How to convince leaders to try new ideas

Powerful people are conservative, but you can use this to your advantage

Everyone pretends to like new ideas, but in reality powerful people in organizations are often very conservative. They avoid changing anything. Why? They worked hard to accumulate their power and do not want to lose it. Change creates risk and most people do not like risk. This means whatever beliefs and habits (they believe) got them into power will be the ones they will rely on the most. Despite their talk about innovation and creativity, many bosses rarely try anything new.

The problem, as you have no doubt experienced, is that design is largely about change and proposing new ideas. This means designers are naturally at odds with the power structure in most organizations. And those powerful people are often not aware of this natural, and frustrating, relationship. Worse, designers are rarely taught to expect this situation, or know tactics for how to thrive in these environments without burning themselves out.

Here’s a quick guide for how to convince leaders of new ideas:

1. Have a great reputation. The best leverage you have with your boss or any leader is your performance. Do they know you to be reliable? Thoughtful? Proactive? Or inconsistent, distracted and passive? People judge ideas primarily on who they are coming from. It’s human nature to do this. If your ideas always get rejected it may have nothing to do with the quality of your ideas and more to do with how you are perceived.

2. Consider the problems leaders needs to solve. Don’t start with your problems or what things you want to try. Instead think about the world from the perspective of your boss. What are their goals? What are their frustrations in the organization? What keeps them up at night? What do they need to do to succeed? What achievements are they striving for? What will get them promoted? Remember that a good pitch is based on the catcher: study who you are trying to convince.

3. Anchor your pitch in their goals. Describe your idea in terms that will help your boss with their goals. Will it raise customer satisfaction? Increase profits? Will it save them budget? That’s the key message they need to hear. Do not focus on your feelings of brilliance or creativity, as much as you think that’s what matters, it mostly doesn’t.

4. Get support from respected coworkers. If your idea is good you should be able to get an influential coworker to support it. In some cases it might even be better if someone other than you makes the pitch to the boss, or does it with you. Allies matter: they improve how much time a leader feels they need to spend considering the idea.

5. Match the size of your suggestion to the quality of your reputation. If no one knows who you are, their trust level will be low. Before you pitch an idea, ask yourself how much trust do they have in me? If the size of your idea is greater than their level of trust, they will likely reject it for that reason, even if it is a great idea. Ideas demand change and change creates risk (which most bosses try to avoid).

6. Plan for a trial. Minimize their sense of risk by suggesting you try the new thing on a trial basis: a week or a month. Find the smallest unit of change that can prove the value of your idea. Also propose criteria for how to evaluate if the new thing was successful after the trial is over. Make it seem risk free to do the trial and that the boss has nothing to lose and only things to gain.

7. Make the pitch. Remember that most people in power respond differently to pitches when they are in front of a group vs. when they are by themselves. Find a situation that provides the best opportunity, based on when your boss is most responsive to suggestions (email? in your performance discussions? at coffee?) Define the problem (in terms the boss relates to), offer the solution, define the (trial) terms, and reference what other companies already participate. Observe how other people pitch your boss and what tactics work best (See: How To Pitch An Idea).

8. Work very hard to make the trial work. Your future reputation is on the line in the trial. If the trial goes well, and they agree to the change, you’ll be in higher standing for the next recommendation you make and convincing them again will be far easier. If you fail, and fail badly, it will be harder to earn their trust next time. Call in favors. Enlist your allies. Go all in. Do everything in your power to make sure that at minimum useful lessons are learned and shared so that future trials have higher odds of success.

In the end, it shouldn’t be that hard to convince a leader to try something that is a clear win and in their self-interest. The first time you convince a boss to try something new will be the hardest. Once you have a reputation for proposing good, useful ideas, powerful people will be more interested in what you have to say.

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This is a revised and edited version of the essay how to convince your boss