We toss around terms like "messaging," "brand," "storytelling," and "change management" constantly, but seldom dig into what those buzzwords actually represent: elaborate machinery for nudging human behavior in directions we've chosen, whether or not we're consciously acknowledging that choice.
Whether you're shipping a product, orchestrating a transformation, hawking a service, or running a campaign, you've stumbled into the territory of behavioral shaping, and the question isn't whether you're molding decisions because you absolutely are, but rather how deliberately and how ethically you're proceeding. I've spent years puzzling over this conundrum, and somewhere along the way I cobbled together a mental model for approaching behavioral shaping like a framework instead of a vibe. I call it the Influence Equation.
With that framing in mind, let me lay out the equation itself. It's not real math, and nobody's measuring "Deception = 7.3" with a multimeter, but it's structured enough to serve two distinct purposes that I've found endlessly useful in my own work:
- Deconstruct how other people are shaping your perceptions and decisions, often without you even noticing it's happening
- Design your own communication and leadership in a more intentional way, with clearer awareness of the levers you're pulling
Here’s the model at a high level:
[ P = (Pl \times I_{mi}) \times (T + D) \times (A + Mu) \times F_t ]
Where:
- P = Power of influence
- Pl = Plots, the narrative built from Truth, Luck, and Folly
- Iₘᵢ = Information and media (channels, reach, credibility)
- T = Truth (alignment with reality)
- D = Deception, including "Mimic N Face" (copying the look and feel of truth)
- A = Appearance (visuals, design, presentation)
- Mu = Music (literal audio plus tone, rhythm, and emotional cadence)
- Fₜ = Time factor, including delay, repetition, and audience mental state
Again: this is a conceptual model, not a physics engine. Walk any memo, effort, or initiative through it and you'll begin to glimpse why it's catching fire or why it's fizzling. Or why it's generating puzzling backlash.
Before we dissect each term, there's one more layer worth naming, a backdrop that colors everything else.
Influence doesn't float in a vacuum; it sits on top of four very old kinds of power, each of which has been around for millennia and continues to shape how information flows through any organization or society you can name.
Financial power determines who funds what, who buys what, and who keeps the lights on, which in turn determines which accounts get amplified and which ones quietly die in obscurity, starved of oxygen. Physical power governs safety, risk, and force, determining who feels secure enough to challenge a dominant account and who stays silent out of fear. Intellectual power sets the mental models and definitions that shape how people conceptualize problems in the first place, the unexamined assumptions underneath everything. Political power sets the rules, policies, and incentives that determine which accounts become "official" and which get marginalized or suppressed.
These four levers don't appear explicitly in the equation, but they shape everything else. Keeping them in mind matters because ignoring them leads to naïve analysis that misses the deeper reasons why certain messages catch fire while others fizzle out despite being objectively better.
Now let's turn to the first active component: the plot. Simple. It's the story you tell about what's happening and why.
But here's what took me years to grasp: how you construct this story matters enormously because identical facts can be framed in dozens of different ways, each of which will land differently with listeners.
Every strong plot quietly weaves together three elements, and the balance between them reveals nearly all you need to know about whether someone's being honest or self-serving.
Truth: What's actually going on in the world, stripped of spin? Luck: What just happened to us that we didn't control, the random events that shaped our circumstances? Folly: Where did we sabotage ourselves, make preventable mistakes, or let ego override judgment?
Most stories aren't manipulative because the facts are outright false. They warp perception by rebalancing these three sliders in ways that serve the teller.
Overemphasize truth while ignoring luck and folly: "We earned everything; nothing was random; we made no mistakes." This is the arrogant champion's creed.
Overemphasize luck: "We're helpless casualties of forces beyond our control." This is the perpetual victim's refrain.
Overemphasize folly: "We're uniquely broken; everything is our fault." This is the self-flagellator's lament.
So when I scrutinize any influential story, whether it's an internal memo, an earnings call, a political speech, or a marketing initiative, I pose myself a deceptively simple question that cuts through most of the noise:
How is this story distributing responsibility between Truth, Luck, and Folly?
That single inquiry reveals whether someone's genuinely aiming for clarity or merely protecting themselves, and once you begin posing it habitually, you'll be astonished how often the answer turns out to be the latter.
In equation form: Pl = f(Truth, Luck, Folly).
The stronger and more coherent the story, the bigger multiplier Pl becomes. This is why skilled propagandists and talented marketers alike obsess over narrative structure. They know it works. Even thin material can punch above its weight with a compelling frame wrapped around it.
The best story in existence doesn't matter if no one hears it, and that's a lesson I've absorbed the hard way after watching brilliant narratives die in obscurity while mediocre ones spread everywhere simply because their creators grasped distribution better than their competitors did.
That's where Iₘᵢ comes in, the information and media component that determines not just whether your package reaches anyone but also how credible it seems when it arrives and whether recipients will genuinely pay attention to it:
- Which channels are used? (email, Slack, town halls, podcasts, TikTok, news, etc.)
