‘The bomb under the table’: The persuasive power of urgency

A potent technique – but it might go off in your face

Alfred Hitchcock had a technique for giving any scene suspense. Simply put a bomb under the table and make sure the audience knows it’s there:

“Let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it…In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the secret.”

Stephen King also uses detonation as a device for getting out of a narrative dead-end. In On Writing, he describes getting bogged down working on The Stand. The plot is drifting, there are too many characters, he can’t work his way to a resolution. And then the answer hits him: set off a bomb:

“The solution to where I was stuck, I saw, could be pretty much the same as the situation that got me going – an explosion, instead of a plague, but still one quick, hard slash of the Gordian knot.” (Chapeau, TL Evans)

What these subtly different but equally explosive techniques demonstrate is the power of urgency.

In the Hitchcock example, it’s the urgency of threat. Because we see the potential for the bomb to go off, everything else becomes secondary. Anything the characters might be discussing, mundane or profound, can now only be understood as a precursor: to devastation, to relief, to something else entirely. We don’t know – but the bomb is all we can think about.

King’s bomb, on the other hand, is definitive urgency. The change has happened. Everything the (surviving) characters thought, felt, or did up to that point is obsolete. All that matters now is the fact of the explosion. The only question is what they are going to do. Every action or inaction is driven by a singular event: the bomb.

There’s no doubt that urgency is a powerful tool in the hands of filmmakers and authors. Arguably, the most powerful. But out here in the real world, how effective is it as a persuasive device? Can drama and tension help bring people round to your point of view? Or is it more likely to set your audience on edge, pushing them further from your position?

Enough with the suspense.

The case for urgency: Inertia as the enemy

Brands love to do competitor audits. Stick a whole load of logos on a board, examine what they’re saying, how they’re positioning themselves, and work out where the clear space is to say something different. It’s a very valuable thing to do. But. But but but.

A lot of the time, the biggest competitor of all is missing. Because a lot of the time, the biggest competitor is… doing nothing. Your audience isn’t carefully selecting between you and the other brands in your space – they’re ignoring the lot of you.

And in this kind of situation, creating urgency is fundamental to persuasion. It literally can’t happen without it. To be persuasive you need to make someone care. And not just care in general, but care right now.

There are a few different types of inertia, and different urgency techniques to combat them.

1) Indifference – “I didn’t know this was a problem.”

In 2015, most people in the UK didn’t have an especially strong opinion about EU membership. This Ipsos study ranked it as the seventh most important issue to voters, named by only 11% as their number one priority.

Hoo boy, was that about to change.

Why? Because those 11% of people managed to turn an indifferent ‘meh’ into a binary choice. Given a referendum and a vote, people were forced to confront their indifference and transform it into a tangible ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

You see exactly the same thing going on (with less consequence) in those schlocky PR campaigns where Heinz will float rebranding Salad Cream as Sandwich Cream, before backing down due to “consumer backlash” – and harvesting a tonne of column inches and social mentions in the process.

The point is salience. If your audience doesn’t know they care, find a way to force them into a choice or having an opinion.

2) Fear – “It’s scary and I don’t want to think about it.”

Only around half of British adults have made a Will. Only 30% or so have life insurance. And that’s because getting people to think about dying and death is hard. When we see an advert, we want it to be about our next holiday or a new phone or a tasty snack, not the administrative arrangements for our own mortality.

So, if your job is writing Wills or selling life insurance, what do you do? In this case, it’s about displacing the urgency so that the persuasive effect comes from relief: ‘yes, this is urgent, but won’t you feel better once you can stop thinking about it?’

It’s why the cliché for a life insurance ad is a) ‘think of your children and loved ones’ (to ratchet the urgency), then b) ‘peace of mind’ (to demonstrate its alleviation).

3) Complexity – “It’s too difficult and I don’t want to think about it.”

Let’s say you’re a tech company that’s invented a whizzy software platform that makes accountancy quicker, cheaper, and simpler for businesses. It should sell itself, right? What business wants organising their finances to be slow, expensive and complicated?

Except, that’s not how the world works. The people you’re selling to (business leaders, CEOs, CFOs etc) have loads of things to think about other than accountancy. And changing one thing in a business tends to have knock on effects.

Your whizzy software platform might work brilliantly in a vacuum. But it might also require a new financial reporting process. It might need to plug into other bits of your tech stack, adding to the stress of your already-overworked head of IT. It might need onboarding and training for the people using it. And anyway, isn’t our process basically fine as it is? Certainly not as bad as the bin-fire of our Q3 sales forecast…

It's instances like this where the ‘bomb under the table’ strategy is most effective. You have to create urgency with the darker motivations: envy and fear. If you don’t adopt our whizzy platform, you’ll fall behind. Your competitors will outpace you. The regulators will come knocking and they’ll bring the wolves with them to the door.

So, urgency can work. If your audience is ambivalent, ignorant, or actively resistant to your argument, urgency is a useful tactic to rocket it up their agenda.

But it’s a gambit you should deploy with some wariness. Unlike other, gentler, slow-burning forms of persuasion, urgency is big and bold and brash. It’s not a tap on the shoulder, it’s a shove. It’s not a quiet word in your ear, it’s a yell.

The case against urgency: Shouting is easy

There are a few ways urgency can backfire.

1) People don’t like the truth.

Your urgency may be completely valid, but it doesn’t mean people will thank you for it. You might be legitimately drawing their attention to a bomb under the table – but they still might think of you as the asshole who put a bomb there.

Part of creating urgency is making people uncomfortable with the status quo. And people, bless them, don’t like that.

2) You might be helping your competition.

The thing about urgency is it’s generic. It shines a big, bright spotlight on the problem, but the solution doesn’t come till later. And that might mean you’re doing your competitors’ job for them.

If you spend all your time amping up the urgency and they put all their effort into explaining how to fix things, who gets the benefit of all the effort?

3) You get called Chicken Little.

Any urgency proposition is essentially: “Do this now – or else!” But if your audience doesn’t do anything and the ‘else’ never materialises, you’ve shot your shot and ended up with nothing. Urgency has to be powerful and absolute. If it turns out you’re absolutely wrong, your credibility and trust might be what takes the hit.

4) You sound desperate.

Every time I see a big “BUY NOW” button on an advert, I can hear a silent “please!!!” And that’s the real question with urgency, especially if you’re selling something: is it urgent for your audience? Or for your quarterly targets?

If it’s the former, then by all means go HAM. If it’s the latter, it may be better to save the drama for when you can really mean it.

It’s only one step

All in all, I’m not a massive advocate of urgency as a persuasive technique. At its worst, it’s noisy, bullying, and self-interested. But even at its best, it’s only a starting point: a shout for attention whose only value comes from whatever follows.

I think it’s why I find a lot of current climate activism so irritating. We don’t need tins of soup thrown at paintings and orange powder on Stonehenge to draw attention to the urgency of the situation. We have apocalyptic wild fires and floods and hurricanes to do that. What we need is immediate practical solutions, and the kind of shouty stunts pulled by XR and Just Stop Oil make those discussions more difficult. (A longer post about this is in the works!)

So, if there is a bomb under the table and no one has noticed, by all means let us all know. But don’t just put one there to see if it will make us jump.

Next week: Fancy autocomplete: How to think about AI and writing