Influencing decision making is the basis of all Marketing and Sales. If there is an art to marketing, this section is it. Inception is the method of making someone think, feel or do something without telling them directly what to think, feel or do. It is giving them an idea without letting them know the idea came from you.

Inception is just an idea in a film, right? A plot device to support a nearly billon-dollar-creating piece of entertainment and art. You can’t actually do it, though? Not so. Inception is the art and science of getting someone or some people to create an idea of their own volition. The hard part is the last element – you’re trying to get someone to come up with an idea themselves. Our ideas our powerful.

The hardest part of communicating an idea is that everyone starts from a different place. There is no common grounding. The knowledge and experience of the communicator is different from the audience and the knowledge within audience differs from person to person. There is no standard of experience. Information is interpreted differently by everyone, and so the impact also differs from person to person. This is variance of baseline understanding is called the Context Gap.

Ideas resonate because they tap into core programming of the human brain. The centres of decision making are black box machines that through learning and experience take inputs, rapidly apply an emotional and logical algorithm and arrive at a conclusion. Stories – when they are simple, tangible, unexpected, and emotional – have the power to resonate near indefinitely.

If you’ve ever worked with a great leader you’ll know that they motivate the people around them to aspire to similar levels of greatness. They may provide clear directions, but they also make people want to follow those directions. They create clarity and a vision that resonates, and then they inspire a team to follow them to the ends of the earth to achieve the mission. People want to follow great leaders. They have to follow average leaders.