The minds in your business, starting with your own.

• LO1.1Identify a trigger in your own week and name what it stands in for.
• LO1.2Explain why a shortcut fails when the trigger arrives without the substance, even with nobody faking anything.
• LO1.3Check the seat matrix before carrying an idea from one seat to another.

Core content

Click, whirr. Robert Cialdini, in Influence, argues that a working life holds more decisions than anyone can think through, so you take one feature of a situation as a sample of the whole and act on it. This course calls the pre-set response a shortcut and the feature that sets it off a trigger. Many triggers are proxies, things that stand in for what you actually care about: a title for expertise, a balance for solvency, a smile for a promise. Most shortcuts pay. One stays a good bargain until the trigger turns up without the thing it normally signals.

A worked example. The businesses in this course and their town, Port Cardew, are invented, and the figures are illustrative, so a story shows an idea at work and proves nothing. Nadia runs a pool service. One Monday in a wet summer she opens her banking app, sees A$31,000 and breathes out. The balance is real. So is A$170,100 of visits her customers have paid for and not yet received. For years a healthy balance had meant a healthy business, and then her own annual plan cut the link. Nobody faked anything. Expect your own proxies to come apart unaided.

Humans and Econs. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, in Nudge, set the error-free Econ of standard economics against the rest of us, the Humans. Loss aversion means a loss weighs on you roughly twice as heavily as the same gain lifts you. Anchoring means an early figure tugs your estimate its way, even when you know it is arbitrary. Framing means wording changes how a fact lands: 90 of 100 survive and 10 of 100 die are one statistic and two reactions. Your ordinary shortcuts deserve least trust in choices that are hard, rarely made and slow to report back, such as a second site, a prepaid plan or a lease.

Planner, doer and habit. On Sunday night you decide to ring your three slowest payers first thing on Monday. By nine on Monday the phone is going and the calls can wait. Thaler and Sunstein would say the planner set the intention in a cool state and the doer met it in a hot one, so where a decision matters, move it to the cooler hour. Older and duller is the habit loop of cue, routine and reward. Tony's fruit display stands full by seven and the cost reaches the bin days later, so the loop never hears about it.

Four seats. A seat is one of four positions a mind occupies: owner, customer, counterparty (whoever sits across a deal from you) and team. Robert Greene's rule is that each trait he describes is yours first and other people's second. Others run the same machine, yet a finding about customers is no finding about staff. So the series keeps a seat matrix, marking each mechanism for each seat as Sourced, Inferred, Analogy or None. Loss aversion is sourced for customers and counterparties and marked None for team. That does not mean the effect is absent. It means no source reaches that seat, so leave it alone, or you are guessing with other people's pay. The matrix is the series' own untested reading, so treat it as a fence.

How sure can anyone be? Three labels run through this course. Well supported means a large replicated literature, plain arithmetic or reasoning that needs no study. Mixed means the direction holds while the size or reach is in doubt. Anecdotal or weak means experience or argument nobody has checked. Cue and reward is well supported in individuals, and so is the claim that people decide by shortcuts, largely in lab volunteers, though a technique built on it must earn its own support. How hard any one trigger pushes is mixed, and so is planner and doer. You as the first target is anecdotal or weak. The labels rest largely on the editorial judgement of the AIEIO Library, whose notes this series is built on, and no source tested any of this in a small business.

What to do with it. Catch comfort that arrives before any checking, then name what it stands in for. Behind a balance, check what you owe against it. Behind a title, check expertise in what, exactly. Behind a smile, check for a date and a name. Let cheap, reversible calls ride. Six questions recur, each the series' own tool and anecdotal or weak at best: (1) Repeat and exit, (2) Truth, (3) Margin and cash, (4) Who decides, (5) Control and (6) Cost of being wrong. Later modules state each one where it is used.

Where it stops working

This vocabulary fits anything after the fact. Ros, who ran a near-identical pool service up the coast, went under that wet year through illness and the loss of one strata contract, with no error behind it, and a neat account of her shortcuts would be easy to write and false. Use these words in advance, as a prompt to check, and refuse them as an explanation of what has already happened. Naming a shortcut does not switch it off either. Psychology also comes second to the sums: about 45 per cent of Helen's revenue sits with one customer, and reading that customer perfectly would not change that. Every module here ends at the point where an insight turns into manipulation or blame. Once you know a trigger you can supply it, and Cialdini calls importing one the situation does not contain smuggling. Telling a partner he is anchored only wins an argument, because nothing here licenses diagnosing anyone, so keep these words for your own mirror. This is general information, not psychological or medical advice.

• LO2.1Explain how a weak finding gains authority as it passes from study to storyteller to retelling.
• LO2.2Sort a claim into use, test or do not cite, and say who was studied.
• LO2.3Separate a piece of advice from its number, and size the bet by the cost of being wrong.

Core content

Why you repeated it. Some time this year you probably told someone that a habit takes 21 days, or that only 7 per cent of a message is the words. A neat figure reached you from someone who sounded informed, and repeating it made you sound informed too. You cannot read a whole research field, so you let a number stand in for one, which is the proxy shortcut aimed at knowledge. How often you have heard a claim tells you how well it travels, so give that no weight as evidence.

How a weak finding travels. Nobody has to lie. Robert Cialdini's Influence leans almost wholly on experiments from the 1960s to the 1980s, when samples were small, analysis was flexible and publication was strongly biased. You can find all three in your own shop: three days of a new ad, counting enquiries and then bookings until one flatters it, and telling friends about the ad that worked and not the four that did not. Replication means other researchers rerun a study to see whether the result comes back, and social psychology has spent a decade watching results fail that test. A 2022 study set academic nudge experiments beside every trial run by the two biggest nudge units in the US government, and the real effects came in several times smaller. Then a storyteller sets the language and retellers drop the caveat.

