DO MORE WITH LESS

As organizations try to contain and reduce costs, departments often find their headcounts are reduced as positions are eliminated or employees leave and not replaced. The workload, as I see it, doesn’t reduce to fit the reduced resource. In effect, organizations are saying to their managers:  “Do more with less.” Sadly, most don’t tell you HOW you do more with less.

 One solution is productivity improvement with the resources that are available. What does that look like in real life? Here’s an example. In a recent story by Greg Keenan in The Globe and Mail, we learned how General Motors stepped up production of some hot models produced at one plant to 225,753 from 152,007 the year before. One of the ways they did it was a productivity boost. “Increasing productivity and eliminating bottlenecks added another 50,000” units, the story said.

 Compare that to one of the other production boosts: adding a third shift at the plant – about 350 workers according to reports when it was announced – to get 60,000 units more.

What if GM had not added another shift? They could still get that additional 50,000 units from productivity improvements without adding many more people – certainly not 350 more as in the added shift. Dramatic.

 So, instead of grumbling about resource reductions as most of us have, or just sharing the extra work amongst the remaining resource, take a page from GM’s playbook.  Don’t add inefficiency when more efficiency is needed.

 For instance, how much time/resources are you using to re-create knowledge (processed information) that you’ve already invested in creating (a staffer’s work output on a project or issue, for example), but just can’t find or haven’t asked for? Just think of the inefficiency and productivity challenge that causes for the person who is assigned to re-create the knowledge (a distribution list, a position statement, a proposal, a company profile, etc.).

 We have more productive capacity in our desktops, laptops, iPads and smartphones than most of us will ever use. Employ that hardware and software to organize, store and communicate your departmental/institutional knowledge. If getting it all together is the challenge, hire a part-timer, like a student, to get it going.

 And if you have to justify the expense with metrics, try this:

1. Ask your teams for examples of knowledge re-creation (rework) and estimates of how much time they have invested.
2. Calculate the monetary value and ask the team to estimate how many of those re-creations they do in a normal week.
3. If the work day was NOT expandable, what’s the productivity effect in time and cost of this one common productivity problem? Try reducing it by a set metric, say 25%, over the next three months.
4. Repeat until the smaller and smaller gains are outweighed by the resources to achieve them.
5. Maintain discipline and work on another productivity waster.

 In August 2010, I wrote a post about how communications improvements can make major productivity and efficiency gains. Find it here: HOW COMMUNICATIONS CAN BOOST PRODUCTIVITY AT WORK

How to survive the narrative rip current

Copyright 2011

nar·ra·tive/ˈnarətiv/

Noun: A spoken or written account of connected events; a story.

 Narrative. So powerful. But what if it’s working against you? A narrative like the  ’Birther’  issue that has haunted President Obama through his first term. I have worked in public relations for many years and have had to manage narratives that ran counter to my client’s interests many times.  It always felt to me at first like getting caught in a rip current at the beach. No matter how hard you fight it, it just seems like it is going to carry you out to sea.

The solution to a counter flowing narrative is, in fact, much like the advice given to those caught in an actual rip current: remain calm, get your feet down on something solid, get help and be patient. More on this later.

What brought the power of the counter narrative back to my consciousness was a column by Toronto Globe and Mail writer Margaret Wente: “Can you handle the truth?  Forget the narrative of catastrophe. The Gulf of Mexico is nearly back to normal.” Her story picks up on an AP report  that basically says that, while not completely back to pre-Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill state, it’s not the disaster we might think it is. What’s instructive here is how this powerful narrative is playing out. After 100 days of almost around the clock coverage and a narrative of environmental disaster, reinforced to this day, that story sticks with many of us. I’m as influenced by it as anyone. The surprising “truth”, says the AP report, is that it is not as bad as we might think. However, for the seafood industry, the tourism industry, the oil and gas industry and BP in particular, they are still fighting the rip current fed by the narrative of destruction that is running against them.

Wente draws an interesting conclusion about why the “narrative of catastrophe” remains, in spite of the facts.

“I think it’s because we saw the spill as a giant morality tale: evil versus good, rapacious oil interests versus the environment, greedy consumers (that’s us) versus oil-soaked pelicans and the unspoiled natural world. The visuals were devastating, and the coverage was relentless. The media took turns hyping the disaster. They had a lot invested in this storyline and, when it took an unexpected happy turn, they couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t even see it.”

So, how do we go about keeping our heads above water and surviving the power of the narrative rip current?

Keep Calm: High emotion and panic lead to bad decisions. Swimming against a rip current often leads to exhaustion and drowning. Use your head. If a narrative is running against you, don’t start thinking like a victim. That’s emotional. Think like the receiver of the narrative. Will they pay attention to it? Will it makes sense to them? How much exposure to repetitions will they get?  How much credibility do you have with the receivers versus the storytellers or protagonists? Plan all actions and communications with the answers to these questions in mind. Be deliberate. Don’t flail about.

Get a Solid Base: If you are caught in a rip current, you’ll find that the water has more power than a swimmer. So – as they say and I have experienced – get your feet on the bottom and walk out if you can. Point is that the solid ground gives you powerful traction to counter the force of the current. Facts and logical arguments will be necessary to counter a strong narrative that is running against you. Obama has come out with the definitive proof of birth in Hawaii that confirms he is a citizen (not for everyone – there are doubters who will never be convinced and there are those with agendas that don’t want to be convinced). Many hope that this action kills the “birther” narrative that has taken up so much space in the public affairs geography. Without the proof, this story had no chance of dying.

If a narrative comes down to their opinion versus yours, you may never win. A formerUSMarine General was reported to have told a group: “My opinion versus yours, mine wins. Your facts versus my opinion, you have a chance of convincing me.” Another element is that people can accept things they don’t like, but only if they understand them. So, while a strong narrative may initially hold sway, planting the seed of doubt with facts and arguments that undermine the narrative can be the beginning of the end. Caveat: the facts and argument have to make sense to the receiver. Too often counter arguments are made that make sense to the party feeling victimized by the narrative, but these arguments don’t make sense to the receivers. An example would be an oil company saying that a spill wasn’t their fault – because they believed it was a subcontractor’s or nature’s fault. The receiver, on the other hand, thinks: “Your well, your oil, your instructions, your oversight, your responsibility, your liability.” Pushing against this is like trying to swim directly against the rip current.

Part of the solid base is context. It can be beneficially powerful. But like most powerful tools, it can also be dangerous, if used improperly. Here’s an example as cited in Wente’s column:  “Tony Hayward, BP’s CEO, was reviled for saying that the amount of oil leaked was ‘tiny’ compared with the ‘very big ocean.’ But he turned out to be right.”  So, good piece of context but delivered too early. In the face of 24 hour video coverage of the oil spewing from the fractured underwater well and the huge slick on the surface and the dead fish and oil covered wildlife, marshes and beaches, Hayward’s offering did nothing more than further damage his credibility. He needed to be calm and patient. Minimizing the problem comes across as defensive and callous. In fact, it is seen as supportive of the negative narrative.

Get Help: If you get caught in a rip current, get help. A boat might be needed, if you can’t walk out. Also, the experience and credibility of someone like a lifeguard might be what you need to successfully counter the current. In the case of a narrative, other credible voices that are prepared to put forward facts and arguments that counter the narrative may become the only credible voices. Yours may be discounted, like Mr. Hayward’s.

Be Patient: Walking out of a rip current can be slow and very difficult. Waiting for a rescue boat can seem an eternity. Be calm and patient. Certainly this is very true when the current is a strong narrative. A national survey checking on attitudes of consumers found that 71% are still concerned about the safety of Gulf seafood, even though fishing is not allowed until the species is deemed safe following testing. It’s going to take time to change the narrative. With both the fishing industry’s  and the government’s self-interest an issue, the credible third parties that are having some traction on the narrative are chefs who are vouching for the safety and quality of the seafood by serving it in their restaurants. This one will be a word of mouth change to the narrative. Set against 100 days of 24 hours of pictures at 1,000 words a picture – well, it’s going to have to be a slow and steady turnaround.

So, given all of the above, and given that he had the definitive proof in hand, why would Obama have let the birther narrative build for almost four years? This might be one of those cases where the credibility of the narrators took a hit with every telling, because the narrative wasn’t of interest or didn’t make sense to most of the receivers. I get the sense that on April 27^th, 2011, when the document was finally released, Obama just calmly and deliberately walked through the current and out of the water. Just sayin’!

More Read A Speech? The US President does it well in the SOTU Speech

More readers have come to this blog for the post Read a speech rather than memorize? Sure. Just do it well. than any other. It’s been translated by Google into what must be nearly a dozen languages.

I know people don’t have time to memorize their speeches. So, we tried to offer tips on how to read a speech so that the audience would forget it was being read. (One way to read a speech is to use a teleprompter. But not many can afford it or find it appropriate to use the clear screens that flank the lectern and that deliver the written text to the speechmaker. Some say they are overused and the President of The United States – POTUS- endures a lot of this criticism for his reliance on TOTUS – Teleprompter of The United States.)

That’s not what has prompted this post. What struck me about President Obama’s State of the Union Speech (SOTUS) on January 25, 2011 was an insight that addresses a powerful element found in influential speeches that is often lost when they are read.

After the SOTUS, Time.com’s editor-at-large and Senior Political Analyst Mark Halperin wrote in his blog The Page:

“Obama’s presentation was close to flawless: upbeat and animated, leisurely and assured, surprisingly engaging even when he lapsed into the professorial mode he favors over tub-thumping. He also offered up some light, teasing humor, a rare feat for the generally sober president, whose forays into comedy often seem forced or hammy. Rehearsals with one of the Democratic Party’s best speech coaches clearly paid off, allowing him to internalize the text and focus on conveying the emotion of the words with grace and spontaneity.”

I underlined the last two lines because therein lies my point. It’s not just reading that needs to be mastered. It’s the delivery.

When I have worked with clients on presentations and speeches, a good part of my contribution is to constructively challenge the words and thoughts in the speech – the content. My intention is not to re-write the material. It is to help the client “internalize” the content. To make all of it conscious as content, not just the words on a page. It’s difficult to do this if you are the person giving the speech. So my suggestion is: get a coach. Just like a stage actor – even a veteran – has a Director to help with this.

A coach’s job is to challenge everything in the content. If you are the speech giver, don’t get defensive. Understand that explaining, say, the purpose of the speech or a line or a word, is part of a process of commitment and internalization. It’s the process to move from a level of just getting through a read with a bit of inflection to the level where we might say the thoughts and points are lifted off the page to fly to the audience instead of dully trudging through space and too often not penetrating the audience’s consciousness. The difference is performance rather than just a read.

So, the upside of reading is that we keep on track, we have an external memory (the script) to rely on and that lessens anxiety and we don’t have to memorize. The downside of reading is that without the extra work, the rehearsal and the use of the reading techniques, the read can be flat and lifeless – a fail that undermines purpose.

Why not be spontaneous, memorize or use cards as prompts? If you can do this well, by all means, use this approach. Unfortunately, too often the preparation is not good and the performance is poor. This fail damages your personal brand.

Yes, POTUS used TOTUS for SOTUS. But, because of Obama’s ownership of the content, his rehearsals with a speech coach and his use of the teleprompters to keep his eyes up and his fear of losing his place in check, we get a review with words like “flawless”, “grace”, “spontaneity”. What more could a speech giver want?

CRISIS ISN’T CONVENIENT – THAT’S WHY WE HAVE PLANS

The weekend of December 24 and 25, 2010 will be forever remembered for one of the worst weather events in New York City history.  “Thundersnow.”  “Snowmagedden.”  Twenty inches of snow in one night.  All NYC area airports CLOSED. Subway passengers marooned in their trains for hours.

No, crisis isn’t convenient. Lots of people away for the festive weekend. Little warning. Big weather event. Big consequences. So, how did the Big Apple administration respond? Badly, it would appear. But more on that in a moment.

Why have a crisis plan? Almost all organizations have a plan or plans in place for emergencies. The fire evacuation plan is the most basic example. Many organizations have business recovery plans in case something interrupts mission-critical business activities. This might be an HR issue, such as the senior leadership killed in a plane crash. It might be an information technology issue, where products or services cannot be delivered because of a software or hardware breakdown. These are operating crisis plans. Additionally, many organizations have crisis communications plans.  And they have them for a number of reasons:

1. To formalize procedures for managing an issue into a plan so that these procedures can be shared, verified, practiced, revised.
2. To reduce “thinking” time and increase speed of response, often critical to good crisis management.
3. To give the backups to the designated first responders, who might be unavailable, the “manual” of instructions to follow.

More sophisticated crisis response plans have an escalation provision that increases the response, depending upon the severity of the issue. I once worked with an organization that had a response plan that they summarized as “Get Big Quick” (GBQ) when an incident was classified as severe. How many crises may have been minimized had organizations responded with GBQ at the first sign of an impending issue? However, the organizational tendency, in my long experience, is to minimize, not maximize. They always hope the problem just goes away. Usually it doesn’t. The momentum of moving to GBQ that is lost to indecision and tentativeness has often been the difference between a well-managed issue and an out-of-control situation – which is my definition of crisis.

Well, having a plan is one thing – sticking to it is another.  The New York Daily News reported on December 29^th: “The MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) failed to follow its own emergency protocol before the blizzard that crippled large swaths of the subway system.

“The MTA didn’t declare its highest-level Winter Operations Plan 4 in effect until Sunday when the storm was underway…An all-hands-on-deck declaration should have been made on Saturday when the forecast first predicted a blizzard would slam the city, the 300-page plan says…Instead, the Level 1 plan – the lowest – was officially in effect Friday into Sunday.”

