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Motivation and Manipulation
When people think about CIA and they think about foreign missions and they think about secret operations, they always think about the word manipulation. What CIA taught me is that manipulation is one side of a coin, and on the other side of the coin is the word motivation. They are made out of the same material. They carry the same weight. They carry the same value. But somehow we think people who manipulate us are bad guys, but people who motivate us are heroes. The truth is that the skills that go into both motivation and manipulation are almost the same skills. The same level of persuasion, the same level of influence, the same level of charisma and dynamic creative thinking drives us to both be manipulated and be motivated.
CIA understands that sometimes you need to lean more into motivating someone to take a certain action. Other times, you have to manipulate them to take a certain action. But the thing that you cannot compromise on is that you are pursuing a very specific outcome. Whether you have to motivate or manipulate to achieve that outcome, your loyalty first has to be to that outcome.
The RICE Method
One of the most powerful tools for assessment that CIA teaches us early on in our training is a method that we know as the RICE method. R I C E is actually an acronym that stands for four other words: reward, ideology, coercion, and ego. The RICE method will show you what actually motivates or drives a person to take the actions that they take. Someone who’s driven by reward is somebody who will take action based on the reward that they’re given. Maybe that reward is money. Maybe that reward is an opportunity. Maybe that reward is nothing more than a pat on the back or a high five.
Ideology means people take actions because of what they believe in. Maybe it’s what they were taught as a child. Maybe it’s what they believe in their religion. Maybe it’s what they believe is right of humanity. They make decisions based off of an ideology that was taught to them at some point in their life. C stands for coercion. Coercion is all the negative things in your life. This is when you make a decision because you’re ashamed, or when you make a decision because you’re scared, or when you make a decision because you’re afraid, or you make a decision because you’re embarrassed. Especially if somebody else is making you feel guilty, making you feel scared, or making you feel humiliated.
E, the fourth motivator, is ego. And ego is the most often mistaken of the four motivators because people mistake the word ego with egotistical. Egotistical means that you believe you are the most important thing in the world. Where ego is simply the way you choose to look for the rest of the world. Everybody has an ego. Even Mother Teresa had an ego. She wanted to appear sacrificing. She wanted to appear humble. She wanted to appear noble. Ego is not good or bad. Egotistical is a vulnerability.
When you understand the RICE method and you understand that all people break down into these four different types of motivators, even if you just sit back and listen to them while they talk to another group of people, you will quickly start to see the indicators of whether they are reward motivated, ideology motivated, ego motivated, or if they can be motivated through coercion.
Rapport
Many people think rapport is just having somebody who thinks well of you, or having a good positive relationship or even having friendly banter. The truth is rapport is a very practical tool. In fact, we at CIA call it social capital because rapport is not really about having a positive relationship, it’s about having a currency that denotes leverage in a relationship. That’s much more like capital than it is like good faith or goodwill.
When you truly invest in rapport, or what we call social capital, what that means is that you are investing your time and energy and attention into somebody because you fully expect to call back and leverage the positive attention and relationship that you’ve built. You’re being nice today so that you can get what you want tomorrow. You’re being assertive today because you want to set a tone for when you call in a favor later on. Rapport is important. Yes. But rapport doesn’t mean that it’s all goodwill. You’re building a sense of leverage. You’re building an actual measurable currency, a social capital that you can use to call in leverage in the future to get what you want.