Here’s the latest communiqué from Marty Neumeier in which he shares his thoughts about the process by which to obtain buy-in from those who are initially opposed or indifferent to the given proposition.

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Imagine being shown a map of the world, only upside down, and being told that this is how all maps will be displayed in the future. Even though you know it’s the same map you’ve seen a thousand times, it suddenly seems foreign. It feels wrong, like your first day in a new school.

It takes a bit of effort to accept the idea that Australia is “up over” instead of down under.

Now imagine being presented with an idea that’s guaranteed to turn your personal world upside down. It might be a radical new business initiative, a sweeping organizational change, or an unexpected job reassignment. Your first reaction might easily be resistance. You might cast around for logical arguments against it. You might even head for the door. The truth is, most people love change until it affects them. One of the tragedies of innovation is that a desire to help people is rarely matched by support from the very people you’re trying to help.

We’ve all seen what can happen when a new idea hits strong resistance: on-the-spot compromise. The presenter simply caves, hoping to salvage some part of the work. Yet discounting the integrity of an innovation is like buying a plane ticket halfway to Hawaii—you save some money, but you never arrive. A better strategy is to take your audience on the same creative journey you’ve already taken, but without all the detours and discomforts.

The Four Stages of Buy-in

A prerequisite for selling ideas to an organization is to understand what geneticist J.B.S. Haldane understood when he charted the “four stages of acceptance.” Whenever someone presents a game-changing idea, the first reaction of colleagues is to call it “worthless nonsense.” As it begins to slowly take hold, the same colleagues label it “interesting, but perverse.” Later, when the idea is all but proven, they concede that it’s “true, but unimportant.” Finally, after success is assured, it passes the acceptance threshold and colleagues are quick to brag: “I always said so.” This pattern is so common that you can almost use it as a test for promising ideas. Extreme resistance is a leading indicator of extreme success.

The next step is to condense the four stages into a shorter time span. If you can take your audience on the journey from “this is worthless nonsense” to “I always said so” in a few minutes or days instead of a few months or years, you’ll be able to keep the integrity of your idea and still launch it in a timely fashion.

The best way to condense the journey is with a story. The story can take the form of a fable, a comic strip, a children’s book, a series of flash cards, or any other narrative vehicle. The main thing is to keep it simple. Fact-laden PowerPoints will not win hearts and minds. Dr. Spencer Silver spent five fruitless years trying to persuade 3M of the value of his removable adhesive because he couldn’t tell a simple story about its potential uses, which included Post-it Notes. Today marketers and strategists routinely use Post-it Notes to organize their stories. If Dr. Silver had been a better storyteller, he could have used his own product to sell his product!

Note: The article was originally published in the Fall 2014 issue of PeerSphere, the journal of the CMO Council, page 20.

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Marty then shifts his attention to Visualizing the Given Change, Getting Across the Swamp, and Designing the Way Forward. To read the complete article, please click here.

He is a designer, writer, and business adviser whose mission is to bring the principles and processes of creativity to industry. His latest book, Metaskills, explores the five essential talents that will drive innovation in the 21st century. His previous series of “whiteboard” books includes The Designful Company, about the role of design in corporate innovation; Zag, named one of the “top hundred business books of all time” for its insights into radical differentiation; and The Brand Gap, considered by many the foundational text for modern brand-building. He has worked closely with innovators at Apple, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, HP, Adobe, Google, and Microsoft to advance their brands and cultures. Today he serves as Director of Transformation for Liquid Agency, and travels extensively as a workshop leader and speaker on the topics of innovation, brand, and design. Between trips, he and his wife spend their time in California and southwest France.