In the days following the blizzard, the Daily News chronicled the City’s tragically poor performance.  Calling out more workers for snow clearing on Christmas day brought poor results – some just couldn’t get to work. Actions taken were sometimes misguided – like sending out buses without tire chains, only to see many of them get stuck and block more streets.  Those were the operational problems. How about the communications response?

On the Monday, with the City still snowed in, the Daily News reported that Mayor Bloomberg said: “The world has not come to an end…On balance, I think you’ll find we kept the city safe and we’re cleaning it up.”

The Daily News showed in its anatomy of the storm and response that New Yorkers didn’t agree.

“Laura Freeman, 41, was among the desperate 911 callers when her elderly mother fell ill in her Corona home. By the time first responders made it through the snow-choked streets, 75-year-old Yvonne Freeman was dead.

“Later, as the distraught family watched in disbelief, Bloomberg appeared on television.  “He said, ‘It’s horrible, but take in a Broadway show,’” recalled Lisa Moyano, another of the victim’s daughters.”

Lessons to be learned

So, what are we to take from New York’s misfortune?

First, the Plan is key. Keep it current. Don’t let other objectives (like finances) diminish it (it’ll cost more to fix than is saved by skimping). Orient new employees to the Plan. Practice it. Follow it.

Second, even a good operating response will suffer if communication isn’t handled well. BP’s “I want my life back” and NYC’s “Take in a Broadway show” will live in infamy.

Third, in crisis where someone dies, no matter what words you use, “sorry” doesn’t help the dead.

EXPOSED: CAN YOU LIVE WITH YOUR COMMUNICATION GOING PUBLIC?

The two major “dumps” of sensitive communication by WikiLeaks have reverberated around the world. Embarrassing. Destructive. Worrisome. Threatening. These are just the more polite descriptions of the fall-out from the public exposure of these private communications. Governments are scrambling to do damage control and prevent another round of leaks. And businesses are not immune to the WikiLeaks mandate – a major US bank is waiting for a WikiLeaks document dump at any moment.

This isn’t new – just the volumes and importance of the communications are novel. People have been blowing the whistle, as they say, and leaking caches of communications for a long time. The solution is prevention. Simple, but far from easy. Why? It requires major behaviour change and that, I have concluded, is the hardest solution to achieve.

Leaking isn’t the only way private communication gets into the public domain. Decades ago I worked for a company whose in-house lawyer demanded that all senior management personnel get more “security” conscious about our communication. He wanted us to be careful about how we said things in our written communication, especially advice or comments that were meant for management’s eyes only. I had largely forgotten that counsel – behaviour change is hard to remember – until I saw this report about Shell Oil in The Guardian Newspaper in the UK. Everything that lawyer warned us about so many years ago became reality for Shell.

The lead paragraphs from the Guardian story paint this picture:

Secret internal company documents from the oil giant Shell show that in the immediate aftermath of the execution of the Nigerian activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa it adopted a PR strategy of cosying up to key BBC editors and singling out NGOs that it hoped to “sway”.

The documents offer a previously hidden insight into efforts by the company to deflect the PR storm that engulfed it after the Nigerian activist was hanged by the country’s military government. Shell faced accusations that it had colluded with the government over the activists’ death.

I do not in any way wish to minimize the seriousness of the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa by using this report as an example of the need for caution, even in internal advice communication. However, the example, as exposed in the Guardian story, powerfully shows the conflict between the very serious context and the bloodless way in which communication can sound many years later, particularly with the language that is chosen. Here’s just a sample from the report:

The documents even reveal that Shell discussed whether it should stay in the country in the wake of Saro-Wiwa’s death. One scenario was called “milking the cow”, whereas the “pull-out” scenario was seen as “giving in” or “caving in” which would set a “very negative precedent for the group”. Another reason for not leaving was that “issues of liability will not disappear even with a total withdrawal.”

So, does this mean that we shouldn’t commit our advice to written (paper or digital) form? That would bring the business/organizational world to a halt. And as I said, even though I was warned a long time ago about the dangers of legal exposure or “leaking” that we now see in the Guardian story, I have written many PR strategy documents in the intervening years and I am certain my language and my advice, at times, have been fairly strong.

After reading the Guardian story, I wrote a strategy for a client addressing a post-crisis recovery and I changed my usual behaviour as a consequence. I think the takeaways from the Guardian example include the following:

• We need to remind ourselves and others to be conscious that everything we communicate – memos, emails, tweets, voicemails, verbal comments – can be brought out in court evidence that includes testimony (where a witness testifies to what you said in a private meeting, for instance).
• Our choice of language is critical and will often be reviewed later in the absence of the emotion that provoked it or the context that explains it. Just look at the offers of resignation sparked by the WikiLeaks exposure of diplomatic cables.
• If you make a conclusion, back it up with some proof. I did this in the strategy I wrote after reading the Guardian story. It only took one more sentence.
• Speed is the enemy of well considered communication. Emails and tweets needing remediation are so frequent these days one doesn’t have to look far to find proof of this lesson.
• If you couldn’t tolerate having your communication out in the public domain, then eliminate it (and I mean by that don’t write it or say it – I don’t mean delete or shred it, which in some circumstances can be criminal offenses) or re-consider how you will communicate.

HOW COMMUNICATIONS CAN BOOST PRODUCTIVITY AT WORK

By Patrick McGee, Copyright 2010

So, do organizations – particularly knowledge work orgs – have a productivity problem? Well, a study that will be released in September (it has been leaked and reprinted here) is reported to conclude that: 

“In the UK private sector, staff are productive on average 44 per cent of the time. While this is pretty low compared to better performing countries or the best UK businesses, it is still much higher than the 32 per cent we observed in local government.” Paul Weekes, Principal Consultant, Knox D’Arcy Management Consultants.

 Obviously not all organizations, according to Mr. Weekes, are laggards on the productivity front. However, enough are that they produce these stunningly low averages. Think about your organization. Do you know the level of productivity of your staff?

Exploring the problem a bit more, we need to understand where the time goes. The Knox D’Arcy report explains that:

 “‘Lost time’ breaks down into obvious lost time (such as waiting for work, information or instruction, arriving late, leaving early, social chatting, taking informal breaks) and also time spent on activity which is ineffective, such as work  which is done incorrectly and has to be reworked.”

Well, wouldn’t you just like to quantify that to get another perspective on how costly it is? I can do that, thanks to another study by the IDC research and advisory firm. In 2001 analysts Susan Feldman and Chris Sherman authored an IDC White Paper titled “The High Cost of Not Finding Information.” In the paper, they developed scenarios to try to help with understanding of the problem. I want to focus on “Scenario 2: Cost of Reworking Information,” because to me it has a mis-communications genesis and it clearly  reflects some of the “lost time” aspects of low productivity identified in the Knox D’Arcy comments.

From the IDC White Paper:

Scenario 2: Cost of Reworking Information

 

A 1999 IDC study found that Fortune 500 companies would lose $12 billion as a result of intellectual rework, substandard performance, and inability to find knowledge resources. IDC call this the “knowledge deficit” (see European Management Fact Book, IDC#21511, January 2000):

“The knowledge deficit is a metric that captures the costs and inefficiencies that result primarily from intellectual rework, substandard performance, and inability to find knowledge resources (both information and experts). IDC’s extensive study of European firms and end-user return on investment (ROI) analysis has enabled us to estimate the average cost of ineffective knowledge management (KM) within organizations. The knowledge deficit translated into an average cost of US$5,000 per worker per year in 1999, growing to US$5,850 in 2003.

“A study by Kit Sims Taylor found that knowledge workers spend more time unwittingly recreating existing knowledge than in creating new knowledge. This study was presented at the International Conference on the Social Impact of Information Technologies in St. Louis, Missouri, October 12-14, 1998. According to Professor Sims Taylor, roughly one-third of productive time is spent in knowledge reworking. The other nearly two-thirds is spent in knowledge finding          and communication, with only about 10 per cent of time spent in actual creation         of new knowledge. For instance, Whirlpool expects to increase productivity of its engineers by 30 per cent by giving them access to existing designs for products. The following scenario uses an extremely conservative estimate of time spent in knowledge reworking.

Assumptions

 

• Knowledge worker salary = $80,000 annual salary plus benefits
• 1,000 knowledge workers x $5,000 per year (knowledge deficit)
• Calculation of cost: 1,000 knowledge workers x $5,000 per year
• Conclusion: An enterprise employing 1,000 knowledge workers wastes $5 million per year because employees spend too much time duplicating information that already exists within the enterprise. If we apply this finding to Fortune 1000, we see that in aggregate, enterprises are wasting $5 billion annually. And this is a conservative estimate, since many corporations employ more than 1,000 knowledge workers. The productivity cost is staggering.”

 I find Prof. Sims Taylor’s comment about 10 per cent of time devoted to creating new knowledge interesting as I think back to my early work years and time spent on a factory floor running a machine. If that $100,000 piece of equipment had only produced at 10 per cent capacity, a lot of heads – belonging to me, my foreman, our shift supervisor and the section manager – would have rolled. The company would have immediately known there was a problem and action would have been swift to get productivity up to acceptable levels. This is the problem in many knowledge work organizations – private or public. Peter Drucker’s comment “What gets measured gets managed” tells us  productivity in this work environment can be so low because it is generally unmeasured.
 
GENERIC SOLUTIONS

In organizations where output is measured – whether on the factory floor, hospital emergency unit, office, or service desk – my assumption is that for the most part productivity is much higher than where it is not measured. So, create a measurement system for your knowledge work and work environment. I will say that counting key strokes seems to be a bit draconian, but defining the output and measuring and monitoring that output is reasonable. Unfortunately, many organizations default to measuring activity, not output, because it’s easier.

Improve communications. How do we end up with unproductive work that is ineffective or has to be redone? I think we can all relate to situations where we have been told that our work output is not acceptable and has to be reworked. That can be done, but how to prevent it happening again? That takes a root cause analysis.

 On the factory floor and in other environments, this happens automatically and very often continuously (quality assurance/control). In knowledge work environments, not so much. In fact, Knox D’Arcy found that supervisors were often unproductive in terms of supervising because they were doing or re-doing their staff’s work.

 The wonderful element of factory floor work that I remember is the clarity of the communication. I was taught how to use the machine. Supervised closely to ensure quality. Supervision loosened somewhat as I built up speed and attempted to reach the consistent output expected per shift. I never made it. Even with more coaching I could not make the numbers. I was replaced on the machine by someone else and given a forthright and fair  explanation. I was then moved to another position where I met expectations and survived the summer work term.

 This happens in good organizations and sometimes under the supervision of a good manager in a bad organization. But I don’t see it as often as required to fix those productivity numbers that IDC and Knox D’Arcy have found. I conclude that the root cause in most of these situations is poor communications and by that I mean  unclear, ambiguous direction (e.g. “you get the idea” or “figure it out”); lack of priorization of work assignments (e.g. “I know that’s a lot of things I’ve given you, but I do need them all at the same time”); inadequate training or instruction or supervision; lack of/no access to appropriate information; duplicated work assignments (e.g. three people given the same assignment unbeknownst to each other).

 The fix is simple but it is not easy: clean up the communications and productivity will improve.

SPECIFIC SOLUTIONS

So, how can you clean up communications in the workplace?

There are technology solutions. I want to mention one, because when I began my research on the question “how much does mis-communication in the workplace cost business?” I started at an iSixSigma Discussions forum on the cost of rework that took me to IDC’s work for Cognisco and then back to the original IDC White Paper. Cognisco has an online product to measure employees’ understanding of their job.

 There can be systemic solutions, where processes are put in place that everyone follows. For some simple examples, I looked in my filing cabinet for work forms and pulled out a sample from a car rental agency, from a roofer, from a local car repair firm and one from a contractor who worked on our house. Each one provided clarity of communication about the assignment to be completed. And we all know that if there was a dispute about the work later, we’d find ourselves back at the work form, discussing what was agreed to be covered and what was not. Interestingly, all of the forms had my signature or initials on them. There’s a formal commitment there that would be absent if the agreement was verbal. So, yes, we could use these kinds of tools to improve communications in knowledge work. And while the resistance might be high at first (“it’s too bureaucratic, it takes too much time, we’re above that”), once the benefits are seen to outweigh the perceived negatives, then we might find these solutions to be very acceptable.

 So, what can you do, short of filling out a multi-copy work order form, to get the benefits of clarity and measurement? Two things: structure and training.

 Structure: A work order form is just a structure of communication. In using structure, we get clarity, comprehensiveness (everything we need to know and agree to between us should be on that car rental form, for instance, including the vehicle, price, timing, contingencies/insurance, range, etc.). We use structure for priorizing work in many environments, usually on a chronological basis. Staffers might relieve a lot of stress if they could say to their boss: “That assignment is number 8 on the list and I am currently working on number 3.” Some do say something like this. Most don’t. And bosses don’t like resistance. So we hear stories of bosses saying things like: “I don’t care, just get it done.” The communication is poor on a number of levels, not the least of which is around the priority of each assignment given the limited resources, like time. The root cause here is not an unproductive staffer perhaps, but an unstructured boss. And that may be because his or her training and/or the system of that organization does not encourage such a disciplined structure. Well, if productivity is important, add structure. It works wonders on the factory floor.

 Individually, anyone can improve their own productivity and that of the people around them by adding structure. In my communications training practice, I am still surprised when very successful managers tell me they’ve had no training in communications. Many have had zero training in supervising or managing as well. They learned it on the job. All the successful people I’ve worked with want to get better. They may have resistance to get over regarding a new idea or way of communicating, but if the idea or structure has strength, they embrace it.

