Book Excerpt October 8, 2010, 3:03PM EST

Excerpt: Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down

In an edited excerpt from their new book, John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead introduce a counterintuitive approach to turning skeptics into advocates for your new idea, plan, or proposal

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It's an age-old, human, and increasingly important problem: You believe in a good idea. You're convinced it is needed badly, and needed now. But you can't make it happen on your own. You need sufficient support in order to implement it and make things better. You or your allies present the plan. You present it well. Then, along with thoughtful issues being raised, come the confounding questions, inane comments, and verbal bullets. It matters not that the idea is needed, insightful, innovative, and logical. It matters not if the issues involved are extremely important to a business, an individual, or even a nation. The proposal is still shot down, or is accepted but without sufficient support, or slowly dies a sad death.

It doesn't have to be this way. In our new book, we offer a single method that can be unusually powerful in building strong support for a good idea. It is an approach that is rarely used or used well and that does not require blinding rhetorical skills or charismatic magic. The method has only a handful of interrelated elements, none of which is complicated. The five elements work together to achieve buy-in by capturing peoples' attention; then with people paying attention, winning over their minds; and with people paying attention, also winning over their hearts.

The most basic and counterintuitive of the elements is the first:

Don't scheme to keep potential opponents, even the sneakiest attackers, out of the discussion. Let them in. Let them shoot at you. Even encourage them to shoot at you!

It would seem logical, when you don't want an idea to be shot down, that you should try to keep the shooters away from the proposal while you are developing sufficient support to get it accepted and then used. With no idea killers around, there are no bullets, or very few, and sensible proposals are much more easily embraced and implemented.

People sometimes use this approach with a good degree of success. But we have observed an alternative that can be much more powerful. The approach turns the very problem of good ideas drawing attacks to your advantage. It does this by solving the single biggest challenge people face when they need to gain buy-in for a good idea: simply getting people's attention.

Without people's attention, you really won't have a chance to explain a hazard or an opportunity, along with your good, practical solution. Distracted people will ignore you. They won't listen carefully or long enough. They won't listen with an open mind. You won't have the chance to gain the emotional commitment that is at the core of true buy-in. And these problems caused by a lack of attention are commonplace, for a number of perfectly understandable reasons.

Think about it. Almost all of us are overwhelmed with literally thousands of communications vying for our attention. Messages from friends, bosses, family, and colleagues via e-mail and cell phone, TV, the Internet, newspapers, and magazines—they all combine to create an impossible information overload. As a result, most messages never make it with clarity into our minds or never make it successfully without distortion.

When people are paying attention, their minds become engaged. That's a crucial requirement for understanding an idea and for overcoming incorrect impressions. You can then use that attention to your advantage in gaining the intellectual and emotional commitment that is at the heart of real support.

Don't try to overcome attacks with tons of data; logic and yet more logic; or lists of reasons why unfair, uninformed, or sneaky attacks are wrong, wrong, wrong. Instead, do what might seem to be the opposite.

It seems obvious: if you have done your homework and someone is trying to shoot down your good idea, you should simply use all your knowledge and data to defuse the attack. So you go over the proposal again. You explain why it is a good proposal. You point out all the flaws in the attack. You offer all the evidence you can think of to support your assertions.