business presentations should be more like stand-up comedy feature
Eric Dixon

Why Business Presentations Should Be More Like Stand-up Comedy

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It’s a bold claim, but one which I stand by: business presentations should be more like stand-up comedy.

Does that mean I think they should be funnier?

Possibly.

More entertaining?

Ideally.

More impactful?

Absolutely.

But this will depend on how they are structured.

After more than thirty years of working with people making business presentations, one thing is clear: the structure often falls by the wayside (or at the very best, is the last aspect to be considered).

In fact, often the first thing that a presenter will do by way of preparation is to get hold of their laptop, open PowerPoint and start designing their first slide.

Frustratingly, they often seem to spend more time thinking about their colour scheme and which font they are going to use, than they do their key messages – which are the ‘point’ of a presentation after all.

It’s here that we can learn a lesson from the world of comedy. In order for the ‘punchline’ to land, what happens previously is crucial. The gag won’t work if the ‘set-up’ is faulty.

For this reason, I advise aspiring presenters who are in the planning stage to ‘reverse-engineer’ their presentations. In other words, decide what they are going to leave their audience with first, then work backwards to ensure that when it is presented the right way around, their argument flows smoothly, logically and coherently. It’s the best way to ensure the audience will ‘take home’ what you want them to.

As many presentation trainers will tell you – for your audience’s benefit, it’s a case of ‘tell them you’re going to tell them, tell them and then tell them you’ve told them’.

For more of this sort of thing, the excellent series ‘The Comedian’s Comedian Podcast’, hosted by stand-up Stuart Goldsmith is worth a listen (there are almost 500 episodes to download for free out there):

In episode 288, recorded in 2019, the brilliant Chris Addison (stand-up comedian, star of ‘The Thick Of It’, ‘In The Loop’, and award-winning director of ‘Veep’) explains that he structures his comedy in the same way he was taught to write essays at university.

You can listen to it here: The Comedian’s Comedian Podcast.

business presentations should be more like stand-up comedy

Chris Addison

In the interview, he says:

“Once I’d got to the show, I would take all the jokes off it and write a 1500-word through-line essay on what the argument of the show is – to prove to myself that it makes sense… I’d write a real essay and then put the jokes back on it, just to know I had the show; that I had the order of it.

“You’re not going to say or read out the essay or show people. It was just part of the process to make absolutely certain that what I was saying… had some foundation. Because on some level, people know. They can tell when you’re wandering off, or they can tell when you’re sticking to the thing that you said.

“So, ‘tell them you’re going to tell them, tell them and then tell them you’ve told them’ is a good maxim. But the middle bit is where people go wrong.”

This advice is gold dust. I’m not suggesting that every comedian goes to these lengths – but it does serve to indicate just how important structure is to conveying ideas powerfully.

However, comedy has even more to offer the process of presentation structure than this – and that’s with what the industry terms ‘callbacks’.

These are simply references to what has gone before. It’s the act of repeating a word, phrase or situation which has already been referred to, and is now even funnier because it’s getting a mention again. Because you literally ‘needed to have been there’ to get the repeated reference, it’s like an inside joke for that particular audience at that particular time.

Musicians will understand the concept of a ‘leitmotif’ – a recurrent theme throughout a musical composition which is associated with a particular person, idea, or situation. It might be just a few notes in a phrase, but they transport you back to something earlier on. And it’s the combination of these references that provides the impact.

In stand-up, often the reference itself doesn’t need to be that funny. It’s only by association with what was said previously that it acquires an extra dimension. Those who were there get it and recognise a bond – a feeling of belonging – with others who get it too.

In presentations – even deadly serious ones – we can make use of the same idea. But we call it ‘circularity’. This is where the end of your presentation harks back to something you mentioned previously (usually at the start) and is not only more powerful for precisely the reasons explained above, but also provides a sense of ‘closure’ or ‘completion’ – fulfilling a ‘promise’ which you made earlier. (This can also help provide a ‘clap line’, generating applause at precisely the moment you want it!)