Three numbers. 7-38-55 says a message is 7 per cent words, 38 per cent tone and 55 per cent body language. Albert Mehrabian's laboratory studies looked at how people read a speaker's feelings when words and delivery pulled opposite ways, and he has objected in public to stretching it further. What survives is modest: when words and tone disagree, believe the tone. The 21 days began as a plastic surgeon's clinical impression in 1960. The best available study, by Lally and colleagues in 2009, found a median closer to 66 days and a range from about 18 to over 250. James Clear's 1 per cent a day for 37 times better was offered as a metaphor and measures nothing. In all three, the person closest to the number was more careful than the people repeating it.

The ledger. A replication ledger is a graded list of what business people quote from psychology and what happened when others checked. Holds up, so use includes defaults (pension members went from roughly half to roughly 90 per cent participation), removing sludge (friction that stops people reaching what is good for them), reminders, plans with a time and a place, and loss aversion. Across these sources, the better the evidence, the duller the idea, though the same editors graded everything. Smaller than claimed, so test includes field nudges, reciprocation, scarcity, commitment, social proof, anchoring and setback beliefs. Treat each as a bet on a small effect in a named group, and run a one-change test: alter one thing for a period set in advance, and measure against a number set in advance.

Do not cite. The third column retires those three numbers, willpower depletion, the mindless-eating research, the claim that self-esteem drives performance, and Stanley Milgram's obedience study and the Kitty Genovese witnesses as usually told. Something narrower survives those two, in lab volunteers. Growth mindset shows a live dispute. In about 12,000 students, one hour online gave lower achievers in supportive schools about a tenth of a grade point, and a 2023 re-analysis found the average not reliably different from zero. No staff were studied, so the claim that mindset training lifts staff performance is retired.

A worked example. A consultant tells Elena, who runs a music school, that her roster change will bed in within 21 days and that, since 93 per cent of communication is tone and body language, she should deliver it on her feet with him coaching. Her friend Helen knocks out both numbers over breakfast. That says nothing against the advice, because telling her teachers in person may be exactly right. So separate the advice from its number, then size the bet with question 6, Cost of being wrong: how cheaply can you be wrong, how fast will you find out, and who pays if you are? Talking to her senior teacher costs an afternoon and needs no proof. Paying for coaching on two dead numbers is a bigger bet.

Your own habit. The moment a figure makes you think "I knew it", ask who measured it and who was studied. A step from pension members or children to your counter can be worth taking, as long as someone says it is a transfer. Keep the hedge when you pass a claim on, because you are a link now.

Where it stops working

The ledger grades claims, and deciding what to do on a wet Monday stays with you. It is a snapshot of one reading, and rows will move. The people who drew it publish this series, and by the series' own definition this free course is a lead magnet, so apply The Seller's Higher Bar here: anyone with something to sell owes you more proof. No row was tested in a small business. Anecdotal or weak means only that nobody has looked, and a retired claim does not prove its opposite: that willpower depletion failed does not show self-control is limitless. A good story is no evidence either, including the stories in this course. The ledger goes bad in two ways. One is knowing a claim is dead and using it anyway, because "studies show" borrows authority the situation does not contain. The other is using it to win a point, or to wave away a change you dislike, so run it on your own claims first and raise other people's in private.

• LO3.1Diagnose a slipped job as will, room or belief, and work in the order room, plan, belief.
• LO3.2Recognise a finished sum and an unfinished action as a sign to look at the picture you hold of yourself.
• LO3.3Check who controls someone's time, room and company before using a habit tool on them.

Core content

Three explanations. This module opens the owner seat, where the material is self-help and clinical observation with a few tested cores. When a job keeps slipping, three explanations deserve your time. Will says you lack the force to carry the plan out. Room says the setting is working against you. Belief says something you hold about yourself is doing the steering. Each leads to a different fix, and it is easy to spend years on the first. Will is more comfortable than it looks, because it says nothing has to change except your mood on some future Thursday.

Room, with a worked example. The paperwork for Nadia's business activity statement sat in a tub on her kitchen floor for five weeks. Wendy Wood's work says habits attach to settings, and a table used for dinner and the books sends a mixed signal. James Clear's law of least effort says you tend to take the easiest path, so count the resistance. Nadia had to find the laptop, clear the table, remember the login, decide where the receipts belonged and pick up the first one. Peter Gollwitzer's implementation intention is a plan naming what you will do, when and where. She moved the tub under the parts counter with a laptop used for nothing else, and booked Thursday at 4pm. Three Thursdays later it was empty. She made both changes at once, so she could not tell you which one worked.

The ruling. Plans with a time and a place are well supported, and the usual figure, roughly double the follow-through, is a round one. Habit, context and friction are well supported, in individuals. Willpower depletion, the science once attached to will, is retired. Avoiding temptation in place of resisting it is mixed, and so are setback beliefs, which come from children. Maxwell Maltz's law of reversed effort, that straining against a belief feeds it, is anecdotal or weak. So is acting before you feel like it, whose evidence belongs to the treatment of depression. The series rules, as its own untested judgement: change the room if you control it, then plan, then look at belief. Moving a tub is cheap and you know within weeks. Work on a belief is slow and may never report back. Rehearsal is well supported for motor skills only, so rehearse only specific conduct, and on the day you do not feel like it, do 10 bad minutes.