 So, we all could improve by using more structure in our communications. Putting it in writing works in services industries and other businesses. Why not in knowledge work environments? Handing a staffer a written assignment allows for discussion to surface missing information or different approaches to resources allocation. Many work environments use this structure as an assignment contract and the parties do what I did with the roofing contractor: we each sign it.  At minimum, if a manager writes down the assignment and ensures all the needed bits are in it – its priority, or who else it has been assigned to, for example – and then uses that written information to give verbal instruction, my educated guess is that productivity is going to rise as rework or ineffective work is eliminated.

 We started this discussion with the call out:  How Communications Can Boost Productivity at Work. There are two choices, just as there are in that old saying: How do you eat an elephant? All at once or one bite at a time.

Latest Tylenol recalls – gold standard no longer?

On Friday, McNeil Consumer Healthcare announced a recall of Tylenol and other over the counter products. Significance? I, like others, had held the company up as the gold standard of crisis response for their 1982 response to the fatal poisoning tampering of the popular Tylenol product. In 2004, I wrote about this exceptional response in a column I did for PR Canada. I have reproduced it below this current posting for reference.

Unfortunately, Friday’s recall was colored by a warning letter from the FDA that said in part:

“The Agency is concerned about the response of Johnson & Johnson (J&J) to this matter. It appears that when J&J became aware of FDA’s concerns about the thoroughness and timeliness of McNeil’s investigation, whether all potentially affected products had been identified, and whether the recall was adequate in scope, J&J did not take appropriate actions to resolve these issues. Corporate management has the responsibility to ensure the quality, safety, and integrity of its products. Neither upper management at J&J nor at McNeil Consumer Healthcare assured timely investigation and resolution of the issues.”

I would like to say that this situation takes nothing away from the brilliant execution of the McNeil team in 1982, but I can’t. While they performed so admirably 28 years ago, this current situation does not reflect well on McNeil or Johnson & Johnson. Like it or not, it also reflects poorly on the Tylenol brand. Brands are assets. And when they’re in crisis, their stewards need to choose their goal, keep focused and execute precisely to achieve that goal. I expand on this below.

Primary Crisis Goal:

Make it tight and get it right

By Patrick McGee

Copyright September 2004

 When it comes to crisis, my view is that a positive outcome will only be determined when one out of the many goals is designated as the primary goal. If that goal is ‘tight and right’ it will drive the response of the organization — including its actions and its communications – to success.

 Realistically, there are a number of goals that organizations have when faced with crisis. Here’s a fairly typical list of commonly promoted goals:

Don’t panic the public.

Avoid/minimize legal action.

Avoid/minimize media coverage.

Minimize financial loss/cost.

Minimize reputation (brand or corporate) damage.

Protect the share price.

Protect the customers (employees, community, public).

Restore operations/business recovery.

Manage the immediate threat.

 Nothing wrong with any of them. But if you can only choose one – if you have to make it a tight focus – which would you choose?

 I’ve asked organizations to make this choice during crisis. It would have been better had they done so ahead of the situation they were facing. But, there we were, with good goals competing with each other for primacy – because the right primary goal can determine resource allocation, priority of actions, tone, and success.

 Does choosing one goal for primacy over the others mean the others will not be realized? Certainly not. Experience shows that choosing the right goal for primacy can ensure the realization of the other goals. In fact, almost all crises that would be considered successfully handled achieved most, if not all, of the goals outlined above.

 So, which goal is the best one to choose in order to get the most benefit for the other goals?

 I believe that it is to protect/respond to the safety, health, and concerns of people such as customers, employees and so on, first and foremost. With that as the stated primary goal, I believe that everything else is achievable. If we look at crisis situations that have been dubbed successes or failures, the pivotal element was what priority this goal received.

 The funny thing is, most organizations have this in their values statements. As well, they are almost obnoxious in touting their focus on the customer or on the fact that their employees are their most important assets. But when the chips are down, profit, hard assets, lawsuits and other considerations often push for priority. And sometimes the wrong goal gets primacy.

 So what made Johnson & Johnson/McNeil different in the handling of Tylenol back in 1982? In the admitted absence of a crisis plan, what guided the response to the strychnine poison added to some its products in order to extort money from the company? What led them to make a decision to remove the product from the store shelves – a $100 million decision – against the advice of legal counsel?

 It was their “Credo” (definition: any system of principles or beliefs).  Here’s what they say about it on their website:

“At Johnson & Johnson there is no mission statement that hangs on the wall. Instead, for more than 60 years, a simple, one-page document – Our Credo — has guided our actions in fulfilling our responsibilities to our customers, our employees, the community and our stockholders.”

I am reproducing it in its entirety below because if Tylenol is the Gold Standard of crisis management we need to understand precisely why. Note in the first section what they identify as “first responsibility” and then the goal they identify as the “final responsibility” in the last section.

Our Credo

We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services. In meeting their needs everything we do must be of high quality. We must constantly strive to reduce our costs
in order to maintain reasonable prices. Customers’ orders must be serviced promptly and accurately. Our suppliers and distributors must have an opportunity to make a fair profit.

We are responsible to our employees, the men and women who work with us throughout the world. Everyone must be considered as an individual. We must respect their dignity and recognize their merit. They must have a sense of security in their jobs. Compensation must be fair and adequate, and working conditions clean, orderly and safe. We must be mindful of ways to help our employees fulfill their family responsibilities. Employees must feel free to make suggestions and complaints. There must be equal opportunity for employment, development and advancement for those qualified. We must provide competent management, and their actions must be just and ethical.

We are responsible to the communities in which we live and work and to the world community as well. We must be good citizens – support good works and charities and bear our fair share of taxes. We must encourage civic improvements and better health and education. We must maintain in good order the property we are privileged to use, protecting the environment and natural resources.

Our final responsibility is to our stockholders. Business must make a sound profit.
We must experiment with new ideas. Research must be carried on, innovative programs developed and mistakes paid for. New equipment must be purchased, new facilities provided and new products launched. Reserves must be created to provide for adverse times. When we operate according to these principles, the stockholders should realize a fair return.

 And did Johnson & Johnson abandon these first principles in favour of other goals when faced with a number of deaths from the criminal act involving its brand? Certainly not. As Larry Foster, Vice President of Public Relations said: “It would have been hypocrisy at its best or worse.”*

 The goal definition was tight. It was about customer safety. That’s why they’re the penultimate example of getting it right. That goal helped achieve other critical goals: protecting the brand, financial/business recovery, positive media coverage, manageable legal action, and so on.

 So, is your crisis plan guided by a goal?  Does it put people first?  Will your organization stick with that goal if the price tag heads up to, or north of, $100 million?

 If you don’t have a plan, start with your organization’s first principles to set the tight, right goal the plan needs to accomplish.

                                                                                                           -END-

 *http://www.cces.ca/pdfs/CCES-PAPER-Malloy-E.pdf.  David Malloy, PhD University of Regina cites Fritzche 1997 p.132 quoting J&J’s Larry Foster.

UPDATE:

I have been informed of an alternate view of the “gold standard” that has been around for a number of years. It is summarized on the subscription only site O’Dwyer’s PR Daily, but reproduced  on the PR Watch website http://www.prwatch.org/taxonomy/term/104?page=7&from=70. Find below the counter argument:

Crisis Management “Gold Standard” Actually Tinny

Source: O’Dwyer’s PR Daily (sub req’d), May 22, 2007

As many speeches, magazines and books have done previously, the current issue of Fortune magazine calls Johnson & Johnson‘s (J&J’s) response to the 1982 Tylenol capsule poisoning deaths “the gold standard in crisis control.” O’Dwyer’s PR Daily writes that “the Tylenol story, as commonly told, is a ‘fairy tale,’” as PR executive James Lukaszewski once called it. J&J’s CEO at the time, James Burke, “learned of the tragedy” of the seven Chicago-area deaths “on Wednesday, Sept. 30, and called a staff meeting for Monday” — in contrast to the “myth” that he acted immediately. J&J also “tried to localize the problem, recalling two batches that were circulated in the Chicago area.” A wider recall wasn’t launched until “after another attempted poisoning using Tylenols took place on the following Tuesday in Oroville, Calif.” And “while Burke has been lauded for his openness with the press, he did not hold a press conference.” The problem was the capsules, which “some pharmacists would not stock,” because they “could easily be taken apart and ‘spiked.’” After another Tylenol capsule poisoning in 1986, J&J’s Burke admitted he was sorry that the company “did not stop making Tylenols in capsules after the Chicago murders.”

While the counter view of the 1982 Tylenol crisis management may be accurate – I wasn’t involved so I can’t say either way – I stand behind the thesis of my 2004 blog above. There will always be competing interests in managing a crisis. Which objective will get primacy and how will that be determined? Look to a defined process or structure to help analyze the competing options. A values statement or credo can provide such a structure.

Influence/Change: What formula are you using?

Success at work involves influence at work. We employ influence in decision-making, sales, client relations (internal and external), change management, organizational transformation, managing, recruiting, handling conflicts, negotiations, and so on.

 We all have our ways of preparing to exercise influence. Some of us are aware of these approaches and for others the approaches are largely unconscious. A way of preparing that yields the best results is to use a formula to guide our research and analysis of what needs to be in our influence/change communications.

 There is a 1960s vintage formula that I have found provides a very useful question stimulus and analytical framework through which to strategically prepare for an influence opportunity. I’m referring to Gleicher’s Formula or Equation. David Gleicher was a  consultant at Arthur D. Little. In equation form, his formula looks like this:

Change = Dissatisfaction ´ Vision of the future ´ First steps towards that vision > Resistance.  (C=DVF>R)

This was later refined to DVF > Cost (economic and psychological). The thought is that, if any of the elements on the left side of the equation are weak or missing, then overcoming resistance/cost won’t happen.

 The great value of using a formula like Gleicher’s when we are planning to exercise influence to achieve a goal is that it brings discipline to our thinking (or lack thereof!) It makes us examine our assumptions against what the person we are trying to influence is thinking, believing, fearing, wanting, etc.

 Who hasn’t heard the admonition to be client (external or internal) centred (driven, etc.) today? Well, the client’s cost resistance is one thing, but that psychological cost is a swamp of resistance, to play on John Bunyan’s Slough of Despond. From bias, to “I don’t know you”, to the fear factors, such as the fear of failure.

 This side of the formula – resistance – has the most weight, precisely because it is the client’s centre. But how many of us want to believe that we’ll achieve the influence we want to have, based on the client’s dissatisfaction with the status quo (and how much research did we do on this?), combined with our vision of the future for the client (our product, service, idea, goal, etc.), along with our gentle (or otherwise) push with a suggested action or exhortation (“now get out there….”)? Some will do thorough research (questions, surveys, etc.) and analysis, using a disciplined approach that will include the resistance part of the formula. But many will not do much more than a cursory think- through, driven by their firmly held assumptions.

 Resistance is powerful. Facts and persuasive influencers notwithstanding, change can be non-existent or slow if it cannot outweigh resistance.  For example, on the issue of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, Professor Andre Potworowski flags the resistance problem in a column by technology writer Tyler Hamilton.

 “It is, in effect, a challenge of change management… The greatest barrier to innovation comes from resistance to change on the part of the consumer… People must begin to see the possibility of profiting from sustainability,” says Potworowski.

 And every issue, challenge – indeed, opportunity – is the same. Does DVF outweigh R?

 There is a circumstance where influence/change can happen extremely quickly. I’ll take some liberty with Gleicher’s formula to explain. When I ask myself what factors have been present when I’ve seen an immediate result in influence/change that overcomes resistance, it looks like this:

Fear + Urgency + Limited Options (FULO) > Resistance.

Why? Basically the values of Gleicher’s DVF are jacked-up to the “threat” level and the cost considerations – economic and psychological – don’t have as much sway.

 How many times do most of us have these FULO factors working in our favour to overcome resistance when we’re exercising influence? Not that many. So, we have to deal with the CVF factors Gleicher identified. We can “manufacture” FULO. Many high-pressure sales techniques do just that. We can introduce some aspects of FULO into DVF. Certainly there’s an ethical line for using these “weapons of influence.”

 Gleicher isn’t the only one with a formula. Just a sample from my bookshelves includes:

 Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People – great advice for anyone.

Robert Cialdini, INFLUENCE – The Psychology of Persuasion – PhD. He has six “weapons of influence.” They are present in every analysis I do and often employed in my strategies and those of my clients.

John Adams, Successful Change, Paying Attention to the Intangibles – a change leader I found by exploring Gleicher, he asked the question “Why do so many of these efforts fail?” He found his own answer. His research led to a list of 12 Individual Change Success Factors that he believes are complementary to Gleicher’s Formula. He shared it in OD Practitioner in 2003.

Howard Gardner, Changing minds: the art and science of changing our own and other people’s minds – Harvard Ph.D. put forward the concept of multiple intelligences, and in this book outlines his 7 Levers of Change, all starting with “Re”. I’m thankful to Gardner for introducing me to a formal examination of resistance. It informs my thinking, training/coaching and counsel.

Gregory Berns, Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently – MD, PhD. Berns wanted to have innovation in the title but it was overused. He really framed the fear factors part of resistance for me.

Chris Argyris, Overcoming Organizational Defenses – Professor Emeritus Harvard and Thought Leader, Monitor Group. Argyris discusses the undiscussable: how organizations resist change by implementing “organizational defenses”. My take on it: Most organizations talk the talk, but few walk the talk.

 I will explore influence and the references above in future blogs, but in the meantime, enjoy your reading if you check out these experts. And don’t forget to use a formula to increase your strategic influence.

Copyright 2009

How to help non-sales staff sell

Copyright 2005/2009

Asking non-sales staff to sell is an issue that arises more and more these days, as organizations compete to move their products and services. Sounds good on the surface, but the request (or demand) often terrifies people who don’t do sales on a regular basis. If they are going to participate in sales activities they need help. I first wrote about this in 2005 and am updating that article here.