To take an example from comedy, let me offer you this:

In the American film ‘Airplane’ (1980), a passenger gets into a taxi. The driver tells him to wait and that he’ll be right back, and runs into an airport. But the driver ends up getting on a plane and not returning at all. Right at the end of the movie – indeed, after the closing credits – the film cuts back to the passenger in the car, who’s still waiting, and who says, “Well, I’ll give him another 20 minutes. But that’s it!”

Notice that the line on its own isn’t funny. It only works because it’s a callback. It’s circularity. But for it to be effective, it needs structure – which is essential to make business presentations more like stand-up comedy.

Funnier?

Possibly.

More entertaining?

Ideally.

More impactful?

Absolutely.

(P.S. And please – once you’ve delivered the circularity with aplomb – avoid the temptation to give a knowing wink and add “Do you see what I did there?” Because that completely ruins it!)

 

Image: Chris Addison
Salim Fadhley, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

Making messages meaningful feature
Eric Dixon

Making messages meaningful – the art of getting quoted

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One of the core principles at The Media Coach is for media interviewees to wrap their key messages in dynamic language, thereby making them more quotable. This is what we often refer to as ‘sizzle’ in our Media Training and Message Building.

Broadly speaking, as long as the words you use stand out, they should help the journalist sit up and pay attention to what you say, therefore become more likely to be drawn towards your line of argument, more likely to use them, and for those words to stick in the minds of the audience (listeners, viewers, readers).

But – and it seems strange we should have to say this – the words you choose have to be used widely enough in everyday speech for the meaning you are trying to convey to be clear.

Well, obviously, you say.

Yes, you’d think.

However, an exchange took place on the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme last week, where the interviewee had clearly not understood this most basic of ideas.

Making messages meaningful

Michael Tomlinson, Conservative MP

He’s Michael Tomlinson, Conservative MP for Mid Dorset and North Poole, as well as Minister of State for

Countering Illegal Migration. He was discussing the Rwanda bill and outlining what he said were minor differences between Conservatives over the issue (although, it has to be said, enough difference for two senior Tories to quit) as compared to the gulf he said existed between the Conservatives and Labour.

Listen here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001vclb (2:56’53” in)

These are the words he used:

“Perhaps the difference, the navvy-gravvy, the inch of difference between us on the Conservative benches – in contrast to the miles of difference there are between us and the Labour Party – the navvy-gravvy of difference is of emphasis, of nuance.”

I’m sorry, the what, exactly?

The “navvy-gravvy”?

What on earth…?

If you’re none the wiser, you’re in good company.

Radio 4 listeners got in touch with the programme asking what it meant too, saying they had no luck when searching on Google.

So, the programme team tracked down lexicographer Susie Dent (a regular contributor to the Channel 4 programme ‘Countdown’ and ‘Cats does Countdown’), who admitted she also hadn’t come across it before.

She had tried consulting the Oxford English Dictionary database (amongst others), with no joy.  But investigating further, and with the help of the Urban Dictionary (what she described as “the voice of the people, for good or bad”), she discovered: “essentially the navvy-gravvy, within the Royal Dockyards, apparently, it is a tiny, tiny difference – used when fitting components, for example, which you need to customise, you might need to shave off a tiny amount… to make something fit.”

So, it’s not even a phrase used by the “youth” (as Husain rather quaintly put it when interviewing Susie Dent), but instead it’s tribal group slang – (once?) used by workers at the Royal Dockyard.

Even Tomlinson would have to agree, that’s a vanishingly small group.

This is not to say the phrase is without merit. The “Navvy” is the Navy, obviously. And the “gravvy” is a repeated sound which seems to be there for rhyming effect – such as “easy-peasy”, “namby-pamby” and “helter-skelter” – or what linguists call a ‘reduplicative compound’.

If I was being picky (or ‘picky-wicky’), I would say that it would have been better for Tomlinson to align his contrasting pair more closely. As he is claiming an “inch of difference” (singular) between individual Conservatives on the policy, the effect was spoilt by claiming “miles of difference” (plural) between Conservatives and Labour. Contrasting pairs work better when the two phrases are as similar as possible, only differing in the specific point they are trying to make.