The picture. The rest of this module stands on thinner ground, because it is argument and no research connects it to owners. Maltz, a plastic surgeon, saw a few patients leave with a repaired face and the old sense of being unwanted, and he named that settled idea of who you are the self-image. This course calls it the picture. It sits in you as plain fact, like your height, so a friend's good argument gets nowhere. What survives is smaller than his claims: much of your conduct runs inside a picture nobody has examined, and it can be revised, slowly. His claim that nobody can go on performing above their self-image comes with one undetailed story, a salesman who could never earn past a certain sum, and it proves no ceiling in you. All of this is anecdotal or weak.

The number that frightens you. A first service cost Nadia A$70 to deliver. She circled A$149 in her notebook, the phone rang, and she heard herself say A$99, leaving A$29. Nobody had argued. The signal is a finished sum and an unfinished action, such as the quote you keep rewriting, so ask what doing it would say about you. Maltz argues that the shy person lacks spare attention, so when you say the number, put your attention on the pool and leave your own voice unsupervised. Clear says build the identity through small votes. Mark Manson, in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, says loosen it with a plain description that stays accurate after a bad year. The series calls that an open verdict: nobody has tested which is right for an owner, and either route is cheap.

What the work is for. Saying you want money and freedom reveals almost nothing, since those wants cost nothing to hold. Manson's struggle question asks what specific unpleasantness you will accept, year after year. His values test asks whether a value is grounded in reality, good for other people and within your control right now. Being liked by everybody fails it, and that value was sitting inside Nadia's A$99. Robert Greene adds that a purpose filters opportunities, yet a filter never shows you what it cost. These are anecdotal or weak too, and cheap to try.

Where it stops working

Nearly every habit tool rests on the control assumption, that you control your time, your room and your company. Question 5, Control, asks who controls those three, and predicts that discipline tools work on people who set their own hours and fail on people who do not. Nadia told her technician Kev he needed a system, then saw he was meant to do his reports in a ute, in the rain, on a route she had drawn up with no gaps. So before judging anyone, run the person or room check: did the setting, tools or management cause this? It has a limit too, because when tools, hours and training are fixed and the same person fails the same way, the room was not the answer. The picture explains far less than its promoters claim. Shortage of money, sickness and bad luck sit outside it, and "your results reflect what you believe about yourself" is where it turns into blame. Expect a finished job from these tools and nothing more. This is not treatment: it is general information, not psychological or medical advice, and no tool here treats depression, anxiety or trauma. If you are struggling, if most things have gone flat or heavy, or dread about money has begun to run your days, see a qualified professional such as your GP or a psychologist.

• LO4.1Separate fault from responsibility, and apply the responsibility asymmetry to a real setback.
• LO4.2Judge what a result can know at its sample and date, keeping luck in the account.
• LO4.3Use the emotional gap to hold back a decision made in heat.

Core content

Two misreadings. A bad result gets read as a verdict on you, and a good one as proof of you. Both lift a number out of a messy world and file it under your name. After two strong years Elena's sentence was that she knew how to do this. After her second site closed, with enrolments sliding from about 220 towards about 170, it was that she had no business running anything. The first sentence hired a hall. The second helped hurry a roster cut she botched.

When it goes badly. Carol Dweck, in Mindset, set children puzzles too hard to solve. Some blamed their cleverness and quit, others grew interested, and what split them was their beliefs about ability, which can differ from one domain to the next. That core observation has replicated in children and its wider link to achievement is weak, so the label is mixed and the step to adult owners is an analogy. Read a bad result as a fact about the task first, and make it earn any promotion to a fact about you. Leave behind any promise that a change of belief will change your results.

The responsibility asymmetry. Mark Manson, in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, pulls two questions apart. Fault concerns the past and who caused this. Responsibility concerns the present and who acts now. The rain at Nadia's was nobody's fault, and the Monday after it was still hers to run. As a rule for your own next move this is mixed, with a stated basis in clinical work on locus of control and no study named. It has a bad twin: use it to explain someone else's life, and luck, illness, poverty and markets drop out of the story. So the series rules, as its own untested judgement: apply responsibility to yourself and structure to everyone else. Ask "what do I do now?" of your own next move, and "what about the setting caused this?" when you judge anyone else.

When it goes well or slowly. Robert Greene says a win lifts your opinion of yourself where you cannot see it. That is anecdotal or weak, from lives he chose. Any check you run uses the judgement that was lifted, so name one outside person in a quiet month, with no stake in your next move. Small early numbers fool you too. That a few tries settle little is well supported, as reasoning. Owners tend to quit early where the cost is visible and stay late where it is not, and from the inside, patience and denial look identical. The defence is a leading check, a small sign due by a stated date, written down before you need it. Reading lag this way is the series' own idea, anecdotal or weak.

Same method, worse luck. Ros ran an almost identical pool service, was ill through the worst of the season, lost one strata contract and went under, with no error anyone could point to. Nadia, with a serious mistake on her record, was still trading. A rep told Nadia she got through because she ran a tighter ship, and that comforting story is the bad twin at work. Luck is a real line in the accounts of any business, so ask who did what you did and got something else, and grade the decision and the result on separate sheets.

Heat. From the inside, heat feels like clear thinking. Late one night, owing A$170,100 in visits against A$31,000 in the bank, Nadia wrote an email rerunning her offer with a sharper price and a closing date on Friday. A storm cut the power before it went, and by daylight she deleted it. Greene's plain response, which this series calls the emotional gap, is to spot the feeling, wait out its peak and trace its cause. You are after a few minutes or a night, and calm can look after itself. Treat a plan that must go out tonight as the sign to wait.

