How can you get others to take action immediately?
It was two days before the monster storm, Hurricane Sandy, was supposed to hit the eastern United States. The storm was tracked to directly hit us (which it eventually did).
I went to the grocery store just to pick up a few things at 6:30 am. I was amazed at the large number of cars in the parking lot. Then it hit me that people were probably preparing for the storm.
Panic In The Store
The first thing I observed is that the grocery store is never this crowded at this early hour. You would have also thought that water, bread and milk were never going to be available again. Shopping carts were filled with cases of water. Shelves were empty. Flashlight batteries were sold out.
The same dynamic was occurring with generators in other stores – totally sold out!
The Power of Scarcity
Here’s the key operating principle: When something becomes less available, people desire it more.
The fear of not being able to get something (even if you don’t currently need it) will provoke someone to want it more and go get it – before it runs out.
This is the principle of scarcity. We see it used (many times manipulatively) in advertising. “Only 10 left!” “Order in the next 10 minutes and don’t pay shipping.”
These techniques get people off their rear ends to take action. So even though we don’t want to fabricate scarcity, we want to look for opportunities where scarcity exists and focus attention to it in influencing situations.
For example, let’s say your management is not reacting to the changing marketplace quickly enough. There is in reality a limited window of opportunity to upgrade products, put out a new marketing campaign, etc. before the competition leaves us in the dust.
You must bring this to your management’s attention in a way to convince them that if they don’t take action within a certain time frame, there will be a significant bottom line cost.
We’ll show you a technique to do this in the next blog posting.
But for now, identify situations where you need to get someone to take action or have more urgency. Then identify how you may bring attention to scarcity in that situation:
- What opportunities may be missed?
- What resources will run out?
- What’s the cost of not taking action?
A collaboration with David C Miller, Author of The Influential Actuary
I remember Hurricane Sandy!! It would be easier to write about that than to take a closer look at my business and answer your questions… but I will challenge myself to do that and see what comes up. Thank you!
Writing about Sandy could be interesting as well, Claudia!
Yes when they say a hurricane is coming on the East coast, even if it’s still in Africa, people tend to panic. Since I’m retired and don’t “work” I’m always doing things on a time frame. My biggest course of action is when I do my reorganizing and the cost of not taking action is just prolonging it and building up more clutter.
Until the clutter gets so bad that you can’t move without knocking something over! (I once worked with someone who had that problem in his office.)
You are so right, as a business owner, I don’t want to fabricate scarcity but need to identify it when it does exist and let my potential customers know. I have done this by acknowledging I can only work with a limited number of one-on-one clients and don’t want to fill my calendar with an excessive number of Clarity Burst sessions (20-minute coaching sessions). Letting people know the limits that exsist creates the scarcity.