But this doesn’t get away from the fact that adding “navvy-gravvy” into the mix confuses everybody.

Any Conservative Party PRs celebrating the fact that Tomlinson’s comment received so much ‘traction’ are misguided. All anyone was talking about was the phrase itself, not the context in which it was used. They are talking about the way in which he expressed a point, not the point he was trying to make. In effect, the original interview was hijacked by the use of a peculiar term that (almost) nobody ever uses, and (almost) nobody understands.

After the interview, presenter Mishal Husain admitted she didn’t know what the phrase meant either, saying – perfectly reasonably – “there were other things to ask him that were more pertinent to the subject”.

In other words, she – like the listening public – didn’t understand it, didn’t want to waste time on it, so ignored it.

Almost as if her interviewee hadn’t bothered saying it at all.

 

Image from: https://www.gov.uk/government/people/michael-tomlinson, OGL 3, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=144203208

For more on how to use interesting words to get quoted and repeated, here is a previous blog from Lindsay Williams on the subject. 

Post office feature
Eric Dixon

Second class delivery: Mr Brand vs the former Post Office Minister

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It’s easy to feel deep, genuine anger at the revelations of the Post Office scandal which has come to the fore of the news agenda in recent days.

Between 1999 and 2015, over 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted for theft, false accounting and fraud when shortfalls at their branches were actually due to errors in the Post Office’s ‘Horizon’ accounting software.

It’s a story of false accusations, cover-ups and downright deceit, which led to hundreds of lives being ruined, in the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

But from a communications perspective, the lessons to be learnt are more complicated.

Untangling precisely who knew what and when over that decade and a half – especially with changing roles, responsibilities and governments – means that an analysis of what should have been communicated at any stage in the proceedings is necessarily nuanced.

This was exemplified in an ITV interview last week between journalist Paul Brand and former Postal Affairs Minister Ed Davey (now the leader of the Liberal Democrats).

 

Post office

Sir Ed was Postal Minister between 2010 and 2012 during the coalition government, and in his conversation with Brand, refused to apologise over his position in the Post Office scandal, despite being asked more than ten times to do so:

Here’s the transcript:

PB: “Why not draw a line under it and just apologise – can you apologise to sub postmasters?”

ED: “Of course, I regret…”

PB: “That’s not an apology…”

ED: “Well… I, I said ‘of course’, I think it really is…”

PB: “Well, why don’t you say ‘I am sorry’?”

ED: “Well, I’ve said time and time again that I deeply regret…”

PB: “That’s not ‘I am sorry’.”

ED: “…that I was… that I was… that I was lied to…”

PB: “That’s not an apology, Sir Ed.”

ED: “…I was lied to on an industrial scale, and of course, I’m sure every other Post Office Minister who was lied to… er… regrets that they were part of this huge conspiracy that the Post Office perpetrated…”

PB: “Hmmm… why can’t you say ‘sorry’?”

ED: “Well, of course, I, I feel that I’m right to express regret for not getting to the bottom…”

PB: “Why can’t you say sorry? It’s the least they deserve. Look what they’ve been through. Just say ‘sorry’ for your part in not having got to the answers.”

ED: “My heart goes out to the hundreds of people…”

PB: “Not enough to say ‘sorry’…?”

ED: “… who were here tonight. I deeply regret that we didn’t get to the bottom of the lies that were told. Er… and I deeply regret it took until 2019 and the High Court case until people got the truth. And what we absolutely need to focus on now, is getting that compensation quickly. When you listen to the sub-postmasters, that’s what they want – they want to make sure that compensation is there. And I think of my postmaster who I’m working for – his case was extremely difficult. When we worked with his lawyers, we were told that because he pleaded guilty, there was no chance – so we need to get the action to help people like him…”

PB: “Hmmm – one last chance to say ‘sorry’?”

ED: “Of, of course, I regret what happened…”

PB: “No… no apology?”