 There is nothing wrong with sales. It is just another manifestation of influence. If the influence is of benefit to the person being influenced, then most societies would usually agree it is a “good” thing.

 So, why are some people and not others afraid of selling? For the answer to this question, which I did not address in my original piece in 2005, I’m drawing on neuroscientist Dr. Gregory Berns’ 2008 book iconoclast, particularly his commentary on “fear”. My conclusion is that some people fear sales because they are uncertain of the benefit of the influence sales represents. They suffer from “ambiguity”, or the inherent fear of the unknown. And/or, they may, like a third of Americans, suffer from the same fear that arises from that most common phobia – public speaking. It’s the fear of failure.

 In his book, Berns references the science of these fears and notes some experiments that prove the power of these fears and their effect on human behaviour. When people who have these fears hear the word “sales”, a movie runs in their head and it triggers a reaction. Think of the fear inherent in making the initiating phone call with the prospective client, or in the “asking for the order” of closing the sale. These images trigger the socially debilitating condition – fear of rejection.

 Before I get into solutions to these fears, let me answer another question. Why would organizations want to have non-sales staff selling? We hear from clients that they want as many points of contact with potential customers as possible. We hear that they also want staff to cross-sell products and services to existing customers. Consulting companies want consultants to go out and bring in new business, or “kill their dinner” as they say. But many of these people are not psychologically equipped to go out and “sell”.

 A number of years ago, I received a call from a truly desperate PR consultant who practically begged me to help him find new business or to get another job. A consulting  firm had recruited him from a position at an industrial association because of his knowledge of a particular industry sector. He told me he had been promised that the firm had lots of business for him to work on and that he would only occasionally be required to participate in new business pitches. Well, that lasted for a couple of months, and then he was told that he had to make a far more substantial contribution to his billings from clients he was to bring into the firm – or he would be let go. This was a likeable, knowledgeable fellow – but a salesman he wasn’t and he knew it. When he told his wife, she was devastated. She had warned him not to leave the association for the consulting field. His distress and bleak prospects had such an effect on me that I use his story as a cautionary tale for anyone who asks me about a career change, where the selling reality is not fully understood. His story also prompted me to want to find a solution to the problem.

 Another situation where non-sales staff are asked to participate in selling occurs when the organization has to make a sales presentation as part of a bid on a major contract. We’ve seen these situations cause serious concern amongst these staff. Organizations that realize the terror this creates come to us looking for training/coaching assistance, to help their non-sales staff to be less anxious and to make a better showing for the prospective client.

 So, what help do we provide these terrified staff?  I should note here that the solutions offered were not derived from, but are consistent with Berns’ commentary on “Taming the Amygdala Through Reappraisal and Extinction”. (The amygdala is the brain’s fear centre.)

 Here are 3 critical components:

1. Brand/Reputation-building, not sales

Change the words and you change the perception of what is being asked of staff. Sales to most non-sales staff (and even to some salespeople!) is as frightening as giving a speech to an audience of 1,000 people. In truth, these people are not really being asked to close deals. Usually they are being asked to find selling opportunities or to contribute to the sales process, not necessarily to do the actual sale.

 It makes sense to use language that doesn’t frighten staff. In fact, what most non-sales staff do is deliver the product or service. If they do it well and look after the customers, they help to build the brand image and enhance the reputation of the organization, thus making sales easier. If the task is explained in those terms to staff, there is likely to be far less anxiety.

2. Customer knowledge

 I always want to have the customer knowledge discussion in these sessions. Non-sales staff have a perspective on their customer and some have a deep knowledge. However, many haven’t fully thought through their customer’s wants and needs. A customer knowledge discussion puts a current perspective about the customer in their heads. It often stimulates a conscious empathy for the customer. Eliciting an expression of interest in helping the customer get what they want/need isn’t difficult after this discussion.

 It may seem like a “no-brainer”, but too often this knowledge and consciousness is taken for granted. When we ask them to tell us the customer’s story at the beginning of this exercise, they can’t. We get part of the story, but not all. So, we should never assume staff have it top of mind. We should always work through the customer knowledge discussion.

 How powerful is this customer mindset? I met the top salesperson for the largest region in a particular division of a major bank. We talked about sales. He said he never sold. He just gave the customers what they asked for. Their ask which resulted in the sale would come after he explored their wants and needs with them, as well as the possible solutions and products that might satisfy those wants and needs. He said he never asked them to buy a product. He didn’t have to. They asked him. His success was based on customer knowledge. And while the monetary reward was good, he said looking after the customer was what he enjoyed most. No anxiety or terror here.

 3. Personal contribution

Most employees believe they are making a contribution and take pride in what they do. We tap into that. We get them to tell us what that contribution is and how it helps the customer. Then we ask, if they were speaking to a customer or prospect, would they feel comfortable in talking about their knowledge of the customer? Or how they as employees contribute at their organization to satisfying the customer want/need? Customers more often want to hear a credible story about how their wants/needs will be dealt with from the people who do the work, rather than hear from a person whose job it is to “sell” making grand claims. But staff doesn’t have this perspective on their minds or the right stories prepared, if they are blinded by the terror of the demand that they have to sell.

 Don’t deal with this terror by saying, “Oh, you’ll be fine, don’t worry” (this line is about as comforting as the “this won’t hurt a bit” line.) Shift the focus from outcomes to a focus on a process that will credibly show non-sales staff how effective they can be at “sales”.

The Net shortens the News Cycle

From Politico’s Arena comes a valuable comment from Christine Pelosi on 2 counts:

1. A topical analysis of  Judge Sotomayor hearings on her nomination to SCOTUS
2. A reference to a very interesting study on how the Net shortens the news cycle today

Here it is complete with the link to the Study:

Christine Pelosi, Attorney, author and Democratic activist:

From Judge Sotomayor’s hearings, we have learned that United States Senators are on the 24-hour news cycle and Supreme Court Justices are not.

It is perhaps a historic coincidence that America’s first Internet President, Barack Obama, sent up a Supreme Court nominee for confirmation hearings the same week that Cornell University published a landmark study - “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle” – that demonstrated how the web shortens the news cycle. The Cornell researchers tracked the accelerated web-based circulation of ideas – scouring 90 million articles and blog posts during the 2008 campaign for the “genetic signatures” for ideas, memes, and story lines.

They found what most Americans already intuit: the Internet shortens the time in which a meme circulates from main stream media to blogs (2.5 hours) and into the popular culture, thus words have more weight as perceived evidence of a person’s character and philosophy. The study helps explain why the role of United States Senators in this Supreme Court Justice hearing is to elevate their chosen memes (“most experienced nominee in 100 years” “wise Latina” “prosecutor” “judicial activist” “moderate” to name a few) through repetition and questioning in order to quickly frame Judge Sotomayor’s character and philosophy, capture the conversation, and build momentum to justify their vote.

Meanwhile, by contrast, the role of Supreme Court Justices is to navigate a long-term jurisprudence cycle not a short-term news cycle. Court rulings rely heavily on precedence, must endure over time, and ideally are not swayed by the passions of the moment. As Judge Sotomayor said, “we don’t rule for the home crowd.”

But before she can be elevated to a lifetime appointment to work in the long-term jurisprudence cycle, Sotomayor must endure the last unblinking look of the 24-hour news cycle. Unlike nominees of the pre-Internet era, the judge’s public utterances were captured on tape and can be taken in or out of context with the stroke of a keyboard. Sotomayor must assess the weight of her words on and off the bench to show us her personal character and judicial philosophy without prejudging cases or adding new weight to badly chosen words. In the questioning to date, Democrats emphasize her words on the bench and Republicans emphasize her work off the bench.

She has demonstrated patience, intellect, and the ability to withstand withering patrimony with aplomb. To her credit, Judge Sotomayor is attempting a candid discussion on jurisprudence that will endure over a lifetime and avoiding a gaffe that will circulate in a news cycle.

 Again:  MEME-TRACKING AND THE DYNAMICS OF THE NEWS CYCLE

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/kdd09-quotes.pdf

How do reporters prepare for media interviews?

I was asked this question in a media training session the other day. I recalled an interaction with the reporter/host trainer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation a few years ago and the “lunch and learn” he organized for me to address a collection of CBC radio hosts/producers/researchers. An article I wrote about that session – “Learnings from lunch with the CBC” – is repeated below. One piece of advice that I gave that media group, when I was asked about how to break the dreaded “message track” of interviewees, was that reporters should ask the interviewee to tell them more about the message the interviewee was delivering. My advice was based on the premise that if the interviewee had more good information of interest to the audience, then the “tell me more” prompt might get them past any stress induced freeze-up and bring out that information. If, on the other hand, the interviewee had only prepared a superficial message, they’d be hard pressed to expand that message and would look appropriately foolish. I was interested to see this technique referenced in a very interesting blog post on Politico by Mike Allen titled: “Reporters war-game Obama questions” and found at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20403.html .

Learnings from lunch with the CBC

There’s a saying in manufacturing: You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Let me apply that sentiment to media and message. We can’t get to win/win with media and message without understanding and a mutual goal. Studying, analyzing and discussing the media relations process leads to learning and understanding of the needs of the participants.

Ever since I wrote a column titled “The win/win interview: Can we get there from here?” I have received a large volume of comment, anecdotes, attaboys, and invitations from readers. One particular interaction, with Ira Basen, a radio producer and trainer at CBC in Toronto, led me deeper into how some media feel about the spokespeople they face, whether from politics or business, and their extreme frustration with the “message track.” This all led to my joining Ira and CBC Radio host Andy Barrie for a ‘lunch and learn’ with CBC staff in Toronto. Let me share how it went and what I learned.

First, the session was well attended and everyone was welcoming and engaged. I was given more than a fair share of airtime to voice my opinion. No ambush, no piling-on. Just a lively and enlightening interaction. I even had one participant sticking up for a point I made, and Ira has been supportive and fair, although not always in agreement, since we first met after he read the win/win column.

What did we learn? The trust situation is damaged. Although both camps have positive experiences, we are drawn to the bad experiences that we’ve had or observed and that causes us to distrust each other. In fact it was Ira who voiced the outcome of this in our first meeting. He said that our camp probably developed the message track (the mantra-like repetition of the exact same message) to counter interviewers who, through their control of the interview and the process, prevented the message from getting through in any form. That fits the law of unintended consequences. The result, however, is bad media interactions. Bad for the audience, the media and, I think, our camp. This was my message to the CBC folks.

My solution is for our camp to bring good stories that are relevant to the audience of the medium with which they are interacting. The media, I suggested, should help their interviewees tell their story in order for both to get to win/win. Well, there was some strong reaction to that at the lunch and learn, I must say.

When one attendee asked what I thought he should do when faced with a mantra-like message track, I suggested that one option would be to say to the guest, “Tell us more about that?” He didn’t like that answer. But I explained that if he asked any other question, he was going to just get the mantra again. So why not see what else the interviewee had to say? And once the interviewee opens up, the dam will have been breached.

I also said that I don’t teach people to do mantra-like message tracks because I don’t think they have any credibility with an audience. I train people to develop their story, make it absolutely relevant to the audience of the medium and to be a good interviewee. We coach people to be the interviewee the media like to have on their programs.

Control is an issue. Several of the CBC participants expressed the view that they decide what the content should be. They decide what the audience needs and wants. In fact, some believe that they are their audience. Andy expressed this: “What I’m told frequently when I do what could be considered a hostile interview – and I don’t set out, believe me, to do that – is people will say to me you asked exactly the question I wanted answered, that was on my lips.”

Andy also believes there is a natural antagonism that exists because the company spokespeople represent the interest of their companies’ shareholders while he and others in the media are representing the public good. So, he rejects my suggestion to let the spokesperson tell their story and let the audience judge. I argued against the idea that the spokesperson is there to promote the shareholders’ interests. I said that I couldn’t remember a media training session where the shareholders were a factor in the discussion.

What I argue for, although I know not everyone who does media training agrees, is that the spokesperson should be thinking first and foremost about the legitimate interests of the audience that is reading, watching or listening and should tell their story in the context of the audience’s interests. The rest will take care of itself – including shareholder value. But that trust thing is always there. And both sides can bring up examples of the worst behaviour of the other. Then we all get tarred by the same brush.

We talked about the rehearsed versus the unrehearsed interviewee. One participant mentioned that they really wanted someone unrehearsed. My response was that few of us go to important meetings unprepared and unrehearsed. Media interactions are important business meetings. Why wouldn’t we approach them on the same basis as other important meetings?

I asked the group if they’d had an interviewee who couldn’t tell their story – in effect had nothing to say. I took the response to indicate this was a reality and an unpleasant one at that. So, I said, wouldn’t you rather have an interviewee who had thought about your audience and their interests and brought a coherent, interesting story that spoke to those interests? Intellectually, I think that’s exactly what they want. Emotionally, I don’t think they trust our camp to deliver on that.

So, there’s a sampling of the learnings from the CBC lunch and learn interaction. A worthwhile investment of time from my perspective.

How did the CBC folks feel about it? Here’s Ira’s e-mail: “ The feedback has been very positive. Even people who were pre-disposed not to like you (most of the people there) agreed that you made some important points.” That’s what I mean by win/win. It should always be the goal.

With media, favor offense over defense

Copyright 2009

Recently I was helping to prepare a very senior executive for a major media interview. As we gathered for the coaching session I was struck again by the defensive attitude that was expressed by the participant and internal advisors alike because a secondary issue was hot and was likely to be introduced into the media interaction by the reporter.

