Let them score the points

The story

Heinrichs spent twenty-five years as a journalist and publishing executive before he gave it up to teach persuasion. The turn came, by his own account, in a dim corner of the Dartmouth College library, where he found a volume of the lectures on rhetoric that John Quincy Adams gave to Harvard undergraduates between 1805 and 1809, while he was also serving as a United States senator. Rhetoric, the Greek and Roman art of persuasion, had been a core subject for two thousand years and had then quietly dropped out of the curriculum. Heinrichs set out to bring it back as a set of practical moves.

The move that matters most is the first one. Heinrichs draws a line between a fight and an argument. A fight is about defeating the other person. An argument, done properly, is about getting people to want what you want. In his words: “You fight to win; you argue to achieve agreement.” Most of us never make the distinction. We walk into a meeting and defend our position point by point as though a referee were keeping score, and we leave having scored well and changed nothing.

So before any argument, Heinrichs asks one question: what do I want at the end of this? Do I want to change their mood, change their mind, or get them to act? He borrows that order from Cicero, and the steps get harder as you go. A good speech can lift a room’s mood in a minute. Shifting an opinion takes more. Getting someone to actually do something takes more still, which is why so many meetings end in agreement and nothing happens afterwards.

Once you know what you want, the rest follows. The person across the table has almost certainly never read any rhetoric. He thinks the point of the argument is to make you admit you were wrong. Heinrichs says to use that. Does he want to score points? Let him. Concede anything that does not damage your case. A colleague says “that will never work” and you answer “maybe not, so let’s tweak it”, and now the conversation is about improving your idea as if the room had already accepted it. That is a concession doing the work of a counterattack.

The other practical tool is tense. Aristotle sorted every argument into three kinds by the time they live in. Arguments about the past are about blame. Arguments about the present are about values, about the kind of people we are. Arguments about the future are about choice. Only the third kind produces a decision. When a conversation gets stuck, it has usually slipped into the past tense, into who did what, and the fix is to drag it back to the future: given where we are, what do we do now?