ED: “… I’m sure the judges and I’m sure all the Post Office Ministers deeply regret. And I hope the enquiry can get to the bottom for those people…”

PB: “Those postmasters don’t get an apology? They don’t deserve that apology?”

ED: “Well, the postmasters deserve a huge amount – they deserve compensation…”

PB: “But not an apology?”

ED: “They deserve a huge apology from the Post Office…”

PB: “But not from you?”

ED: “… from, from Fujitsu, from all the people who led this conspiracy of lies against them, and frankly the whole British public.”

PB: “Alright – Sir Ed Davey, thank you very much.”

ED: “Thank you.”

In a post on ‘X’ (formerly Twitter), journalist Michael Crick described it as “a truly dreadful interview” which “will be used by media trainers for ever as a model of what not to do.”

However, to be fair to Davey, it now seems that it was only in 2015 (3 years after he left the role) that the situation became clearer, when a whistleblower who used to work for Fujitsu appeared on the BBC’s Panorama programme, indicating that there was a problem with the Horizon system. And it was from 2015 onwards, on this evidence, that the Post Office prosecution of sub-postmasters stopped.

So, Ed Davey’s lack of an apology and recourse to the words “regret”, “deeply regret” and “my heart goes out to…” indicates how careful he feels he needs to be not to admit culpability. I’ve written about the problem with making public apologies before – back in April 2021 (‘Why sorry is the hardest word’). The message here is the same: unlike a simple expression of regret, an apology would imply Davey was at fault. It’s likely he would have had legal advice suggesting a response along these lines too. As my crisis communications colleague Catherine Cross puts it, he has to “balance the implications for the court of law with the court of public opinion.”

Indeed, in a more recent post, Michael Crick said “And if Davey said that on legal advice… I’d love to know who his lawyers were – partly so I and others can avoid them if we ever get into trouble.”

It’s true, the leader of the Liberal Democrats comes across very badly in this interview. He appears awkward, untrustworthy and evasive. As his PR advisors would tell him, “the optics don’t look good”.

The problem is, the wave of public anger currently breaking on the shore of the news agenda can engulf the reality of just what it was genuinely possible to say at any one moment in the timeline of this story. Including, as we’ve just seen, right up to the present day.

Hostage to Fortune Feature
Lindsay Williams

Avoid a Hostage to Fortune Unless You Have Really Thought About It

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It is a simple but hard-to-follow rule for many leaders: avoid committing or promising something in the future, that may not be deliverable.

Rishi Sunak’s political difficulties today are in part created by his bold decision to ignore this rule.

Hostage to Fortune

Of the Prime Ministers five pledges (easily found here on the government website), two are particularly definite and easily failed.

One was to halve inflation by the end of the year and the other was to ‘stop the small boats’.

Most commentators back at the beginning of the year thought halving inflation was so likely to happen that the government was not going to be required to do much. It was predicted to happen whatever the Treasury did (although that looked less certain by the summer). At the time it was probably a safe commitment.

However, pledging to ‘stop the boats’ may in hindsight seem a schoolboy error.  Indeed, a classic ‘hostage to fortune’. Everyone understood it would be difficult to do and it is so specific that there is no room to fudge.  ‘Stop the boats’ appears to mean to completely and utterly stop all the small boats bringing migrants across the channel to the UK.

[It’s worth noting that the ‘stop the boat’ slogan was copied from Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott in 2013.]

A hostage to fortune can be defined as:

An act, commitment, or remark which is regarded as unwise because it invites trouble or could prove difficult to live up to.

And while some leaders, like the Prime Minister, will flout this guidance fully knowing the risk they are taking, there are many other instances where people casually commit to future numbers or ideas without realising that they may live to seriously regret it. Phrases like ‘we want to be number one in the market’, or ‘we expect to win 30% of the market’ are the sort of casual business commitments that can cause negative coverage.

As a rule, the PR advice for businesses is not to release any forward-looking numbers. Internal business targets are best not shared with journalists, it is too easy to check back later and find they have been missed. Missing a target can be perceived as much more negative than it really is.

In fact, hard and fast commitments of any sort should only be shared if some time and effort has gone into making sure the promise is deliverable.