 

The problem I’ve seen too often is that almost all preparation gets focused on the attack point. And, while excellent rebuttal argument may be built and bridging practiced to get away from the secondary issue and back to the core message, there isn’t enough core message available to sustain that move. In those cases it is easy for the reporter to make the attack dominate the interaction.

 

My approach to this is to ensure that the participant – the executive in this case – has a clear and very strong objective to accomplish in the interaction. In my training/coaching sessions I suggest participants think of the objective as a destination – something they must get to. No detours or obstacles should deflect them from getting to where they set out to go.

 

What I’m really trying to accomplish with this is to get their mind-set focused on offense more than defense.

 

To deliver on offense I believe the participant needs both the intellectual arguments and – as critically – the emotional, passionate energy to not only match the emotion of the attack but to use it to fuel their determination to reach the destination. This isn’t manifested by wild emotional outbursts. On the surface it could in fact seem rather cool, especially in the face of a spirited attack. But there is a belief in the destination that has its own passion and that is what usually drives the credibility of the argument on offense.

 

Back to the example I started with to illustrate this point. We didn’t need to start the session focused on the negative – everyone in the room had already spent lots of resource on the issue. Instead, we started with defining the destination. It wasn’t difficult to do, but did require some discussion and refinement. That exercize is the first step in conditioning the participant to think offense.

 

The next step is to review the positive story. Note that it should be a story – not just messages or facts. Story allows us to deliver both emotion and facts in a structure that can include the best interests of the viewing, reading, listening audience. It all depends on how we structure the story.

 

A technique for finding an appropriate and powerful structure that might counterbalance an attack is the concept of ‘The Other Goliath’. In essence, it means we need to find another, far larger Goliath than we are in the media’s story equation of David versus Goliath (good versus evil).

 

In another case I worked on recently, the company had already found this Goliath: threat to consumer safety. This was an alternative to the media’s equation, which was: consumer versus profit-driven company. In the new equation the company plays a different role than in the media equation. They had a good story about protecting consumer safety and could support it.

 

It’s not unusual for companies to try to find another bad guy to take their place in the equation. Sometimes the attempt is misplaced. They choose a completely irrelevant or inappropriate substitute to focus attention on. It doesn’t fly. In other cases, there isn’t any factual support for the premise that someone or something else is the real Goliath.

 

Premise needs to be proved. The story (it carries and develops the premise for comprehension) needs to be supported.

 

In the last case I mentioned, while the company had the premise right, they lacked all the supporting information to allow the full story to play out. It was available, but had not been integrated into the explanation. If I had been a reporter I would have pressed the company to prove its alternate premise (new Goliath) and if it couldn’t do it convincingly, with examples and facts, I wouldn’t have accepted it and may have dismissed it or minimized it in the balancing of the story.

 

One reason there wasn’t more information in the story was the quite legitimate concern of a senior communications manager that he didn’t want his spokesperson going into deep detail. I believe this decision came from a defensive mindset. To me there are no right and wrong approaches. Only options with pros and cons. You analyze their benefits and risks and choose one. That becomes the “right” one if you need that label.

 

I explained to the communications manager that in this case the positive story was not substantial enough without further detail (proof). So we simply added a very strong example to the story to support the threat to safety premise and to make a far better story. In fact, the logical place for the example was at the beginning of the story because it captured the problem statement for the consumer. After that, the company’s position became solution to the problem – rather than the problem as the media wanted to portray it.

 

There is nothing magical about this. As shown, the companies can be almost there with their offense.  The difficulty with getting to the best place is that too often the people involved are too close to the issue. They become susceptible to the negative, defensive mindset and focus too much time and attention on that side of the equation.

 

The other difficulty is not going far enough on the offense story. Sure, there may be problems with it, but that shouldn’t cause it to be abandoned or cut short. I tend to keep asking questions until I get enough information that either makes it go or supports finding another story. But, in asking these questions I often get information that the people close to the situation have forgotten or somehow dismissed as irrelevant or unnecessary. Maybe to them, but not necessarily to someone on the outside.

 

If, at the end of the exercize the media still doesn’t buy the story, but does give it good play as balance because it is fully formed, supported and delivered with energy, then the reader, viewer, listener gets to decide. And that can be the victory we’re after when we’re dealing with serious issues with the media.

 

As some sage has often been quoted: The best defense is a good offense.

 

Sounds good. What about investigative journalism? Different story. The best offense with investigative journalism is to communicate your story to your key audiences directly, because the media aren’t going to. Yes, they’ll ask lots of questions in research, ask for an interview with your most senior person, and try to curry favor to get the interview. If you refuse, the tone will change and you are likely to experience threats. If you refuse the interview, you should also expect the “ambush” interview, where they try to get to your executive directly – on the phone, in the parking lot, at the elevator, etc.

 

I don’t generally like to accuse media of having written the story before they talk to us. With investigative journalists, j’accuse. I believe they take a purely deductive approach – they know you are guilty and they’re only interested in the information that supports that premise. I strongly suggest only doing these interviews if a key constituency must have you engaged in the interview to defend a position. This rarely produces anything more than the media taking select bits out of the interview and through editing, using it to support the thesis. Better to send a written statement of your position and save a spokesperson’s psyche from the bruising they take before, during and after these interviews. Yes, the broadcast media will scream the loudest, but participating isn’t going to make them go any easier on you than the statement.

 

How to Control a Media Interview

By Patrick McGee

Copyright December 2008

 

If you’re afraid/concerned about where the reporter is going to take an interview, then you need to know how to control the direction of the interaction. There are three key things you want to keep in the front of your mind:

1. Own it. Consciously commit to be in charge. If this was a business meeting you were running, would you simply be reactive to the questions or direction in which the participants wanted to go? I don’t think so. You would lead the meeting and maintain a pre-determined focus. Why does this have to be the reporter’s meeting? It should be yours, even if they asked for it.
2. Prepare. Determine the interview outcome that will meet your needs, the needs of the reporter and those of the readers/viewers/listeners (that YOU decide are the target). Build the whole story – not just messages – so that you can tell that story completely, concisely and compellingly and the reporter can, at least in theory, just take that story and have a great product for their audience. Be prepared to bring the story without any stimulus from the reporter. In other words, you don’t have to wait for the questions. (I watched Richard Branson of Virgin companies’ fame tell his mobile phone story on a remote TV interview for three or four minutes without a single question from the media host because Branson’s earpiece wasn’t working and he couldn’t hear the host. So, he just launched into his story and stopped when he was finished. Brilliant!)
3. Manage the interaction using premise challenges. In effect, explain why you won’t answer a question precisely, but rather will respond appropriately, and use guiding to let the reporter know where this interaction is going. (They may not like that you’re leading but another part of them likes to know where they’re going.)

 

In my Media Training sessions at McGee+Associates I often get asked about controlling the interview: who does this well? One only has to watch television to see people who are masters, strivers and failures. But there was one situation recently that I thought provided an excellent real life example of the concepts outlined above.

 

On December 9, 2008 in Chicago, Illinois, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald, along with his staff and members of the FBI, the IRS, and the Postal Service held a full-house press conference to announce the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and John Harris, his Chief of Staff, on corruption charges. (All of this was included in the notice to media, so they knew going in what the presser was about.)

 

I’m going to take you through excerpts of the transcript to show you the words Fitzgerald used to control this interaction with the media. And if you want to watch him in action you can do that here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4691428975272263845

and/or read the full transcript here: http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2008/12/fitzgerald_press_conference_on.html

 

Fitzgerald clearly did not go into this interaction unprepared. He was in charge. He was focussed. He had a story and he told it and told it well. And he guided the media during the session and challenged the appropriateness or premise of their questions. This is the technique I’m going to illustrate below. Key points will be underlined. Any editorial comments I have will be in bracketed italics either before or after the transcript material from Federal News Service (all typos in the transcript are theirs and any others are mine) carried on the Chicago Sun-Times blog of Lynn Sweet.

 

(Fitzgerald starts the press conference by introducing his colleagues and even here he is guiding the reporters with directions and then he launches into his story which, in one paragraph, is really the essential story without the details.)

MR. FITZGERALD: Good morning. Joining me is — to my far right, is Rob Grant, the special agent in charge for the FBI office here in Chicago. To his left is Al Patton, the special agent in charge of the IRS Criminal Investigative Division, and to his left is Tom Brady, the inspector in charge of the Postal Inspection Service in Chicago. Behind me, to my left, are Carrie Hamilton, Reid Schar and Chris Niewoehner, assistant U.S. attorneys.

This is a sad day for government. It’s a very sad day for Illinois government. Governor Blagojevich has taken us to a truly new low. Governor Blagojevich has been arrested in the middle of what we can only describe as a political corruption crime spree. We acted to stop that crime spree.  (Fitzgerald, with that last sentence, has just covered off one of the weak spots in the actions he has just announced – did they act too soon? He will come back to this point/message in his story several times in the press conference and it will be easier to defend/explain as part of the story. For the next 14 minutes or so, he tells the long version of the story and lets the FBI man have his say.)

(As Fitzgerald is walking back to the lectern after Special Agent Rob Grant is finished, the first question is thrown at him. It deals with the timing issue.)

Q Mr. Fitzgerald, was this done today in an effort to head off the appointment of someone to fill Barack Obama’s Senate seat? Was it so imminent that that’s why you had to step in?

MR. FITZGERALD: I would say that we decided that this required unusual measures, and there were a lot of things going on that were imminent.

There’s a bill sitting on the desk that we think a person who was supporting that bill has been squeezed to give $100,000. And to let that bill be signed to me would be very, very troubling.

There is a hospital — Children’s Memorial Hospital — believing that it’s getting $8 million, but its CEO has not coughed up a campaign contribution. And the thought that that money may get pulled back from a Children’s Memorial Hospital is something that you cannot abide.

There is an editor that they’d like fired from the Tribune. And I laid awake at night worrying whether I’d read in the paper in the morning that when there were layoffs that we’d find out that that person was laid out. The complaint– the complaint lays out, in there, in fact, when there were layoffs, there were conversations to find out whether the editor who should have — they thought should be fired was fired, and he wasn’t, and the governor was asking whether there’d be more layoffs. So we have the governors, in these modern times, the only one who’s looking for more layoffs.

You take that, what’s going on, add it to the fact that we have a Senate seat that seemed to be as recently as days ago auctioned off to the — you know, to the highest bidder for campaign contributions. And Governor Blagojevich’s own words on the tape with a bug that’s set forth in the complaint talked about selling this like a sports agent.

Q Couldn’t he just –

MR. FITZGERALD: So — I’m just — so we stepped in for a number of reasons.

Basically, as I said before, we’re in the middle of a corruption crime spree and we wanted to stop it.

(Members of press shouting simultaneous questions.)

Okay. Can we –

Q Patrick, you said –

MR. FITZGERALD: Okay, just one second. No, no, let me just say one thing. We’re going to stay here as long as this is productive. We will — you’re not on a clock. We want to dispel any misperceptions. So don’t feel like you got to — anyone’s got to yell to get a question in.

Okay.

Q (Inaudible) — you said twice that we shouldn’t cast aspersions on people who we think we recognize within the complaint. Does that mean that all of these people are beyond blame in any way? I mean, some of the things in the complaint point a very kind of a tacky finger at some people, their willingness to play. And if pay to play is illegal, isn’t the willingness to play also culpable, even if you didn’t charge today?

MR. FITZGERALD: What I’m trying to say is this. Look, we never give – ….I’m never going to say no, because that’s just our practice. But I don’t want people, when I answer those questions, ….What I’m trying to do is explain caution about a complaint. …

Yes? (He points out a reporter for the next question, who says they want to know one thing, then outlines two parts with various conclusions and data .)

Q Would you please address one thing? And that is, when Blagojevich walks out of here today, unless I’m mistaken about the constitution of Illinois, he will still be governor. He will still have the power to make the appointment to the Senate seat. He will still have the power whether or not he’s going to sign the bill that you are concerned about.

Also would you address the fact — and I know you’ve referred to this — would you just address whether or not President-elect Obama was aware that any of these things were taking place?

MR. FITZGERALD: Okay. I’m not going to speak for what the president-elect was aware of. We make no allegations that he’s aware of anything, and that’s as simply as I can put it.

And the first part, my understanding is that he is the sitting governor of Illinois today, now, and that is not something we have any say in or control over. So at the end of the day, he will be the sitting governor.

Q In your view, in your view, Pat, in your view –

(There are lots of questions and hands waving. He sorts it out.)

MR. FITZGERALD: Okay, this — and then Carlos next.

Q In your view, Pat, should the governor, on his own volition, step aside while he fights these charges, or should the Illinois state legislature move ahead with what it’s threatened to do and impeach him? What are your views on both of those?

MR. FITZGERALD: The Office of the United States Attorney has no view. We are not entitled to any view. And the view of what happens in the legislature of Illinois is not for us.  (When Ari Fleischer was George W. Bush’s Press Secretary, he might have said: “The premise of your question is not valid so I can’t answer it. But I can tell you this….” Fitzgerald just skips calling it a premise challenge and goes directly to an explanation of the fault in the premise of the question. His response is strong and clear and uses deep, as in fundamental, context to respond. Too many interviewees don’t go back far enough and miss out on using some of their strongest arguments.)

Q What do you –

Q Pat –

MR. FITZGERALD: Carlos. Carlos and then Carol (sp).

Q Pat, given the scope and the brazenness of this alleged conduct of Governor Blagojevich, what does it say that this happened despite the cautionary tale of George Ryan?

 

MR. FITZGERALD: I just — I think it tells us certainly — you know, I don’t want to jump ahead of things. Again, the governor’s presumed innocent. (Another diplomatic premise challenge. Fitzgerald could have prefaced his response with: “Your question is inappropriate based on timing.”)