What heat does to the aim. Under threat, Maxwell Maltz says, most people stop wanting to win and start wanting not to lose. Greene adds that pressure shortens how far ahead you can see, and Nadia's horizon went from a year to Friday. Wanting narrows you as well: money paid ahead for work not yet done is a debt, which is well supported as arithmetic, and relief is a poor bookkeeper. A sudden certainty about a partner may be old material, an old feeling taken for news about today, so ask them something before you act. These mechanisms are all anecdotal or weak, with no study cited. A night's wait is cheap, so start there.

Where it stops working

Sometimes the verdict is right. Reading a bad result as information has to include the information that you may be bad at this, and reading failure kindly can become a way of never hearing no. The biggest decisions are the hardest to read, because nobody opens enough second sites to reach a sample. The gap changes what you do next and leaves the balance where it was, and a gap of three weeks is denial with better manners. Keep all of this for yourself: explaining a failed business by its owner's composure, or telling a partner his view of you is old material, is blame with a new vocabulary. This is not treatment: it is general information, not psychological or medical advice, and nothing here treats depression, anxiety or trauma. If you are struggling, if the feeling does not lift when the bank does, if you dread the ordinary parts of the day, or if you are leaning on drink or anything else to get through, see a qualified professional such as a GP or a psychologist, and go early. If you have started to think the people around you would be better off without you, or you are thinking about harming yourself, treat that as an emergency and contact emergency services or a crisis line today.

• LO5.1List the proxies a stranger meets and say what each one stands for.
• LO5.2Distinguish a free item as evidence from a free item as a debt.
• LO5.3Apply the buyer's three questions when you are the stranger.

Core content

The customer seat. This module opens the seat with the best science in the course. Most of it is experimental work from the 1960s to the 1980s, on small samples of mostly Western, educated volunteers, and when the field looked again its effects generally came back smaller. Trust a direction and no particular size. A stranger cannot judge substance, so they judge proxies. A mother new in town, choosing a first music teacher, cannot tell a good one from a poor one, and teaching is what A$240 a term would buy.

The free hour does two jobs. Every school's claims cost the same to make, so from her side they are worthless. Alex Hormozi argues in $100M Leads that the free item is all a stranger has to go on. As evidence, it asks only to be judged, and it survives being seen through. Its second job is reciprocation, the felt debt that follows a gift. In an experiment by Dennis Regan, people handed a soft drink they had not asked for went on to buy substantially more raffle tickets from the stranger who paid for it. Once a person decides the gift was a sales device, the debt falls away. Reciprocation is mixed, with the best record here as a principle and its size uncertain. Take away any sense of owing from your free item and ask what it still proves. If the answer is nothing, expect it to fail on the first buyer who sees it as a device.

People like us, and badges. Social proof means taking other people's apparent view as your guide. It pulls hardest when a situation is unclear and the others seem like us, which is why one tired father at a school gate can stand up to rows of stars. The effect is real, and messages about what most people do mostly fall short of their published size, so the label is mixed. Liking and the symbols of authority are mixed too. A teacher who remembers a boy's name, or a matching shirt, says nothing about teaching, and both go home with the mother. A credential you really hold is simply helpful to state. Elena spent years as a secondary music teacher and her page never said so.

What the price is measured against. A bare price has nothing to stand against. Robert Cialdini's contrast principle says we size up a quantity against whatever we met just before it, and Hormozi's stack lists each component with its own value. Both are sales-floor practice, anecdotal or weak, while anchoring is mixed. Ten lessons at A$24 in a class of four is the same A$240 with something to stand against, and a stack of real values is only clear pricing. In Ellen Langer's photocopier experiment, a reason that said nothing did about as well as a real one. That is one experiment in one queue, anecdotal or weak, and it suggests a stranger will rarely check your reasons, so the checking falls to you.

A worked example. The mother rang two schools. The franchise rang back within the hour. Elena, shut in a soundproofed room with four children, rang back the following evening, and the mother chose the franchise. That silence said Elena did not much care, which was false. So proxies can be wrong in two directions. Some flatter you, and others sell you short, which on this series' reading is the commoner fault in an honest firm: the hidden qualification, the bare price, the slow call-back. Elena began telling callers when she taught and when she would ring. Nobody can say whether it won a single family, and it cost almost nothing. Ask of each thing a stranger meets first whether what it stands for is true today.

When you are the stranger. You will often sit in that chair, in front of software, consultants and courses like this one. The Seller's Higher Bar says a product pressed on you by the person who sells it, on evidence that person chose, owes you more proof. Three questions travel well. Does this person really know this field? What do they gain if you believe them, and how far should that discount what they say? Have you been shown a mechanism or a result? A vendor's slide on why a family will not break a practice streak is a mechanism. A family that stayed is a result. This bar and its companion, Boring Basics First, which says to check the free explanation before paying for the clever one, are anecdotal or weak.

Where it stops working

Every proxy here can bring a stranger to the door and none improves what they find there, because once a family has had a term, the substance is in front of it. Proxies wear out as well: the photo water report that set Nadia apart in Year 1 was arriving from rivals by Year 6. The idea thins at both ends. A stranger at Tony's can squeeze the fruit, and Helen's buyers work to a tender and a budget, where nobody is won by a shirt. Use this for one person deciding on work they cannot inspect. Any trigger can also be supplied with nothing behind it, which Cialdini calls smuggling: an invented credential, coins dropped in your own tip jar, a printed sign made to look hand-lettered. As general information, under Australian law a was/now or comparison figure that was never genuine is a false representation about price, and invented stack values are legal exposure. When a stranger goes elsewhere, resist calling them shallow, because they used the only evidence they had. Look first at what you showed them.