Of course, none of that means that journalists won’t ask questions that try to elicit a commitment: often this can harden up a soft story. As a spokesperson, you should be able to spot that happening and sidestep any such request.

We have written before about the ‘hostage to fortune’ issue, which particularly dogged the government during the pandemic. You can read that blog here.

Image: Rishi Sunak – Flickr
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

 

 

Media Interviews Feature
Lindsay Williams

The Many Types of Media Interviews, and How Training Helps

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The curse of knowledge means that while every press officer understands the different types of interviews and the risks or lack of risk attached to each, a surprising number of spokespeople are much less clear. My experience is a little clarity on this goes a long way.

Here is my list of the different roles an interviewee plays and how Media Training can help reduce both risk and stress as well as increase the effectiveness of any media interaction.

The Players

These are the interviewees who are in charge in some way. The CEO, the Director General, anyone on the senior leadership team, one could include government ministers or union leaders. For journalists, securing interviews with these people is a very valuable prize. These leaders tend to come out rarely and only when there is something they want to talk about. For the interviewee, these are the highest risk media interviews, as journalists feel they have to fulfil their role of holding these people to account.

Media Interviews

RMT Leader Mick Lynch: If you are the boss the questions will always be challenging

Why Media Training?

Most players will have had basic media training earlier in their careers. They will also be well supported by PR professionals. The role of Media Training here is usually very specific to an announcement or event. As trainers, we will be role-playing the interviews as realistically as we can, be involved with the analysis of where the messaging works or doesn’t, and help identify the tough questions.

The Experts

Expert interviewees are for me the other end of the continuum from the players. Experts are usually free to share their opinions about their subject without any risk. What’s more, it is in the journalist’s interest to help the expert look good. They will never ask an expert the same question five times. You might think there was little need for Media Training but in fact, we teach dozens of experts a year how to be a good media commentator in press, web or broadcast interviews.

Why Expert Media Training?

Experts suffer greatly from the curse of knowledge. They will be prone to using technical language. Media Training can quickly teach people how to organise their insight so it can be easily understood in 3 minutes on BBC Radio Five Live or Sky Breakfast show.

Market Commentators

For me, as a former financial journalist, market commentators are an important subset of expert interviewees. There is a huge daily need for people who can comment, mostly on television, about the markets. It can be the trends of the day or a discussion of particular stocks or sectors. Bloomberg, CNBC, Reuters, Asset TV and others will all be booking multiple experts a day. Being a good market commentator can enhance your career, even get you headhunted. TV face time might be part of your salary negotiations. At first glance the risks are slim but actually, there are plenty of rules around financial reporting and misspeaking can on occasion ‘move the market’.

Media Interviews

Being a good market commentator can enhance your career, even get you headhunted

Why Market Commentator Media Training?

Here again, we tend to only be involved once to explain what the producers and bookers are looking for, how to handle questions that you don’t know the answer to and above all how to keep things interesting. I regularly hear market commentators whom I trained once or twice five or ten years ago. Once launched these experts are likely to find media appearances just part of the day job.

Profile interviews

Profile interviews are often considered by PRs as low risk. They tend to be friendly, and the interviewee is mostly talking about themselves. However, I am always keen to urge caution and preparation for these occasions.

Why Profile Interview Media Training?

A few role-play interviews with playback and feedback will quickly uncover things that might be misinterpreted, things that might be used by opponents or simply that need better explanation. If you are hoping for high office later in life, I think you need to give serious thought to the stories you want to tell about yourself, and media training is the fastest way to do that.

Crisis Interviews

There is a whole subset of media training that deals with crisis preparedness and crisis management. Basically, any organisation needs at least three trained spokespeople who can stand in front of the cameras in the event of a crisis. One is simply not enough. Crises can relate to fraud or wrongdoing, data loss, fires or other disasters. But all PRs know you need to ‘get out early’ and put a face to an organisations concern and response. Getting out early does not usually allow time for training, so those three spokespeople need to be trained in advance. The interviews are likely to be relatively simple but emotionally demanding and getting the tone right is essential.