- How much reach do they have?
- How much inherent trust or distrust comes with those channels?
- Is this a single blast, or an ongoing series?
A mediocre narrative with excellent distribution will beat a brilliant narrative that never leaves a slide deck, and I've observed this dynamic unfold so many times that I've stopped being surprised by it even though it still frustrates me each occurrence.
This is where numerous executives and technical teams subtly stumble, often without recognizing they're stumbling, because they're so focused on perfecting the content that they forget the content doesn't exist until someone actually encounters it:
- Put genuine thought into the material
- Ship it once through a single channel
- Assume "we informed everybody"
- Then act surprised when nothing sticks
From a persuasion standpoint, that's equivalent to whispering once in a crowded bar and expecting the entire room to remember what you said.
Now we reach the uncomfortable part, T + D, and this is where things get murky because it's where I find myself cogitating hardest when I analyze someone else's pitch, trying to figure out where Truth ends and the theater begins, which is often harder than you'd expect.
Truth is how closely the package tracks reality, which sounds straightforward until you realize that "reality" is itself contested territory that different observers experience differently. Deception covers a range from subtle framing and strategic omission to outright fabrication, and most deception lives in that first category where you're not technically lying but you're definitely not conveying the complete picture either.
Inside D there's a particularly contemporary gambit I've started calling "Mimic N Face," and it's everywhere once you begin looking for it:
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Mimic: duplicate the surface signals of trustworthy things. Visual styles pilfered from reputable brands. Academic or scientific formatting that looks legitimate. Charts that seem data-driven but crumble under scrutiny.
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Face: wrap the whole package in a human front. A relatable spokesperson with carefully rehearsed authenticity. A curated persona or influencer. Someone who looks "just like you" reading from a teleprompter you can't see.
You can be technically "not lying" and still massively distort perception through mimicry and face selection, which is why so much modern propaganda passes fact-checkers while still being profoundly misleading.
To keep myself honest, I contemplate what I call an integrity ratio:
[ Integrity = \frac{T}{T + D} ]
I never actually calculate it. Numbers would be false precision. It's more of a gut check, a forcing function for a hard question: are we relying on truth, or are we relying on mimicry and theater?
Sometimes I realize we've crossed a line. We pull the message back. Painful but necessary.
Other times I recognize we've been underselling genuine substance because we're weirdly allergic to narrative craft. In that scenario, we can safely lean in harder. The truth deserves good packaging too.
Either way, it's better than pretending T and D don't exist. At least you're being candid with yourself about what you're doing, which puts you ahead of most practitioners in the field who never even pose the question.
Appearance (A) covers all things visual. Slide design, typography, layout. Color palettes and aesthetic choices. The room, stage, and background. Physical or digital artifacts that audiences can reference later when they're attempting to recall what you said.
Here's the thing I've had to absorb the hard way: we like to think substance wins on its own, that good ideas will rise to the top through some kind of natural meritocracy, but in reality observers decide whether to even consider the substance based on how the surface looks, and if the surface looks sloppy they'll never bother to uncover what's underneath.
You can launch the exact same initiative twice. If one version looks rushed, inconsistent, and cheap, audiences distrust it instantly. If the other looks considered and coherent, they grant it the benefit of the doubt. Identical substance, wildly different reception.
In persuasion terms, Appearance doesn't replace Truth. It gives Truth a chance to be heard in the first place, an opportunity to enter someone's consideration set before being dismissed.
Ignoring aesthetics doesn't make you principled. It merely hands an advantage to whoever grasps that perception is part of the process. I've witnessed too many brilliant proposals die because nobody bothered to make them look credible.
In the equation, Mu stands for Music, but it encompasses far more than just literal audio because there's an entire layer of musical qualities embedded in every form of expression, even the ones that don't produce any sound at all.
There are two layers here. First, there's actual sound: theme songs, stings, scoring, sound design, the stuff that plays in the background of commercials and launch videos and political ads. Second, there are the musical qualities of expression that exist even in silent text: tone, cadence, rhythm, repetition, the patterns that make some writing feel urgent and other writing feel calm even when the vocabulary itself is similar.
Think about the contrast between a calm, measured all-hands meeting and a frantic one. Consider how certain phrases get repeated until they become refrains ("Move fast and break things," "This is who we are," "Zero trust"). Notice the emotional contour of a launch video or internal bulletin.
Before anyone has "evaluated" your communication, their nervous system has already responded to its music, its rhythm and feel. They've already experienced something before they've thought anything. This happens below the level of conscious reasoning.
You can use Mu to nudge audiences toward fear, outrage, calm, focus, pride, or apathy. The question isn't whether you can accomplish this. You can. Everyone does. The real question is: what emotional state are you intentionally cultivating, and why are you cultivating it?