• LO6.1Distinguish the fear of missing out from the fear of being wrong at the moment of yes.
• LO6.2Settle a sales tactic by applying Truth, Repeat and exit, and Who decides, in that order.
• LO6.3Decide whether an offer made after a yes protects the purchase or reopens the decision.

Core content

Two fears. A customer who leaves ruins an afternoon, and one who signs pleases you until about lunchtime. A loss feels roughly twice as big as a gain of the same size. Loss aversion is well supported as a body of research traced to Kahneman and Tversky, and "roughly twice" is a round figure about people in general. From the customer seat, the moment of yes is rarely someone leaning towards something good. It is someone weighing two losses: missing out, where the place goes to someone else, and being wrong, where the money is gone. Much closing advice works on the first. An honest business can do the most about the second.

Lowering the fear of being wrong. The money moves today and the answer arrives later. A homeowner ringing Nadia about a green pool wants clear water. She also wants not to be the person who paid A$99 to a stranger and lost a day waiting, which is the fear Nadia answered when she dropped vague arrival windows. A guarantee shifts some of the risk to the seller, who is better placed to judge whether the product does its job. That shift is risk reversal. It is mixed, resting on marketing literature and commercial experience with no figure and no named study. Before your next quote, write down what this buyer stands to lose by saying yes, and what you could honestly move onto your own side.

Scarcity and urgency. Robert Cialdini, in Influence, gives two reasons scarcity works. Things that are hard to get are usually worth more, and people react badly to losing a freedom they thought was theirs, which he calls reactance. A limit that has just arrived bites harder than one that was always there, and visible rivals push the feeling towards frenzy. Urgency works on time where scarcity works on quantity. Scarcity is mixed: it is well replicated as a principle, so expect the direction, and size is the open question.

What holds a yes. A stand, once taken, pushes us to behave in keeping with it. Four features make a commitment hold: the person did something, others saw it, it took some effort, and they chose it themselves. The fourth matters most here. By analogy, pressure may get you the yes, but it also supplies the reason for it, and when that reason lifts, nothing of the buyer's own holds the decision up. Commitment and consistency is mixed, with the direction holding and the size uncertain, and the step from old lawn-sign experiments to a booked service is a transfer.

The ruling, with a worked example. Alex Hormozi hands the scarcity lever to the seller. Cialdini describes it from the target's side, calls the false version smuggling, and holds that a true limit, stated, is simply information. The series' ruling, its own unmeasured judgement, runs in order. Question 2, Truth: does the trigger match something real, and would you say aloud what you are doing? If not, stop, because nothing further can rescue it. Question 1, Repeat and exit: will you deal with them again, can they leave, and will others hear about it? Where all three answers are yes, state the real limit as information and leave it alone. Question 4, Who decides: one motivated person on a short cycle, or a committee on an annual budget? With a committee, drop the pressure even when the deadline is true. Elena pasted "only a few places left" from an old enrolment email when Saturday had room, so Truth ended the matter. She listed which classes had places, and the term still came in thin. The series predicts that a discovered mismatch costs more than the sale where the relationship continues, and it does not claim every mismatch is discovered.

Whose loss, and after the yes. When you feel the urge to add urgency, check whose loss is speaking, because Elena's fear started in her own chest. Separate effort the buyer chooses and that serves them, such as sitting in on a trial class, from effort you impose, such as posting a form. After a yes, Hormozi says a person is readiest to buy again, and Mark McCormack says stop talking, because more talk reopens the decision. The series rules that you never reopen the decision already made, and that a new offer belongs in that moment only if it makes that purchase work better. Nadia's A$149 pump and filter check qualifies, because clean water on failing gear does not stay clean. These rulings are untested, and upsell timing is anecdotal or weak.

Where it stops working

All of this works best with one motivated buyer, a short cycle and a decent margin, and the sources' proof comes mostly from such businesses. A guarantee means nothing to Ruth's strata committee, which meets when it meets, and the loss Ruth guards against is being the manager who recommended the wrong supplier. Helen put a closing deadline on a quote to a procurement officer, who took it as an insult. Tony's customers decide in four seconds, and the risk on a peach is a peach. These mechanisms can raise the number of buyers and the price they pay, and none improves what those buyers get. The harder cases are the true ones. A real deadline timed to land on a tired parent late on a Friday may pass on the fact and fail on saying aloud what you are doing. In a one-off sale to a stranger who will never talk, a smuggled trigger may simply pay, though effective is not the same as acceptable. As general information, claiming limited stock when it is not, or running a resetting countdown, is misleading or deceptive conduct under the Australian Consumer Law. A buyer who hesitates is running a sensible shortcut, and treating that as a weakness to be worked on is contempt.

• LO7.1Interpret customer silence as a missing decision, and claim no more for it.
• LO7.2Explain why a recurring base holds the glad and the undisturbed, and why friction feels like retention.
• LO7.3Apply the smuggling test and the publicity test to a default or an exit path.

Core content

Nobody decided. Somewhere on your statement is a payment you meant to stop. You have not decided to keep it, and on somebody's screen you are a retained customer. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, in Nudge, file this under status quo bias, and their point is that it tells nobody what you prefer. The default, whatever happens when someone does nothing, holds its ground because moving takes work. Their strongest evidence concerns workers outside a pension scheme, who once enrolled and free to leave turned out never to have objected. It had simply never got done. That record is well supported, in pension members. In your customers it is mixed: this is strong evidence from another field, no business trial is reported, and a business default usually sends the customer's money to whoever set it.

