Oh, NOW You Believe Me!

Why does advice suddenly carry more weight when it comes from someone else? Nancy considers feeling unheard, listening at work and the latest authority in the room: AI.

There are few things more irritating than hearing your own words come back to you from someone else.

Actually, let me amend that. There are few things more irritating than watching someone suddenly embrace an idea you already gave them, because now they’ve heard it from somebody else.

This has been happening to me with alarming regularity.

I’ll say something…like make a suggestion, offer an observation or advice that’s been asked for. It is received politely. Perhaps there’s a nod. Maybe even an “interesting,” and then we move on.

Then, sometime later, that same person comes back to me, newly enlightened.

“I know you’ve told me this before, but I was talking to so-and-so and they said…”

Oh, well then…that changes everything!

Sometimes it’s a colleague. Sometimes a friend. Sometimes an expert. Now it might even be ChatGPT, Claude or…well, you get where I’m going with this.

Apparently, I don’t just need to have an opinion. I need references.

And apparently, organizations have the same problem.

How many times has a company brought in outside consultants, only to have them tell management what the people who work there have been saying for years?

The consultants conduct interviews, hold meetings, analyze the findings and produce an impressive presentation, complete with charts, graphs and recommendations.

And what do they recommend?

Pretty much what the team has been saying all along. Except now it’s a strategic initiative. For employees, that can be more than irritating. It can leave them wondering whether their ideas matter, or whether they simply need someone else to deliver them.

And because it comes from someone with an impressive title, a PowerPoint presentation and an equally impressive invoice, suddenly everybody’s paying attention.

I say this as someone who has been a consultant myself. Sometimes an outside perspective really is invaluable. But sometimes the greatest value a consultant brings is getting management to listen to the people they should have been listening to in the first place.

Because that’s really what drives me crazy about this. The problem isn’t that you didn’t hear me. You heard me perfectly well. It just somehow took hearing essentially the same thing from someone else for it to really register.

Although there’s an inconvenient wrinkle in all this righteous indignation.

I used to do the same thing.

Many years ago, my then-shrink pointed it out to me. She would tell me something, I would acknowledge it, kinda sorta, and then I’d hear the same thing from someone else and suddenly it had merit.

Yikes!

Once you see yourself doing something that annoying, it becomes considerably harder to keep doing it. So I made a conscious effort to stop. And maybe that’s partly why it irritates me so much now. I know exactly what it feels like from both sides.

You know, it isn’t really about being right. It’s about that strange human tendency to hear something differently depending on who says it.

There’s something subtly diminishing about watching an idea that barely registered the first time suddenly acquire weight the second or third time around. Another person. An expert. A friend of a friend. A complete stranger who happened to say exactly what you said three days ago.

And now, increasingly, AI.

Which, when you think about it, is really just the latest addition to a very old human habit of giving the same idea more weight once it comes from somebody (or something) else.

Maybe we’re more inclined to listen to the unfamiliar voice. Maybe familiarity somehow diminishes authority. Or maybe we humans just like a second opinion.

And a third. And apparently, in my case, occasionally a quorum.

So the next time someone tells me, “You know, you were right. I just heard the same thing from XYZ,” I’m going to try very hard to focus on the important part: they finally heard me!

But I can’t promise I won’t be thinking…

“Oh, NOW you believe me!”

And that’s the “G”-rated version!