Crisis Preparedness: The Role of Media Training

The role of Media Training here is simple. We can give the spokespeople some very clear dos and don’ts and get them used to the process of being questioned. Here again, it is a relatively small investment in time and money that can save huge stress and even reputations if things do, one day, go badly wrong.

Lived Experience

As a team, we have coached dozens of people who have ‘lived experience’ of some important issues from diabetes to adoption. I trained a man dying of lung cancer who had been signed up to explain the perils of smoking. I trained another whose daughter died of carbon monoxide poisoning as a student; he asked me to help him work out how to tell the story without breaking down. These are all people who become interviewees for a cause they believed in but still needed support to be able to tell a compelling story quickly and clearly.

Lived Experience Media Training

The role of Media Training here is very much coaching, helping people to say what they want to say. They may also be asked questions that they are not equipped to answer, and knowing how to handle these builds confidence.

Witness

Finally, there is a category of media interviewees that need no training: eyewitnesses. If you are a witness to something newsworthy and a journalist wants your account, you will need no training to simply say what you saw.

What did I miss?

If you think you or your team might benefit from our bespoke Media Training ring us on 020 7099 2212 or email enquiries@themediacoach.co.uk to set up a scoping call.

 

Images:

Still image from YouTube
Composite created by The Media Coach

Lindsay Williams

Latest Gaffe: Another Hot-Mic Incident

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James Cleverly last week added his name to a long list of senior politicians who said something unwise, only to find it had been caught on microphone and made it to the front pages.

latest gaff

It all began when Labour MP Alex Cunningham asked Rishi Sunak at Prime Minister’s Questions, ‘Why are 34% of children in my constituency living in poverty?’

Cleverly was heard – at least, some people thought they heard him – responding sotto voce with: ‘Because it’s a shit-hole.’

Numerous attempts have been made to clean up the audio caught by the House of Commons microphones but technology has not conclusively proved whether the offensive comment was about the constituency in question, Stockton, or was in fact, as Cleverly later claimed, unparliamentary language aimed at Alex Cunningham.

Either way, it has been a talking point in Stockton and at Westminster, although I doubt many other people care much.

The Guardian decided to go and ask people in the street in Stockton to voice their disgust at the besmirching of their town, only to find that most people they spoke to agreed with the Home Secretary.

This latest mini-drama is in the traditions of a long line of senior politicians sharing what they really think in a way that is caught on mic, and unexpectedly becomes public. The damage is that it shows how they really think, in this case about poverty and the hollowed-out towns beyond the commuter belt.

The Week calls these hot-mic incidents, and the latest edition lists some of the most famous (although the article is behind a paywall). These include:

1993 John Major’s comments about ‘those bastards in the cabinet’.

2010 Gordon Brown describing Gillian Duffy, a Rochdale pensioner, as a ‘bigoted woman’ after she grilled him on camera about immigration.

David Cameron as PM had a number of such incidents, of which describing the leaders of Afghanistan and Nigeria as ‘fantastically corrupt’ while in conversation with the Queen was probably the worst. Although humming a cheerful tune after telling the world he was resigning as PM was also pretty crass.

In 2019 Jeremy Corbyn was seen mouthing ‘stupid woman’ at Theresa May during a feisty session in the Commons. It was enough to make the headlines even though no one actually heard it.

Just last year MP Heather Wheeler had to apologise after calling Birmingham and Blackpool ‘godawful places’.

And Education Minister Gillian Keegan had to apologise 2 months ago for using the F-word when complaining after an interview about the concrete in schools crisis.

The clear PR lesson of these recurring situations is to properly apologise and try to move on. Gillian Keegan did that well and it worked. Cleverly got it all wrong by first denying and then coming up with the story of criticising the man not the town. The prevarication just ensures the story runs for another couple of days. Gordon Brown in 2010 did the apology bit quite well but the damage was too great and many commentators believe the hot-mic influenced the election result.