Read silence as a missing decision. Elena added a bold line to half her term reminders, saying most families had already re-enrolled, which was true. The two piles of late families came out about the same height, and when she rang round, the forms were sitting on fridges. A persuasive line is aimed at someone weighing something up, and nobody was. Her story proves nothing, and the wider record points the same way: the big structural tools delivered and the clever wording mostly did not. The plan holder who has not cancelled may be content, or may be you and that payment.

The glad and the undisturbed. Robert Greene notes that wanting runs ahead of having, and what we own stops pulling at us. So a recurring base holds two kinds of people who look the same on a screen: those who would sign up again tomorrow, and those nothing has yet disturbed. A renewal figure is a mix of the glad and the undisturbed, and the figure cannot separate them. On this series' reading, few people wake up and decide to go. A tight month, a house move or a bad visit turns their attention on a payment, and for one evening they are deciding again. All of this is anecdotal or weak, tested on nobody.

Why friction feels like keeping someone. Nadia's pool service was losing about six monthly plans a month, which cost A$1,800 a month to replace. Her partner Col proposed keeping the one-reply sign-up and taking cancellations by phone, in office hours. A cancellation hurts more than a sign-up pleases, so anything that slows the leaving brings relief before any thinking arrives. Yet a customer who decides at nine, finds the office shut and forgets by morning counts as a customer kept. A stuck customer and a glad one make the same amount of noise. Friction that stops people reaching what is good for them is sludge. Removing it is well supported in people using government programs, and that says nothing about what a private firm gains.

The same force, turned round. What carried workers into a pension they never opposed can hold a homeowner on a plan she stopped wanting in March. You cannot tell a helping default from a trapping one by how it works. The difference lies in who it is working for. Alex Hormozi wants continuity built into the first sale, and commentary in the AIEIO Library's notes, on which this series is built, wants the way out no harder than the way in. The series rules, as its own untested judgement, for both: build continuity and make leaving easy. Where one design tries to do both jobs, ask whose interest it serves and whether you would say it aloud, which is question 2, Truth.

Two tests. These are rules of conduct, so they carry no evidence label. The smuggling test, from Robert Cialdini, looks at the facts: using a trigger is fine when it matches something real, and importing one the situation does not contain is smuggling. The publicity test, which Thaler and Sunstein take from Rawls, looks at you: would you defend the design in public? Col's phone line fails the first, by analogy, because nothing about a plan begun with a single reply needs a call to end it. The second bites only if you state the whole reason. Hearing from customers was half of his, and the other half, that some people will not ring, he would not have printed on an invoice. Elena's default passes both. A student's place carries forward unless the family replies by a stated date, and the first line of the notice says so. Self-interest does not fail the test, and hiding it does.

Where it stops working

Inertia can end on the day you fail someone, and a paid-up term can hold back the signal. A customer on Nadia's annual plan went quiet after his visit was moved twice, his row stayed on the list, and she read his silence as peace until he failed to renew the following spring. If customers are leaving because something is wrong, fix that first, because no default repairs it and a warm note does not get a ute to anyone's pool. Disclosure does not make a default accurate either: a few of Elena's families who had not got round to leaving paid and asked for their money back, and she gave it. The one exception to easy leaving is a genuine fixed term, clearly disclosed, chosen knowingly and priced as such, with the law checked. If nothing renews in your business, as at Tony's fruit shop, keep the reading of silence and leave the rest. Who should decide what customers would endorse stays open, because the owner is a paid judge of it. As general information, cancellation harder than sign-up is under regulatory attention in Australia, so take your own position to the regulator or a qualified adviser.

• LO8.1Explain why a strong argument can fail, and show a result where you would have argued.
• LO8.2Run the prediction test, holding each reading of a person as a forecast you could lose.
• LO8.3Answer a move by watching your own response and testing any deadline.

Core content

A good case is not enough. A counterparty is whoever sits across a deal from you, such as a landlord, a supplier or an adviser. This seat rests mostly on two working lives: Chris Voss, an FBI kidnapping negotiator, in Never Split the Difference, and Mark McCormack, the lawyer who built the sports agency IMG, in What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School. Their diagnosis, that loss, framing and fairness shape how people decide, is well supported as behavioural research. Their technique is anecdotal or weak, told by the men it worked for, so read it as a craft nobody has tested.

Listen, and read odd conduct as a signal. McCormack treats taking in what is said as hard work. Voss adds tactical empathy: saying aloud what you have understood, position and feelings both, with no agreement implied. The tools exist to keep someone talking until something you did not know comes out. His rule for odd conduct is that crazy is a signal, so assume a hidden constraint. Helen's A$180,000 job stalled when the buyer asked for a quote he already held, then a breakdown, then the same one laid out differently. She rang, named what she could hear, a man under pressure he was not free to discuss, and stopped talking. His head office had frozen large orders. It did not save the job. It did stop her buying steel on his word, and A$140,400 stayed in the business. A real buyer might have hung up.

Why arguments fail. Robert Greene says everyone guards three beliefs: that they act freely, that they are clever and decent, and that they are good at heart. Any threat to one ends the listening, so a strong argument can make things worse, and you do better to show the result. That account is anecdotal or weak too, from lives he chose. Voss's small tools leave those beliefs standing. A mirror repeats someone's last few words as a question, then goes quiet. A feeling label names their feeling aloud and stops. An accusation audit voices the negatives they may hold about you first. Each displays understanding and none can produce it. Nadia used them on a strata committee with a rehearsed list of objections, and it said no. One owner said the evening felt like being handled.