Q Are you able to tell us if, in the Tribune scenario, it was the Tribune who came to you and said “We’re being extorted,” or you that went to the Tribune with this revelation?

MR. FITZGERALD: I don’t — that’s not set forth in the complaint. What we can tell you is that that was conversations we intercepted on the governor’s side, speaking to Mr. Harris about what they wanted to do…

Q So it’s conceivable, then, that the Tribune, at some level of management, was considering, or forced to consider, the governor’s alleged extortion.

MR. FITZGERALD: I’m not going to speak for the Tribune or what happened, what message got there… So I’m not going to speculate as to…

(The following is an instructive exchange. The reporter asks about “a different matter”, an issue that is not on this day’s agenda. The reporter is trying to change the focus, whether intentional or not. Fitzgerald just says it’s not on focus and then stays in control invoking a position he has already established. Then he moves on to someone else, not taking a follow-up. Note the language that allows him to be in control.)

Q Mr. Fitzgerald, what does this say about Senator Durbin’s letter to the president requesting commutation of George Ryan’s sentence, which has only been a year of the six-and-a-half-year sentence that was imposed for the — for the crimes this office charged him with and convicted him of?

MR. FITZGERALD: And that’s a different matter. I told you the office doesn’t have a view on what happens in sort of Illinois government. We just don’t have a stake in that. To the extent the office has a view in the Ryan pardon, if we’re asked by the Department of Justice or the White House to express that view, we will do so privately. But we’re not going to — it’s inappropriate for me, on behalf of the office, to express a view where the power of pardon and commutation rests with the president. And it’s not our power — our power, and we do not make a practice of commenting to other branches of government, what they ought to do unless asked by them in private.

Yes?

Q I’ve got two questions. What does the law say about the appointment process of the U.S. Senate, you know, as it relates to the governor before his arrest? And then I have another question, is how could the appointment process of the U.S. Senate, you know, change now that, you know, the governor’s been arrested?

MR. FITZGERALD: And I’m not going to comment …I’m not going to comment on any proposed modifications.

Q Which advice would you give to anybody who would now take a senatorial appointment from Rod Blagojevich?

MR. FITZGERALD: Oh, I’m — I’m going to duck that one on — okay.

Yes, sir. (Why can Fitzgerald get away with ducking and moving on? Although unstated, the premise of the question is inappropriate and he knows that everyone in the room knows it, so he just moves on. If the reporter challenged him, Fitzgerald would give him the “we don’t do that” explanation. Since he’s given it once, he doesn’t use it. Some of the people I train worry that using this tactic would be rude. With the words he uses and the point having been previously established, Fitzgerald isn’t rude.)

Q We understand the governor was taken to the FBI headquarters this morning.

MR. FITZGERALD: Yes.

Q Was he interviewed there? And did he make any kind of a statement?

MR. FITZGERALD: I’m not allowed to comment on whether anyone made a statement, but he was arrested and taken to the FBI.

Q Was he interviewed?

MR. FITZGERALD: I don’t think I – (Fitzgerald appeals for advice to one of his staff out of camera. So for those who think they have to know everything or else someone might think them incompetent, it’s not necessarily so. Here’s a very confident, in-command Fitzgerald, appropriately seeking counsel from one of his lawyers. No worries.)

Q (Off mike.)

MR. FITZGERALD: I don’t know if I can comment on whether we attempted an interview under the rules. I can’t comment on that.

Q Mr. Fitzgerald, would you make clear just something about the timing here? When the Tribune ran its story a few days ago revealing that the governor was being taped, would you explain — and I think some of this is laid out in the complaint — did further taping take place, or did that essentially terminate your ability to listen in?

MR. FITZGERALD: Well, what I would say is to back up, and to the extent that there have been articles I’m not confirming or denying the accuracy of the articles. You can compare them against what happened.

I will say this…

 

Q Patrick, you are always very careful to separate politics and law enforcement. …How about weighing in on a matter of civic responsibility?

MR. FITZGERALD: I think there’s enough people here who can weigh in on their opinions about things, and the citizens can weigh in with their opinions.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI do not have an opinion on what actions the legislature ought take. The only opinion we’ll express is that we hope that people with relevant information will come forward and cooperate with us.

Q You’re — you live here in Chicago. Do you trust this governor to make a good choice for the Senate, which is so important?

MR. FITZGERALD: I am a citizen of Illinois, and I do have opinions and beliefs. And what they are, are for me, because when I speak, I speak on behalf of that seal, and that seal has no opinion on that matter.

And in the back? Yes? And then you.

Q (Off mike) — confirmed so many investigations — (off mike) — be additional counts added against these defendants and others?

MR. FITZGERALD: What we’ll simply say is the investigation continues. We’re not going to predict that other charges will or will not be filed.

Yes?

Q You spoke before about if Senator — you didn’t know — no awareness that Senator or President-elect Barack Obama knew about this. So is it safe to say he has not been briefed? And can you also tell us if any phone calls were made to President-elect Obama that you intercepted, or to Rahm Emanuel?

MR. FITZGERALD: Okay. I’m not going to go down anything that’s not in the complaint.

And what I simply said before is, I’m not going to — I have enough trouble speaking for myself. I’m not going to try and speak in the voice of a president or a president-elect.

So I simply pointed out…. And that’s all I can say.

(Fitzgerald is not afraid of the media. He is prepared to manage the interactions. The questions are getting more speculative rather than fact seeking. Here’s a light exchange.)

Q What will be your position — what will be your position at this afternoon’s hearing on detention or bond for the governor?

MR. FITZGERALD: I don’t expect there’s going to be a contentious issue about bond, but we’ll — Magistrate Judge Nan Nolan will be handling that proceeding. I think she can hear the specifics from us for the first time in court. But –

Q You won’t oppose — (off mike).

MR. FITZGERALD: I think Judge Nolan should hear what our position is, not through your excellent reporting but through our (assistants/assistance ?) telling him what it is.

Q How would you categorize this — (off mike) — compared to other things that you’ve seen? How would you categorize it?

MR. FITZGERALD: I’m not going to go beyond saying that just we — the conduct we think is appalling. I’m not going to do a comparative to other cases, but I just think it’s very, very disturbing that we have these pay-to-play allegations going on for years, and that they picked up steam after a conviction, they picked up steam after an ethics-in-government act, and that it would go so far as to taint the process by which the governor and his inner circle of advisers were choosing someone to take a seat in the United States Senate to represent Illinois.

Q (Off mike) — said that Senate candidate number five took herself out of the running after this was made apparent to her? Can we gather that is Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky?

MR. FITZGERALD: I’m not going to confirm or deny any names with numbers. I just can’t.

Q You do name the governor’s wife in this. And you quote her in the charges. Can you recount for us what she said and what her role was as it’s laid out in the charge?

MR. FITZGERALD: Since I don’t — (inaudible) — won’t quote it accurately, there’s a paragraph, I believe, … I think I’ll just leave you to looking at the complaint and –

Q If she what the governor has been charged with, why wouldn’t she be charged if she’s saying the same thing?

MR. FITZGERALD: I’m not going to comment on anyone not charged. I’ll simply say ….

Q Mr. Fitzgerald, I have a question….

MR. FITZGERALD: Well, you hit on two questions. One is a legal distinction.

 

 

Q Mr. Fitzgerald?

MR. FITZGERALD: Yes?

Q Sir, just to be crystal-clear on this point, you’re not aware of any conversation, then, that took place between the governor and any member of Barack Obama’s transition team at all?

MR. FITZGERALD: And what I simply said is you can read the complaint. I’m not going to sit here with a 76-page complaint and parse through it. You know, that’s all we’re alleging. And I’m just — I’m not going to start going down and saying, “Did anyone ever talk to anyone?” You can read what we allege in the complaint. It’s pretty detailed. Look in the 76 pages, and if you don’t see it, it’s not there.

Q In the briefings that President-elect Obama has had over the past weeks with various government departments here, would it be possible for him to have been briefed on what was going on here with regard to this investigation?

MR. FITZGERALD: I’m not going to comment on that. I’m not the briefer. I’m not at those meetings. But I would simply say that this was very close-hold in Washington, and on a need-to-know basis. So I’m — but I’m not going to — I’m not the briefer, so I’m not going to represent what happens. But — I’ll leave it at that.

Q Pat?

Q Is there anything –

Q Will you quantify the number of calls that you’ve gotten –

(At this point the questions are getting out of control and Fitzgerald reasserts authority with clear direction – it gives the media direction and they settle down. This kind of control can be asserted one-on-one just as well as in a group.)

MR. FITZGERALD: Sorry? Okay. After Carol (sp), we’ll go do a ring around the back.

Q Pat, one of the things I think that people out there look at is, the governor’s known he’s been under investigation for several years now, and yet he would still engage, allegedly, in this kind of activity. What does it say about the audacity of the governor to do this while he’s under investigation and knows it?

MR. FITZGERALD: I’ll leave that for you to draw your own conclusions. It’s a pretty audacious set of conversations set forth in the complaint, in the circumstances.

In the back? Yes.

Q Which union did the governor solicit in exchange for the Senate appointment?

MR. FITZGERALD: I think it’s laid out in the complaint that it’s …and again, I’m not going to describe more than is in the complaint –

Anyone else in the back?

Q Can the FBI comment on at all on the search warrant that was executed for the governor’s office at the Thompson Center?

MR. FITZGERALD: That’s — I don’t think it’s the governor’s office at the Thompson Center. There’s a search warrant — can we say where? (Fitzgerald again defers to his staff and doesn’t proceed with his answer without guidance.)

MR. FITZGERALD: It’s at the office of Deputy Governor — a deputy governor. And there’s a search warrant being executed at the Friends of Blagojevich campaign headquarters.

Q Right now?

Q Can I ask you one, Pat?

MR. FITZGERALD: Well, one more. I just want to get the — I want to make sure –

Q Can you help me with a matter of law, a question of law…?

MR. FITZGERALD: Okay, and I’m not going to get into hypotheticals that you’ll abstract, from the complaint, and start going down that road.

Q I was just wondering, is — I haven’t read the full complaint either — is Rezko going to be testifying regarding this case at all? (Off mike.)

MR. FITZGERALD: I think there’s a discussion of Mr. Rezko, in a footnote, somewhere in the complaint. And I couldn’t tell you the footnote number. But if you look there, there’s a succinct summary of his status, in that footnote, that I won’t try to repeat out loud.

And yes. Who’s next?

Q If a Tribune executive did agree to fire somebody on the editorial board, as an exchange for this, would it be criminal behavior? And can you characterize at all how far the Tribune plot went?

MR. FITZGERALD: I’m not going to say how far the Tribune plot went, other than the person who was identified, as the person to be fired, was not fired and still works there today….We don’t go beyond that. I’m not going to opine …

Q Pat, you spoke very directly about why the indictment had to come now.

(Fitzgerald makes sure the reporters have their facts straight in this premise challenge.)

MR. FITZGERALD: First of all, there’s not an indictment, I realize. It’s a complaint. So I don’t want people to understand it’s an indictment. We’ve filed a criminal complaint.

Q State lawmakers said this morning they’d like to see impeachment proceedings within — (off mike) — January. Now, I understand impeachment is somewhat — something like a trial. Would you assist them in any sense or with any of the evidence you’ve prepared — (off mike)?

MR. FITZGERALD: I thought about a lot of things this morning. That one hasn’t come up yet. And I’m not going to take it off the top of my head and spring. So we’ll go from there.

STAFF: Thank you very, much folks.

END. (Yes, the end of an hour-long masterful performance of managing the interaction with a room full of reporters. The language of control and premise challenge that Patrick Fitzgerald used is the type of language that we use each and everyday in our interactions with colleagues, clients, suppliers, family and friends. Fitzgerald has shown that it is equally appropriate and extremely useful in controlling a multi-lateral media interview. I know it works in one-on-one interviews as well. )

 

 

 

 

Resolving conflict and moving forward

An executive in Europe was put in charge of a major project for her company. The project involved multiple offices and a number of key players. She wasn’t involved for very long before she found herself engulfed in conflict and at risk. Not good for an upward career path.

She found her way to me for some problem solving and communications counsel.

When we met up over the telephone, she briefed me on the situation and the “cast of characters”. There was a lot of negativity in her description. The negative feelings she had seemed to block a clear perspective and, therefore, a constructive way to resolve the escalating conflicts.

I had learned a neat technique during a negotiating course at Harvard Law School and with my client’s permission we used it to re-analyze the situation she had just described. We used role reversal.

I asked the client to go back through each of the characters and tell me what they would say, in their words, about her. She did.

In so doing, her tone changed. She became more empathetic to each character’s situation and mindset. We explored some characters more than others, but we covered them all.

I didn’t have to tell her what to do. She was ahead of me. She “saw” her way forward. It was one of the options she had been mulling over but in which she had not had confidence. Her mind seemed to unblock. There was a confidence and energy in her voice. She was in a hurry to get off the phone and get on with taking actions to solve the problems.

All of that took one hour. She had spent that time actively “listening” to the critical players, even though they weren’t on the call. She had interrogated them on their feelings and thinking and objectives, based on her knowledge. She had developed a new perspective on the conflict and quickly selected the actions that she now knew would begin to drive toward a solution.

Is it working? I asked her later. She said this: 
“Yes, I am happy to tell you that there has been some progress in the
last week or so.  I don’t think that I am out of the woods yet, but
there is a clear improvement.”

Thinking “out of the box”, in my opinion, is achieved by adding new information or stimuli to help us achieve a new perspective or “see” a solution that is not the one that is blocking progress.

Listening, using a variety of techniques, is one very effective way to add that new information or stimuli. And if you can’t seem to do it on your own, or do it well, get some help from someone with objectivity.