American politicians, the Royals and many others have been caught in the same way and as far as journalists are concerned, it all provides some light relief from wars, murder and climate change. But rarely are these incidents significant (The Gordon Brown faux pas is, in my mind, the exception).

For business people the risks of pithy asides becoming public is much less, there are way less microphones around for one thing. However, it is another cautionary tale for all those in the public eye.

 

Photo: James Cleverly, Flickr

 

 

answer a journalist's question feature
Lindsay Williams

Why Sometimes You Cannot and Should Not Answer a Journalist’s Question

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‘I don’t want to be like one of those politicians that never answers a question.’

It is something we hear from almost everybody we media train. And we understand why so many would hate to feel they were behaving ‘like a politician’.

In fact, once trained by us, any spokesperson will know that one of our rules is you should always say something to a journalist’s question, even if it is simply ‘That is not a question for me’ or ‘Sorry, that is not something I can reveal today’. In business interviews as opposed to political interviews, this is nearly always enough to stop a journalist pursuing the issue.

In this post, I will explain why, despite the immediate viewers reaction,  sometimes the only sensible thing to do is not answer a question. Last week, we saw a crystal-clear example of this when BBC Political editor Chris Mason spoke to newly appointed foreign secretary and former Prime Minster, David Cameron.

answer a journalist's question

In this short clip (the second on the web page), Mason asks Cameron about his commercial activities after leaving office, in particular lobbying for the bank Greensill. Mason reminds Cameron that a parliamentary enquiry found he had shown a ‘significant lack of judgement’ in sending more than 60 text messages to former colleagues in the government, lobbying on behalf of a bank that later collapsed. If you need a reminder of this story the Guardian has a good summary here.

The clip shows that Cameron first ignores the Greensill point answering a different part of the question, about what he has been doing since stepping down as PM. And then at the second time of answering, he says: ‘I think all those things were dealt with by the Treasury Select Committee and by other enquiries at the time. As far as I am concerned all that has been dealt with in the past and I now have one job as Britain’s Foreign Secretary …’

This is a classic example of a politician refusing to properly address a question, probably annoying half of the viewers.  But let’s look at the other options.

Cameron could have said any of the following …

‘I agree I showed a lack of judgement and I apologise ….’

‘I understand that some people felt my behaviour was not as it should be, but I was operating within the rules …’

‘At the time Greensill was making a contribution to the UK economy and I have no regrets…’

There are many more options but any one of them would have guaranteed 24 hours of headlines about an issue that most people can, at the moment, only barely remember. This would be disastrous at the start of his new job as Foreign Secretary, and could easily dominate his time in the post.

Cameron is a skilled media operator; he knew this question was coming and will continue to come. He knows exactly how he will handle it. He holds a poker face, he shows no embarrassment (or even amusement), he does not change his reasonable tone, but he says absolutely nothing quotable about Greensill or his judgement. In short, he refuses to answer or even address the question.

As a result, there were no headlines, almost no comments and the news coverage was dominated by other aspects of the story.

He would be naive or a fool to do anything else.

 

Photo from screengrab

creativity feature
Eric Dixon

Creativity: Why Your First Idea is Probably Your Worst Idea

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Let’s face it, being creative is hard.

Not only do you have to avoid falling into the trap of thinking in tired old ways (tricky enough in itself), you have to come up with new stuff into the bargain.

It can take ages and be genuinely difficult. Plus, it’s a process which might be carried out in vain anyway – because it’s perfectly possible (and sometimes likely) that you will fail to think of anything truly original at all.

Creativity

Hours of time and effort. Wasted.

All of which explains why, when you come across a problem that needs solving, seizing upon an initial thought (any initial thought?), and seeing it as the solution is so tempting.

To be fair, what you’ve arrived at might be a solution. But it’s highly unlikely to be the best one.

This reminds me of an anecdote from columnist and food writer Giles Coren about a conversation with his father, writer and satirist Alan Coren:

“When I was about 11 and doing creative writing at school, I would always go to my dad and say, ‘What shall I write?’. He would always say, ‘Whatever the first thing is that comes into your head, don’t write that because that’s what everyone will write. When the second idea comes into your head, don’t write that either because that’s what the bright kids will write. Wait for the third idea, because that’s the one that only you will do’.”