The last big multiplier is Fₜ, the time factor. I conceptualize it in three distinct pieces, each of which can make or break an otherwise well-crafted offering.
First, there's delay and timing. Are you early, seeding a story before people are forced to care? Are you right on time, framing events as they unfold? Or are you late, scrambling to retrofit an explanation after audiences have already decided what it meant? Each timing carries different costs and opportunities, and I've bungled all three at various junctures in my career.
Second, there's repetition and duration. Is this communication a one-week campaign or a multi-year drumbeat? Does it appear only in official announcements, or does it permeate everyday artifacts and habits?
Third, there's audience state. I call this "drunk vs brainy." Are we hitting folks when they're exhausted, angry, doom-scrolling, overwhelmed? That's drunk mode, where critical thinking goes out the window. Or are we reaching them when they have context, bandwidth, and psychological safety? That's brainy mode, where they can genuinely evaluate what they're absorbing.
Manipulative persuasion tends to arrive late, framed as an emergency. It uses high repetition in short, intense bursts. It targets audiences in drunk mode: fearful, exhausted, overstimulated. Classic manipulation playbook.
Healthy communication tries to reach people before the crisis hits. It sustains the core concept over a reasonable horizon, building familiarity gradually. It aims at brainy mode, the spaces where folks can actually think, pose questions, and push back. Hard to do. Worth it.
From an equation standpoint, Fₜ is the compounding interest on everything else. You can have great truth, story, appearance, and tone. But ship it once, at the wrong moment, to the wrong mental state? P stays small. I've observed brilliant proposals fail because of timing alone. Maddening to watch.
This model is useful in two complementary directions, defensive and offensive, and I find myself deploying both regularly depending on whether I'm trying to understand something that's being aimed at me or crafting something I'm directing at others.
When something is clearly moving people (a story that's caught fire, an initiative that's everywhere, a "common sense" idea that suddenly materialized) I run it through the variables.
What's the plot? How are Truth, Luck, and Folly being balanced? Where is it being distributed, and who's amplifying it for free? How much is Truth vs Deception, and what portions feel like "Mimic N Face"? How are Appearance and Music priming my emotions? What's the timing? Am I encountering this mostly in my "drunk" mode or my "brainy" mode?
You'll begin to notice the mechanics. And once you notice them, you're less likely to confuse volume with validity. Loud doesn't mean true. Repeated doesn't mean real. Ubiquitous doesn't mean accurate.
If you lead teams, craft products, or shepherd change through organizations, you're already entangled in the persuasion game. The only real choice is whether you play it blindly or deliberately.
I use the equation as a diagnostic checklist, posing myself a series of uncomfortable questions. Have we told a genuine story that includes our Truth, the role of Luck, and our own Folly? Do we have a proper distribution strategy, or just a vague plan to "announce it"? If we were compelled to write down our Integrity ratio, would we be proud of the number? Are we relying on "Mimic N Face" tactics we'd hate to see used against us? Have we given this message the visual and emotional support it needs to actually land with our intended audience? Are we reaching people at the right moment and in the right cognitive state, with enough repetition to matter?
Two principles I try to enforce.
First, increase P by improving the honest variables: Pl, Iₘᵢ, T, A, Mu, and Fₜ. Make the story clearer. Make the distribution smarter. Make the visuals more compelling. Make the tone more intentional. Make the timing more thoughtful. Work harder on the legitimate elements.
Second, constrain D. If we find ourselves tempted to lean on deception, mimicry, or drunk-mode timing to get our way, that's a warning flag. The underlying idea may not deserve the level of persuasive power we're attempting to give it.
That's where trust is either built or quietly destroyed. And I've learned that the hard way more than once, watching relationships and reputations erode because someone got too clever with the theater.
We're entering an era where AI can mass-produce "Mimic N Face" at industrial scale, where Appearance and Music can be generated and tested and optimized automatically by systems that never sleep, and where distribution is algorithmic and micro-targeted to our most "drunk brain" hours with a precision that no human marketer could ever achieve.
Behavioral shaping is getting cheaper to manufacture and harder to detect, and that's not speculation or paranoid futurism; it's already happening right now, in your feed, in your inbox, in the notifications that show up on your phone at carefully optimized intervals.
So the task, especially for folks who care about security, safety, governance, and long-term resilience, isn't to pretend we're above these dynamics. We're not. Nobody is. We're all swimming in them.
The task is to build a shared vocabulary for how these mechanisms operate, a lexicon that lets us dissect what's acting on us without getting swept away by it. Then use those same mechanics to express truthfully, not to out-compete reality but to give reality a fighting chance against well-funded fiction.
Because at the end of the day, progress isn't about clever stories or aesthetic tricks for their own sake, however satisfying those might be to craft. It's about doing the difficult work to turn novelty into system. System into resilience. Resilience into trust.
That's what I keep returning to. That's why I wrote this down, and why I keep refining it. Maybe it'll help you perceive the machinery too.