 

Copyright November 2008

 

Louder than words – non-verbal communications

Copyright October 2008

The US election presidential debates. Senator Obama counted on his fingers. Senator McCain stuck out his tongue, rolled his eyes and wandered the stage. Who won the debates? The polls and the independent pundits credited Senator Obama with having a clear plan to address the economic crisis. And for a man whose opposition was trying to position him as someone without the experience and ability to lead the country, that was victory for Senator Obama. Both had non-verbal communications. Why Obama over McCain?

One of the thinkers about “body language” has said that this isn’t just a “by-product” of the speech process (Kendon 1980). He said it was just a different way that we expressed ideas and that the receiver registered them as such.

So, in the thoughtful piece Debate coaches: McCain must up game on Politico.com October 13, 2008, Andy Barr compared McCain’s delivery of his plan with Obama’s: “McCain then made many of the same points, but in a digressive fashion that was considerably harder to follow…The dishevelled delivery (my emphasis) was matched in last week’s town hall debate by an equally disconcerting style, as McCain walked around the stage seemingly without purpose.”

Back to Kendon. The non-verbal communication of Senator McCain in the debates has spoken louder than his words and his “ideas” have not gone over well with those he needed to influence.

There are many examples of non-verbal communications – demeanor captures part of it – conflicting with verbal communications. Here’s a reprise of a piece I did a few years ago in another space.

Did Kobe Bryant – the Los Angeles Lakers basketball star accused of sexually assaulting a female hotel employee in Colorado – hurt his claim of innocence because his demeanour sent the wrong message? At least one PR consultant thinks he may have.

When reports first came out that he was being investigated, Bryant acted as though nothing had happened, even appearing the picture of contentment at an awards show with his wife.

But, on MSNBC’s Right Now program, Los Angeles PR executive Michael Levine commented that Bryant didn’t act “innocent.” He said that if he were advising Bryant, he would recommend a strategy that would have Bryant “create a feeling of more righteous indignation” over the accusation.

It took the prosecutor a couple of weeks to lay the charge of sexual assault. Only at that time did Bryant become righteously indignant about his innocence. (Not too righteous – he had to admit that he had committed adultery with the woman, but claimed it was strictly on a consenting basis.)

MSNBC Editor-in-Chief Jerry Nachman commented that more than a PR strategy, Bryant’s early lack of righteous indignation – his demeanour in other words – spoke to a key legal point.

Nachman was referring to the “exceptions to the hearsay rule” regarding testimony. One such exception is “tacit admission,” which means that if a person fails to strenuously deny an accusation, statements about his or her passive demeanour can be used in testimony – from a policeman perhaps – to support tacit admission. In layman’s language, according to Nachman: “an innocent man wrongly accused will protest.”

 The picture of attitude

Even those of us who don’t have celebrity clients (or bosses) need to be aware of the impact of demeanour in the business environment.

For instance, consider the story of a CEO who is not happy with the demeanour at meetings of a particular high-potential young executive. While another senior officer interprets the demeanour as a front for shyness, the CEO finds it either a display of boredom or displeasure. Either way, demeanour is now a factor in the career path of this individual.

And herein lies a big part of the problem of demeanour as message. First, we may not know that we are displaying a certain demeanour, and second, whether we know or not, we don’t have control over how others interpret that demeanour.

Certainly different audiences have interpreted Kobe Bryant’s initial “no sweat” reaction to the allegation of a sexual assault in different ways. He may have meant one thing, but some people interpreted it as another thing entirely.

We all have our biases, which are based on prior knowledge. It’s this prior knowledge that we use to filter all new data coming into our brain.

We have images of demeanour stored in our brains, and meaning attached to the variety of demeanours: bored, outraged, angry, afraid, threatening, empathetic, enthusiastic, interested, and so on.

Vincent Covello, the risk communications expert, tells a great story that demonstrates just how this works. At a public meeting where a certain company’s representatives were meeting with “the community” over a contentious issue, he instructed the executives on the panel to sit forward throughout the whole meeting – even if it went on for several hours. They were not to sit back in their chairs and they were not to cross their arms over their chests.

Once the meeting was well underway and photographers and TV camera operators had drifted away from the front of the stage, Covello signalled one of the execs to display the banned demeanour. Once that one executive had leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, it took only a moment for the visual image makers – the photographers and camera operators – to move into position to capture that executive’s demeanour. But before they could shoot, Covello signalled the exec to sit forward and uncross his arms. The media waited, but when the demeanour didn’t reappear, they went back to the sidelines.

Covello explains that the disengaged posture of leaning back, together with the crossed arms of “closed” body language captured for the media the stereotypical demeanour of big company executives toward the little people of the community and their concerns. It was this “prior knowledge” image that the media had in their brains as an illustration of disinterest.

 Walking the talk

So, when we walk into a business meeting, what message are we giving with our demeanour and what interpretation are the others in the room giving it? Is it what we want them to read?

In an article entitled The Power of Posture, Nick Morgan* wrote:

“The way you stand could change your life. Immediately. For businesspeople, stance is an important indicator of how deeply you are engaged with your job, how much you believe in the products you are selling, how confident you are that your company will survive.”

Of course, it’s not only how we stand but also how we sit, as Covello demonstrated. It’s our whole demeanour. And the first step in ensuring that our body language matches the message we want to send is to be aware of our demeanour. When we become conscious of our demeanour, then we can modify it. (I’m still on the learning curve on this. I tend to display my emotions and feelings and am not good at poker – I have too many “tells.”) Sometimes that means asking a trusted advisor to watch us and give us a description of our demeanour.

As Covello advised his corporate clients, we can still be bored, but don’t let anyone see the signals for it! Match your demeanour with your conscious, intended message.

# # # 

* Nick Morgan is the Editor of Harvard Management Communication Letter. “The Power of Posture” appeared in the HBS Working Knowledge electronic newsletter but first appeared as “Are You Standing in the Way of Your Own Success” in the June 2003 edition of HMCL.

THE STORY’S THE THING.

Copyright 2003, 2008

Hamlet used a story – performed as a play by a travelling performing troupe – as a powerful communications tool to “catch the conscience of the King,” thus exposing the King as the murderer of Hamlet’s father. William Shakespeare knew that stories were important triggers for the brain.

Storytelling remains an important tool for communicators, and the weight of evidence showing how useful stories are in effective communication with all audiences just keeps getting larger.

In Gerald Zaltman’s How Customers Think he devotes two chapters: Memory, Metaphor and Stories and Stories and Brands, to the power of stories in how people think. Throughout the book he talks about how to tap into the deeper, sub-conscious thoughts of the people we might want to better understand in planning our communications with them.

He says one way to do that is to elicit stories from them and then mine the stories for the information that might really tell us what they will do in a given situation. (In an appendix to Chapter Four Zaltman shows how to conduct the Metaphor/story-Elicitation Process and later shows how to mine the information and build consensus maps. A very practical book.)

To support the need to dig deeper, he cites the work of Merikle and Daneman, summarizing their conclusions by saying that: “Unconscious reactions to marketing stimuli are a more accurate indicator of actual thought (and subsequent behaviour) than the conscious reports consumers often provide.” (He also devotes a very interesting section to minimizing the value of focus groups.)

And while Zaltman has a heavy emphasis on customers and marketing – the external business world – everything he talks about also has application to employees – the internal business world.

Zaltman says that “memories are stories, stories consist of memories, and both are often expressed through metaphors. Most important, the fusion of memory, metaphor, and story enables consumers to create meaning around, or to see personal relevance in, a company or a specific brand.”

I found this statement particularly pertinent to a technique we use in media training when we are trying to make our spokesperson’s messaging more useful and acceptable to the media. Simply put, we ask them to build the message platform as a story starting with the target audience’s problem (need, want, threat) and then working through to the branded solution, rather than the other way around, which we see too often in messaging. If the reporter and/or the audience don’t see personal relevance in a message, they are going to tune out, move on, and not remember the message. The message will not have any meaning for them. The story format helps remedy that need.

Stories within stories

Using stories in management is an area that needs a look as much as using stories with customers. Gaynor Dawson’s story of becoming the superintendent of 43 Junior High School Principals for the Calgary Board of Education offers a clear illustration of the effectiveness of using stories in a management context.

“As I look back, without realizing it then, the tool that was most useful to me in my job was story-telling. I was the carrier of school successes, colleagues, system news . . . These principals began to share their stories with me . . . they became part of the junior high school’s legends, myths. If a school had a success story, I would say, “Did you hear?” If there was a tragedy within a school, I would say, “You will want to know . . .” These 43 principals became story-tellers . . . at our meetings we left time to share stories of success, hard times, personal challenges . . . Our meetings became a place to come to refuel, to rebuild, to share pain, problems and celebrations.

“They knew through the stories I shared of the values that were important in their work with me. They knew which lines they couldn’t cross . . . not because of rules … because of shared stories, successes and even failures.”

If we think of our management teams, who uses stories this way and who doesn’t? And who are the most effective managers as far as communication is concerned? Ms. Dawson has shared an effective technique for improving communications.

Learning the art of storytelling

There are many consultants who teach story telling as part of or as the focus of their practice. One, whose website alone provides very useful information on the impact of stories, is Richard Stone, President of The Story Work Institute based in Florida.

In his articles section there’s a piece called How is Business Like a Story? Using Narrative Structures to Create a More Successful Organization. This article takes us through the application of the narrative form in business and describes its impact in an internal context. Near the end he points to practical implications, such as:

“Take the time to listen to the stories being told in the hallways of the organization. Here you’ll find what bureaucratic layers will hide from you. This is the pulse of the company, and will serve you as a diagnostic tool for understanding what ails the organization. Creating space for staff to tell you their stories will also unleash their creative spirit.”

And for those who might still be skeptical of the power of stories in a business environment, I’ll close with one of Stone’s examples. In an article titled Enhancing Communication Skills Through the Power of Story Telling he relates the example of the Disney Development Company and how it went about training Community Guides who would sell the as yet unbuilt new community of Celebration, Florida. 

“To help them with their task of selling the community, SWI designed a one-day training program that taught the guides 

·     how to improve speaking and listening skills through the art of storytelling; 

·     how to effectively communicate a clear picture of the power of place in people’s lives through the sharing of personal stories; 

·     how community means much more than a place, that it lives in the relationships people have with each other, and how to communicate that Celebration will be a place that fosters such interactions; 

·     how to translate the city’s many features into stories filled with human interest, and  

·     how to ask incisive questions that will elicit a visitor’s stories of community, thereby enhancing the Guide’s ability to relate Celebration’s many features to the visitor’s true needs and interests, improving the likelihood of a future purchase.”

Did it work? Oh, yeah. When development is complete, Celebration is expected to have 12,000 to 15,000 residents  (9000 to date). Some 2,500 of those had already moved in during the community’s first year of existence. Subsequent new developments sold like the proverbial small-town hotcakes – one new section sold a third of its lots on the first day of sale. In a later section about 78% of proposed units were reserved by potential buyers, again on the first day of sale. Such is the power of a good story well told.

                                                                        -end-

Zaltman, Gerald, How Customers Think, Harvard Business School Publishing Copyright 2003

Philip M. Merikle and Meredyth Daneman, “Conscious vs. Unconscious Perception,” in The New Cognitive Neurosciences, 2d ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 1295-1304.

Storytelling as Communication, excerpts from an address by Gaynor Dawson, Human Resources Consultant, in The Business & Professional Woman magazine, copyright (c) 1998 Val Publications Ltd on behalf of BPW Canada. Note: this magazine is no longer published. Dawson piece now available online. 

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WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO? AND WHY?

By Patrick McGee Copyright 2008

You’re giving a presentation to influence a group to support a project and at the end you get this question from the most important person in the room: “Are you sure you’re asking for enough money?”

Is that victory or what?

 

It happened to a client I worked with. It happened because he identified the most important person in the room. It happened because in his presentation he addressed the most important business concern that the most important person in the room had. And it happened because he made certain to remind the most important person in the room of that most important concern – at the beginning, in the middle and at the end.

 

Identifying the most important person in the room was easy. Zeroing in on that person’s primary business driver took a couple of tries. Why? Well, like most of us, my client considered this most important person’s most important issue through his own lens and the driver he identified first was not enough for the president to override his own lukewarm interest and the conflicting interests of others and support this proposal so strongly.

 

In coaching this client during is preparation, we moved up the president’s “hierarchy of needs” until we found the ultimate driver: his financial target. The proposal was then built to set this context in the president’s mind for the duration of the presentation and to show how the proposal supported the achievement of that target. And that’s why the president wanted to ensure the success of the proposal.

 

We have duplicated this success with others for their speeches and presentations by using the same approach. Its successful application relies on the use of the Why? question. (The Japanese use a concept called The Five Why’s? They keep asking Why? until they are satisfied that they have deepened their understanding to the fullest.) Spending preparation time on getting this front end right helps ensure success at the end of the presentation.

 

What about a mixed audience? We get this question a lot. We use the same approach.

Example: A client was going to a major industry conference in Europe. There was a lot at stake for the client. Her company had invested heavily in the content she would present and her boss wanted the company to make an impact. Her performance was going to be closely watched.

 

We talked through who would be in the audience. Not only did we identify audience segments (customers, potential customers, competitors, other suppliers, media, others) so that we could identify who was most important to talk to, but we also analyzed what their mindset would be at the time that my client would make her presentation. The reality is that getting 45 minutes right after lunch on the third day of a conference is like the story reader at kindergarten at naptime. Yes, you’ll have some listeners, but most of the audience will be tuned out, even if their eyes are open.