The yes that comes apart. Voss sorts yes into three kinds: counterfeit, which gets someone out of the room; confirmation, which only acknowledges a fact; and commitment, which means they will act. Only the last counts. A strata manager's "looks fine" was a confirmation about some sums, from someone who did not hold the decision. A yes with no how attached costs nothing to give, so count nothing as agreed until you have heard the how from someone able to deliver it.

Reading a person. Greene says to distrust the first impression, because it is the part people have practised. His character check looks at how someone treats people who can do nothing for them, their conduct under pressure, their history with commitments, and who caused the failures in their stories. His prediction test asks you to forecast one person's reaction to one piece of news. A new steel rep gave Helen the best hour of her week and was curt with her receptionist. She wrote down that he would blame the yard at the first short delivery, and gave him a small order. He rang first, called it his mistake and fixed it by Friday. Her forecast failed, and she still cannot weigh the curtness. All of this is anecdotal or weak. Weigh the record above the room, hold each reading as a forecast you could lose, and never let it outrank a written term.

Moves made on you. A move is a trigger supplied on purpose. An invented deadline exists to make you fear losing, so test it and find out what really happens the day after. A sham concession earns no repayment, so ask what it cost them. Robert Cialdini's single defence is to watch your own response, the sudden sense of owing or the spike of wanting as supply runs down, and treat that feeling as your licence to stop. The moves built on reciprocation, commitment and scarcity are mixed, and the defences are anecdotal or weak. The series' untested ruling on show or hide turns on question 1, Repeat and exit: will you deal with them again, can they leave, and will others hear about it? Guard your hand with a counterparty, explain yourself to your team, and never stretch guarding into saying something false.

Where it stops working

In a hostage negotiation nobody can walk away and nobody comes back next year. Your counterparty can usually leave, and a person you will meet again has time to work out what you did, so borrow the tools and leave the hostage logic behind. Every tool assumes one person across a table, and a mirror at a committee is plainly strange. Being understood moves only people with room to move: Helen's dominant customer could feel thoroughly understood and still pay near day 75, because the character check reads a person and the payment run belongs to a firm. The record fails for people with no record, for old records from a different setting, and in hindsight, so it counts only if you run it before you sign. Microexpressions, face reading and generational types are retired, and you are not qualified to diagnose anyone. Whether understanding used to get something is still understanding stays open. The working test is whether this would be acceptable if they could read your notes: a page showing you studied their situation passes, and a page showing you studied their buttons fails. Supplying the feeling of being understood without the substance is smuggling.

• LO9.1Plan a change using the three parts of fair process.
• LO9.2State an honest reason for a change, with your own part in it.
• LO9.3Run the person or room check and the defensiveness check before a hard conversation, and put a date on it.

Core content

Thin ground, and a Sunday email. This is the thinnest seat in the course: one factory illustration, some philosophy, and work on children and students carried across. None of it was tested in a firm your size. Elena cut hours on a Sunday night by email, with two lines about numbers being down, and Mia, her senior casual teacher, lost her Saturday mornings. On Monday Mia taught well and left with the last child. The room stopped being reset, and the quiet calls to unsure parents stopped. None of that had ever been in Mia's job, and by every number Elena kept, nothing had happened.

Fair process. W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, in Blue Ocean Strategy, argue that work nobody can fully inspect depends on cooperation people choose to give. Fair process has three parts: engagement, where those affected are asked and can push back; explanation, where they hear why it came out as it did; and clear expectations, where they know the new rules and how they will be judged. A person can live with a result they dislike. What they refuse is a decision with no reason in it, and that comes out as compliance without commitment. The basis is two plants at one unnamed manufacturer, with no figures, so the label is anecdotal or weak. Robert Cialdini concludes, about children, that threats and bribes work only while they are in the room, and carrying that to staff is an inference.

An honest reason. The next year the roster had to change again. Elena told the casuals before the grid was settled and gave the reason, including that she had opened a second site on term fees. She asked where the new grid would break and moved a class when a teacher found a clash. Two casuals still lost hours and said what they thought, and nothing in her figures moved that she could put down to it. Put your own part in the reason, because the weather alone would probably have been accepted, and acceptance tells you nothing about whether a reason is true. The case for this is question 6, Cost of being wrong: if the account is mistaken, you have spent an hour explaining yourself.

Your side of the gate. Mark McCormack files delegation under trust, because the work will now be done another way and, to begin with, not as well. When Nadia handed Jaz a run of customers, Jaz did the baskets last. Nadia drove past, rewrote a note and went back to brush a step. Within a month Jaz was ringing about every small call, and Nadia took that as proof she had been right. Before you correct someone's work, ask whether it is wrong or only unlike yours. Baskets last is a difference, and a skipped water test is a fault. This advice is anecdotal or weak, and it costs little.

Praise and failure. In experiments Carol Dweck reports, children praised for intelligence mostly took the easy next task, and those praised for effort mostly took the hard one. This process praise, aimed at what someone did, is mixed: shown in children, over the short term, with smaller effects in later work. Carrying it to staff is a transfer, and it assumes you can judge the process. When Elena tried it on Mia, who knew that class better, she got the look of someone handed a sticker. Rewarding effort every time is what Dweck calls false growth mindset. High standards count only with the means to reach them, which is anecdotal or weak, and the claim that mindset training lifts staff performance is retired.

The talk you keep walking past. For two years Helen avoided raising rework with Dave, a long-serving supervisor, and spent about 100 Saturdays checking his jobs herself. Others paid too, Dave included. Work in order: the room, the message, the date. The person or room check asks whether the setting, tools or management caused the problem before you judge anyone. It is mixed, and none of its voices was tested in a workplace. About half the trouble was Helen's: late drawings, and a supervisor's title for a man still on the tools. Then run the defensiveness check, which is anecdotal or weak: does this message imply the person has no say in their work, is a fool, or is bad? A remark about attitude can hit two of those, and a remark about a weld need hit none. Take your share first, bring the work itself, ask what they want to do, and put a day beside the talk.

