agreed with the observation and corrected the diagnosis. The principle is as strong as it ever was. What has shifted is trust in the channel.
Testimonials are a good illustration. A written testimonial is one of the easiest things in marketing to fabricate, so we read them cautiously. A full name raises credibility. A photo raises it further. Video raises it more, right up until you remember you can buy a video testimonial for ten dollars from someone who has never touched the product.
Which brings up the most counterintuitive number in the episode. Ask business owners what average review score they want, and almost everyone says five stars. Five stars is the wrong target. A perfect average lacks credibility because nobody is that good, and people assume you deleted the bad ones or bought the good ones.
The most persuasive average score sits between 4.2 and 4.7. High enough to signal quality, imperfect enough to be believed. Below 4.2, you keep the credibility but lose the confidence. So the three-star review that knocked you off 4.9 may have done you a favor.
I brought Patrick a case from Switzerland that runs in the same direction. Galaxus, the largest online retailer here, announced that it would only accept reviews from customers who had actually bought the product and deleted roughly 350,000 reviews that failed the test. Deleting your own social proof looks like a loss. What it bought them is legitimacy, and my trust in what remains went up rather than down.
What AI gets wrong about influence
Authority is moving. People increasingly treat AI as the source that knows more than they do, and the principle fires the same way it would with a human expert. Patrick’s caution is that these systems are built by companies, carry opinions, and are confidently wrong in ways that are hard to spot.
The sharper problem shows up when you ask AI to write something persuasive. It understands the science. It has no situational awareness. It does not know your history with this person, whether trust already exists, or what is actually blocking the decision.
That matters because the seven principles are not interchangeable. Patrick sorts them by the problem in front of you. Some principles build and repair relationships, which is where you start when there is no trust, because without a relationship, nothing else lands. Some reduce uncertainty, which is what you need when the relationship is fine, but the person keeps saying they want to think about it. Some create motivation to act, which is the situation where someone likes you, likes the offer, and still has not moved.
Ask a model to make your email more persuasive, and it will pick a principle without knowing which of those three problems you have. Often, it picks the wrong one, and sometimes it invents a supporting fact to make the copy work.
I would add one more caution. Today’s assistants are the strongest confirmation bias engine ever built. They agree with almost anything you propose and produce an articulate justification for it. Before you open a chat window, write confirmation bias on a sticky note and put it where you can see it. Ask the model to argue against you, not for you.
Persuasion is a productivity skill, not a sales skill
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 ranked persuasion as the third most urgent skill for businesses to develop. That ranking makes sense the moment you stop filing persuasion under sales.
Persuasion is about behavior, not transactions. Whether your team follows the safety procedure. Whether the project gets unblocked this week or next month. Whether your peer in another function returns your call. Almost everything that happens in a company happens because someone convinced someone.
In the 4 Productivity Vectors methodology, this sits across two vectors. Communication belongs to Effectiveness, and Cross Functional work belongs to Ownership. Both are places where capable people lose enormous amounts of time. A stalled decision is not a communication problem you can solve by sending a longer email. It is a persuasion problem, and it is costing you weeks.
Think about your last month. How many hours went into a proposal that stalled, a meeting that ended without a decision, a request you had to make four times? That time did not disappear into poor time management. It disappeared into an influence that failed. It is one of the quieter reasons strong performers get frustrated and leave. Nothing they push seems to move.
The same logic applies to saying no. If you can only decline by citing capacity, you sound defensive. If you can surface what the other person already said matters to them and honestly show that the request works against it, you protect your focus without damaging the relationship. Knowing who holds influence over what is half of that battle, which is why mapping your stakeholders is worth the hour it takes.
Start with the smallest change
If you take one thing from Patrick’s work, take the word because.
In a classic queue study, someone asked to cut in line at a photocopier. With a plain request, roughly 64% of people agreed. Adding a reason, because I am in a rush, took compliance to 94%. Then researchers kept the word and stripped the reason: because I need to make some copies. Everyone in that queue needed to make copies. It carried no information at all.
93% still agreed.
The word itself triggers the response. Patrick’s theory is that we learned it young, in every conversation with a parent that ended with “because.” Whatever the mechanism, it works, and it costs nothing to use. Give a reason when you ask for something, and give it with that word.
Then pick one more. Stop introducing yourself and arrange for someone else to do it. Sort your testimonials by who you are presenting to. Hand five tasks to five people as a group instead of one by one. None of these cost money. All of them change the numbers.
Patrick’s answer to the last question of the episode is the one to keep. The most ethical thing you can do as a persuader is not to lie, not to exaggerate, not to import things into the situation that were not naturally there, and never to persuade someone into something they would not come back for.
That is a working definition of professional integrity, and it happens to be the version that produces better results over any time horizon longer than a quarter.
Want to know which of the four vectors is costing you the most time right now? Take the free Productivity Assessment or work through the productivity quiz. Everything else lives in the Productivity Hub.
Listen to the full conversation with Patrick van der Burght on the ProductiviTree podcast. Patrick’s free persuasion guide and seven-day influence challenge are available at ethicalpersuasion.com.au, with no email address required, which is a small demonstration of the first principle on the list.