 

That analysis of the audience is important. We knew what the client was facing. Then we put ourselves in the seats of the audience. (This is a great exercise: Ask yourself, “If I am sitting in this audience, how I am I feeling and what am I interested in?”) The client had a lot of data. Would the audience absorb it? Why were they there?  Why would they stay awake and listen to my client? Why would what she had to say make an impact? Why would they engage with the company? Why would they follow up?

 

The answers to these questions fine-tuned the base presentation and the tactics to achieve the goal of the company.  Instead of the presentation being over laden with data and rushed, to get it all in without running overtime, my client knew what the audience needed and how best to deliver on that need. She set the context: why do companies need to know about this data? Then she whets their appetite: What kinds of data have been collected? Finally, she set the measurable engagement piece: How can attendees (even the napping ones) get access to all of the data?

 

So, what’s new about this audience analysis? Nothing except the depth. Most people who make presentations think about their audience. In truth, many make too many assumptions (that’s a subject for a future blog post) and their analysis is light, or lacking, or they propose to talk to everyone, instead of to those who really matter. And sometimes they just miss what the audience really needs to hear, especially if it’s not what they said they wanted to hear.

 

Any audience can be analyzed and strategized. If you feel that you won’t be rigorous in doing it on your own, get some help: a colleague or a coach. We get so close to the subject we can’t see the forest because we have our nose pressed up against a tree. Remember the client at the beginning of this post? Would the president, the most important person in the room, have asked him that commitment-laden question if the client had not pushed himself to find and invoke the key driver that would eventually trigger the president’s support? If you want it you have to know whom you’re talking to and why.

MORE BUSINESS LESSONS FROM IMPROV: BLOCKING

An educator I was media training said that a basic skill that should be taught in all schools is improvisational communications. He said we face the need to improvise responses to situations in all aspects of our lives – from work to home to the community. I agree.

An aspect of improvisation in the theatre that is also found in our daily lives is the concept of ‘blocking’ – the rejection of a suggestion that is ‘offered’ by another party.

For several years now my son, Thomas D’Arcy, has studied and performed improvisation as part of his performance training. “There is nothing more frustrating – well, except impossible suggestions from the audience – than being on stage and having one of the actors block your offer,” he says. “It can stop the story and then you have to work that much harder to get around it and keep the action going.”

We see blocking at work perhaps more than we realize. I was in a business meeting not long ago when one of the participants brought forward a creative suggestion to address a problem. It was not ‘out-of-the-box’ to me, but it was to some of the others at the table. One in particular immediately blocked the suggestion by attacking it. Some others joined in support of the attack. I was immediately reminded of the contemporary meeting rule that all ideas were to be respected. And that’s what I said. Clearly, while the specifics of the suggestion may not have been accepted the direction was worth exploring. Reined in, the attackers then let the suggestion stand and we were able to move on constructively.

The immediacy of the rejection – the “block” in this meeting – caught me and I went back to see what improvisation expert, teacher and author Keith Johnstone had to say about blocking.

“When I meet a new group of students they will usually be ‘naysayers’”, observes Johnstone.“The motto of scared improvisers is ‘when in doubt, say NO.’ We use this in life as a way of blocking action. Then we go to the theatre, and at all points where we would say ‘No’ in life, we want to see the actors yield, and say ‘Yes’. Then the action we would suppress if it happened in life begins to develop on stage.

 

“In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.”

Think about meetings you have been at like the one I described earlier. Creativity, new ideas, action were probably stifled. Think about what happens when a participant is blocked:

1.      New ideas are rejected;

2.      Enthusiasm is dulled; and

3.      Sometimes, we are forced to accept an inappropriate idea because the block of this idea is rejected by the offering party and, if that party has the power, it can impose their idea to get around the block.

I’ve held for a while now that there are no rights and wrongs, only options, each with their advantages and disadvantages. It allows me to stifle my ‘naysayer’ nature and consider all ideas. It is my structure for improvising a response to the ideas of others and it has worked in that it has kept the action moving.

Another way to overcome the ‘naysayer’ or blocking mentality is to release the ‘yeasayer’ in all of us. There are many techniques for this but let’s talk first about how it works, psychologically.

Johnstone quotes extensively from Arthur Couch and Kenneth Kenison on this: “Yeasayers seem to be ‘id-dominated’ personalities, with little concern about or positive evaluation of an integrated control of their impulses. They say they express themselves freely and quickly. Their ‘psychological inertia’ is very low, that is, very few secondary processes intervene as a screen between underlying wish and overt behavioural response. The yeasayers desire and actively search for emotional excitement in their environment. Novelty, movement, change, adventure – these provide the external stimuli for their emotionalism. They see the world as a stage where the main theme is ‘acting out’ libidinal desires. In the same way, they seek and respond quickly to internal stimuli: their inner impulses are allowed ready expression…the yeasayer’s general readiness to respond affirmatively or yield willingly to both outer and inner forces demanding expression.

“The ‘disagreeing’ naysayers have the opposite orientation.”

So, it sounds like the yeasayers have fewer inhibitions than the naysayers. Therefore, a sure way to loosen up the creativity juices is to serve a lot of alcohol to the participants. Where that is inappropriate, any exercises, games, etc. that let people get into a ‘yeasayer’ mood might be appropriate. At minimum, participants should be asked to agree to a yeasayer approach to the discussion. The more individual and public the agreement the more chance that each person will act consistently with their public commitment to act like a yeasayer for the discussion. (If they balk at making a public commitment, remind them that the alternative is to go through inhibition-loosening exercises.)

In improvisational training, turning students into yeasayers involves trying to get them to say the first thing that comes into their head without the idea police in their brains screening the thought or trying to replace it with a more brilliant one.

Johnstone says: “Suppose Mozart had tried to be original? It would have been like a man at the North Pole trying to walk north, and this is true of all of the rest of us. Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre.”

Improvisation has a lot to offer us in improving our daily communications. We see how blocking stops the action in the story in improvisational theatre just as it does in our business and other interactions.

 NOTES

1.      IMPRO Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone, Published by Routledge/Theatre Arts Books, N.Y. Copyright 1979 Chapter on Spontaneity pp 75-108

2.      This term and its opposite, ‘yeasayers’, come from a paper by Arthur Couch and Kenneth Kenison. ‘Yeasayers and Naysayers’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 160, No.2, 1960. Found in the footnotes to Johnstone’s chapter on Spontaneity in IMPRO.

3.      ‘Yeasayers and Naysayers’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 160, No.2, 1960. Found in the footnotes to Johnstone’s chapter on Spontaneity in IMPRO.

Copyright 2005,2008

EXITING THE MEDIA INTERVIEW – CRITICAL CONTROL TECHNIQUES

I have been doing media training for over 20 years and I’ve found that the toughest aspect of media interviews that trainees need to master is the exit. If you are being interviewed and you can’t end it, then you aren’t in control of the interaction and the less the control the more the risk.

 

NOTE: All interviews should be negotiated to establish the parameters (subject/focus of the interaction that you would use if it were a business meeting? Who is the reporter and what media outlet? When is a mutually agreeable time for the interaction? Where is the best place for the interaction or where does it have to take place? Critical to the exit: How long should the interaction last given the subject/focus and circumstances?). Setting the same parameters as you would for a business meeting is the key to our training methodology. Our participants’ strengths are in doing business meetings, not media interviews. Therefore, the control techniques we use in business meetings are critical to control the interaction with media. Negotiating the time limit based on how much we have to say about the subject will help as much with exiting the media interview as it does for exiting a business meeting.

 

There are two techniques to the exit:

1)      Ending the discussion

2)      Preparing and executing the physical disengagement.

I’ll elaborate on these more after further exploring the problem.

 

In one very memorable training session I was working with very senior executive in a large energy company. This person had been trained before a number of times and was experienced at media interviews. In fact he came to my session directly from a media interview. We were practising addressing the media during a serious accident at a plant. This executive was very confident and competent in taking control, making a full and very appropriate statement and managing the questions. What the executive was not able to do – at all – was end the interaction. The questions kept coming until the “reporters” were done. When the deficiency was identified, the executive quickly wanted to fix the problem in the second simulated interview. Everything went very well through to the close of the interaction. The executive said something to the effect that: “ Well, that’s all I have for you at the moment.” But then he stood and waited. And the questions started up again. In the critique, all he wanted to talk about was why his feet wouldn’t move. He wanted to leave but couldn’t.

 

In discussing this very common situation, some people say that they feel it would be rude to leave. Others express fear of being shown walking away accompanied by negative commentary. But many just do not know why they cannot leave.

 

When we work on this with trainees, we emphasize that there are two parts to the exit. The first is shown in the example of the energy company executive above. He used an appropriate line to close the discussion. We also see this often in press conferences. In fact, we use it in our daily interactions.

 

The second part is the stimulus that gets us physically moving out of the interaction. It seems as though we need our mouths to say the right thing in order for our feet to move. When the executive in the example above tried again and added the words: “and I’ll brief you again later when we have more information,” his body was starting to turn to make the walk away. The words he used suggested a separation. In a stressful situation it seems that an important cue to physically exiting is a line that calls for physical movement. Another might be any variation of: “I have to get back to….” So, active voice versus passive voice for exit lines works best.

 

Exiting is a more difficult technique than just closing the discussion. In fact, we’ve seen training participants (and news conference participants) try to close and exit, only to stop and even return to the interview spot, because the reporter asked another question. When participants ask what they should do in this situation, I ask them what they would do in a business meeting they were trying to exit. The answer is often that they would use the “stop” hand signal and a repeat of the close and exit line. Of course! That’s control. As valid with media as it is with our business colleagues. 

 

Another line that is effective in ending the discussion? “Thank you.” I think thank you and its variations work for many people because it negates the “rude” worry. So, it works on one level but may not get the feet moving. A technique one participant used on me while I was playing an aggressive reporter involved extending his hand to give me a closing handshake. The action of putting his hand out caused me to respond by shaking hands automatically, thus breaking my control and cueing my brain that the interaction was ending. He had no trouble walking away after that, he told me. Brilliant. Doesn’t work for everyone and certainly only in certain circumstances, but he drew on his business skills to take control to effect an exit.

 

All of the above has been focussed on stand-up scrums or stand-up one-on-one interviews. What about telephone? Well, what lines do you use to end formal phone interactions with business audiences? The same ones will work with telephone media interviews.

 

What about studio interviews? Problematic. So let’s look at the dynamics of this interview situation. You’re wired with a microphone. You’ve agreed to be there for a certain time. Your brain will resist walking out. (We need to assume here that in the negotiation for the interview, you chose or agreed to this venue for a very good reason.) There would be no need for you to call for an exit if the interview stayed on focus, because you would have enough new information to support your story to keep the focus for the length of time agreed. If the interviewer tries repeatedly to drive the interview off focus, then an improvised exit may be required. I dealt with this in an earlier blog post titled: What do you say if they ask if you’re gay? Essentially, you either fight to stay on focus, or you get out. The lines you could use would sound like a variation of: “I’m not prepared to get into that today so why don’t we end it here. Thanks for having me on.” Then the awkward part, taking off the microphone and walking off the set. The question you need to have answered for yourself before you go into the studio interview is this one: What will be worse if the interview changes focus and you can’t get it back on focus – staying in the interview and risking doing a bad job, or physically exiting and risking looking like you’re fleeing?

Why even think about any of this? Preparation. The best outcomes are reached in business meetings when the appropriate preparation has been done. Very successful sales people think as much about the exit (or close) as they do the pitch – and so should any media interviewee.

Copyright 2008 Patrick McGee

SPITZER APOLOGY – BELIEVABLE STATEMENT OR B.S.?

I didn’t believe any of it. Not one word of Eliot Spitzer’s televised resignation statement was believable to me. (OK, the part about resigning and the date maybe.) And for every executive or corporate spokesperson who may one day have to do something similar, take a lesson. The words don’t mean a thing if they don’t have that certain body language and tone.

Eliot Spitzer said these words: “In the past few days I’ve begun to atone for my private failings with my wife Silda, my children and my entire family.” His wife was standing right beside him. Did he look at her? No. Did he even slightly turn his body in acknowledgement that she was there? No. Did he look at the camera to communicate with his eyes that he meant the words? No. He read. He was a proficient reader. But he was not believable. I think if he meant those words, he would have made some gesture towards his wife, let alone look her in the eye, when he said them. I think, if he really meant what he was saying, he would have used non-verbal expression to support the words on the page. He went on to say: “Words cannot describe how grateful I am for the love and compassion they have shown me.” He was right. So, where was the gesture towards that representative of the family, standing so close by in support? There wasn’t one. More. “I am deeply sorry I did not live up to what was expected of me.” No eye contact with anyone. Oh yes, his eyes flicked up and down as he read, but you could tell his eyes were not connecting with anyone. Finally, he changed the pace of the delivery, looked up and delivered the word “sincerely”, to the cameras. Why? He was talking to the people of New York. As in: “To every New Yorker, and to all those who believed in what I tried to stand for, I sincerely apologize.”  I would have thought his wife was one of those and deserved some eye contact. Apparently not. Maybe she knew better. The performance never improved. He had his chance: “As I leave public life, I will first do what I need to do to help and heal myself and my family…..” Still no acknowledgement of the family rep stating next to him. (If you want to see a powerful, non-verbal performance watch this announcement but focus on Silda. She makes eye contact with the media and with someone off screen. She obviously had her reasons for being there and I thought she was very strong, not just for showing up, but for her performance.)

We all have our own idea of what remorse/contrition looks and sounds like. We use that filter to evaluate the words we hear to determine credibility and trust. Mehrabian’s analysis of an emotional communications moment says that the body language and voice make up 93% of the trust value. That leaves only 7% for the words. Spitzer gave us the words but left out the rest. Business people beware. This bell tolls for thee as well.