Where it stops working

The person or room check needs an end. What would count against it is plain: tools, hours and training are fixed and the same person fails in the same way. At that point the room was not the answer, and the next step is the conversation, with advice first if it could end the job. The check can also become a hiding place, as Helen's Saturdays did. The opposite failure is talking where you should be fixing, like Elena's growth-mindset poster above the kettle when the cause was her own roster. In an emergency, or where law or safety has fixed a decision, explain it and do not pretend to consult. Consulting on a decision already made fails the smuggling test, because it supplies a trigger with nothing real behind it. Compliance without commitment describes a relationship and is never a finding about a person, and the extra means care inside the hours you pay for. As general information only, hours, rosters, casual work, pay and ending someone's employment sit under employment law and the awards that apply, so check with the Fair Work Ombudsman or a qualified adviser first.

• LO10.1Date one of your own objections to test whether envy may be wearing a principle.
• LO10.2Explain pluralistic ignorance, and treat silence in a group as no information.
• LO10.3Apply the responsibility asymmetry in its last form: motives in yourself, the setting in everyone else.

Core content

Thin ground again. None of the sources offers a study of envy, of co-owners or of small-firm politics. This is observation with one piece of lab work beside it, so everything here is a prompt for noticing and none of it is a verdict on anyone. If you finish this module knowing what is wrong with your partner, you have read it backwards. Someone you have worked beside brings you good news, you say well done, and on the drive home you find you have a concern. It is a sensible concern, and it did not exist at lunch.

Envy in disguise. Robert Greene, in The Laws of Human Nature, treats envy as the feeling people hide hardest, because to own up to it is to concede you feel smaller than someone. So it leaves the house as a criticism, a worry, a joke or a point of principle. Its likeliest source is someone similar and roughly level. Your own envy hides just as well, and its usual costume is an objection on principle. When her partner Col mentioned that a key client now rang him first, Nadia said customers should deal with the business and not with one person. Her line was not false. It was timed. All of this is anecdotal or weak, with no population studied.

Date your objections. When an objection arrives on principle, note what had just happened and to whom. Then run Mark Manson's certainty check: could I be wrong, what would that mean, and would being wrong leave a better or a worse problem? The objection may well survive, because a shabby origin proves nothing about a rule. Motive and point are separate questions. Five weeks later Nadia told Col her principle had turned up on the day he told her the news. He said he had carried that work for three years with her name on it, which gave them something they could argue over. They settled who would front which accounts, and neither would call it mended.

The rule nobody at the table likes. At the owners' breakfast in the wet summer, Nadia talked about new bookings, Elena said enrolments were a bit soft, and Helen talked about a tender. Each looked round at people coping and concluded the trouble was private. Robert Cialdini, writing about bystanders, calls this pluralistic ignorance, so the table is an analogy: when things are unclear you look to the others, they look to you, and everyone takes everyone else's calm as information. Thaler and Sunstein add that a group can go on honouring a rule most of its members privately dislike. This is mixed. The bystander effect it helps explain replicates reasonably well in lab volunteers, and no source measures it in a job meeting. The same probably happens inside a firm, though that step is inferred: the people at Helen's Monday meeting each thought it a waste, and she took their silence for agreement. In any group you run, treat silence as no information at all.

Saying the plain thing. Late that summer Helen told the table her biggest customer was paying near day 75 and that it hurt. There was a silence, someone asked about mangoes, and it never came up again. Two of the others told her later that they were glad she had said it. On this series' reading, one plain sentence changes what a group has to go on, and nobody can say whether it changed that table. Greene advises spells of distance from any group, so step back from its assumptions and keep its information.

Quiet aggression and politics. Greene holds that most aggression travels in disguise, like an email answered two days late on purpose. This is the hardest idea here to check, because any friendly act can be called cover, and an explanation that turns every kind word into evidence cannot be wrong about anybody. That is a defect in the explanation, so keep it as a question about your own conduct. Mark McCormack is the sanest voice on office politics: learn how it works and refuse to make a pastime of it. Both are anecdotal or weak.

What is it for now. Most quarrels leave a plainer question behind. Greene ends on mortality, arguing that behaving as though time will never run out lets you fuss over small things and postpone what matters. Take that as an argument about how to live, with no method attached. Across the three courses in this series, the finish line is one pattern from your own business with both its labels, one for the mechanism and one for the business result. A learner who no longer needs the course has succeeded.

Where it stops working

Greene's books can account for anything once it has happened, so use these ideas in advance, as questions, and refuse them as an account of a quarrel already over. Some quarrels are about something: Nadia and Col were two people squeezed by a copied product, with a split of the work nobody had looked at for years, so run the person or room check before you read a motive into anyone. A hard patch with a partner can feel like a verdict on the pairing, as Carol Dweck describes in relationships, and giving it time is no argument for staying in a bad partnership. The weapon version comes first to hand: telling yourself a critic is merely envious keeps your view intact, and nothing they say can dent it. Passing off a group's silence as agreement nobody gave fails the smuggling test, because it supplies something the situation does not contain. Diagnosing narcissism, typing people and explaining them by generation all stay banned. The last form of the responsibility asymmetry, which applies responsibility to yourself and structure to everyone else, is to read motives in yourself and the setting in everyone else. This is general information, not psychological or medical advice, and if thoughts of death frighten you, weigh on you or will not leave you alone, talk to a GP or a psychologist.