2.1 Plan your message
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. We recognise that they’re our own and we’re protective of them. Our ideas define us, and we recognise and reject when others try to place them within us. If you tell someone to do something, they know that it’s your idea, not theirs. They may push back and reject it. They may create new ideas about your motivation for the instruction and the interest you have in them following through on it.
“Okay, this is me, planting an idea in your mind. I say: don't think about elephants. What are you thinking about?”
“Elephants?”
“Right, but it's not your idea. The dreamer can always remember the genesis of the idea. True inspiration is impossible to fake.”
“No, it's not.”
No, it is not. These four lines from the film Inception articulate the problem with implanting an idea, but they also over-simplify what in reality inception happens every day. Every day communication results in new and different ideas forming in the mind of the audience that are not included in the original message. Many times, they’re called misunderstandings. How many times has someone informed you of a decision and you wrongly read into it? Or how many times have you tried to share some information, only for some people to take a completely different thing away from it? Have you ever had to inform a team that you’ve had to let one of them go due to poor performance only a week later to hear that the rest of the team are worrying that they’ll be next? Or have you ever promoted someone only for other team members to feel demoralised that they weren’t? And how many times have you quickly responded to an email only for some subtle nuance to be missed?
Clearly, while misunderstandings are an example of ideas being created, they’re not the intended vector. Inception is the practice of intentionally making someone think, feel or act a specific way, not the act of eliciting random sense of fear, uncertainty or doubt. But there is merit to recognising that inception does use emotion to drive action. The goal of inception is to make a person have an idea themselves. Telling a person to think something is an instruction. Great communication gets people to think for themselves. An idea that a person creates is a powerful thing – it’s personal, its connected to their self-identity and it defines their perspective on the world. Often in a business-to-business environment, it’s possible to forget that on the other side of the equation are real people. People driven by hopes, desires and fears. Business, by contrast, can be regarded functional, logical or transactional. In Inception the characters go through the same thought process.
“How do you translate a business strategy into an emotion?”
“That's what we're here to figure out, right? Now, Robert's relationship with his father is stressed, to say the least.”
“Well, can we run with that? We could suggest to him breaking up his father's company as a "screw-you" to the old man.”
“No, 'cause I think positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time. We all yearn for reconciliation, for catharsis. We need Robert Fischer to have a positive emotional reaction to all this.”
“Alright, we'll try this, umm... "My father accepts that I want to create for myself, not follow in his footsteps."
“That might work.”
Of course, in the film the route to implanting an idea is a visual spectacular. Marketing communications are far less likely to include mountain assaults, anti-gravity hotel sequences and train-based city chases, but they still require considered planning.
Say your goal is to set up a first meeting between a suspect and a sales representative. Your goal is to make them want to accept a meeting, so how could you tackle this? You know what the meeting could mean to you – future business – but what could a meeting mean for them? If they visualised success, what could it look like? It could look like a successful project. Or perhaps a promotion for some great work. Or it could look like being recognised as an industry leader and being invited to speak at events. It could look like making a bold decision that others wouldn’t and standing out from the peers. It could be partnering with an organisation that has similar values, treats people with the same level of high respect and cares for its employees. It could be feeling like they are building part of a positive legacy and being recognised for doing this. Or it could look be never exposing the organisation to risk, though it can be hard to visualise what that means for the individual. The key is to conceptualise what you want the audience to feel, and what you want them to do with that feeling.