Notice how passive Coren suggests the process is. He describes an idea as something which “comes into your head”. Rather than working hard at it, focussing on the issue at hand and forcing yourself to find an answer, it seems more likely that a solution will arrive while you’re doing something else: going for a walk, making the lunch, even having a nap. (Comedian Sara Pascoe says she gets many of her ideas during that dream-like state just before falling asleep or as she wakes up; fellow comic Paul Sinha says he finds most of them arrive during long car journeys after gigs). As Hamlet recognised, “thinking too precisely on the event” – to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare’s own creative output – can lead to its own pitfalls.

The trouble with ideas which arrive straight away is that they are often clunkingly predictable. We’ve all seen films, plays or TV dramas where hasty, ill-considered writing has led to ploddingly obvious dialogue which only exists to explain the plot. Such writing is often described as being too ‘on the nose’. Compare the pedestrian “I’m going to threaten him so that he does what I want” with the shorter and much more sophisticated “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse”.

I went to see the musical ‘Blood Brothers’ the other week, and watched two hours of class-ridden angst and tragedy, only to have the narrator say at the end: “And do we blame superstition for what came to pass? / Or could it be what we, the English, have come to know as ‘class’?” CLUNK! Even Willy Russell might agree that deleting those last two ‘on the nose’ lines would now be preferable.

This is what worries me about Artificial Intelligence. In the search for a quick solution, a few themes pumped into ChatGPT will produce a result in seconds. But there’s little or no sophistication involved. What’s more, this problem is likely to get worse, not better. If AI will one day generate most of the content we consume, its own future source material will be the very stuff it has already created: a vicious circle of anti-creativity.

Nevertheless, the element of waiting – even if you’re carrying out some other task while you do so – would appear to be an essential part of the mix. Actor, comedian, writer, producer and all-round creative genius John Cleese certainly thinks so. He writes in his book ‘Creativity – a short and cheerful guide’:

“Leaving a question unresolved, just leaving it open, makes some people anxious. They worry. And if they can’t tolerate that mild discomfort, they go ahead and rush the decision. They probably fool themselves that they’re being decisive. But creative people are much better at tolerating the vague sense of worry that we all get when we leave something unresolved.”

So, it’s partly a question of being prepared to wait, but also being comfortable doing so. To become more creative, we need to get better at putting up with the unease of not arriving at the answer. Not immediately, anyway.

Others have written here and here, about the benefits of waiting once an initial idea has formed.

Clearly, if you’ve got a deadline coming up, and that speech needs finishing tomorrow, this relaxed approach may be a luxury you simply don’t have. Which is why leaving time to prepare your material means not only leaving time to write it, but to wait for ideas to come to you as well.

That’s the thing: it’s supposed to be hard. That should not come as a surprise to any of us – but we should actually relish the fact that it is time consuming.

Because if it isn’t, we’re probably not being creative enough.

 

Image: iStock – Mariia Vitkovska

Chat Show Host Feature
Lindsay Williams

Prime Minister as Chat Show Host: The Sunak Musk interview

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I watched this interview with a huge sense of cynicism. I almost wondered if Sunak is anticipating losing the next election and fancies a job as a chat show host. Labour suggested he was just angling for a job with the billionaire.  Others made the point that with the war in the Middle East as well as Ukraine, not to mention the cost-of-living crisis and a year of extreme weather events even in the UK, one would think the PM would have something more pressing to do with his time.

However, having sat through the whole 51 minutes I quickly found myself really enjoying it. Musk was a somewhat irritating interviewee as he did a lot of mumbling and stumbling and often needed a bit of helping out. I guess being a genius doesn’t mean you are good at everything.

Sunak on the other hand, apart from being a bit giggly, came across as very assured, very well-briefed and impressively seemed to know the names of everyone in the room! He also appeared to know all the film references that Musk used which is more than I did.

Sunak constantly referred to his own influence as Prime Minister saying repeatedly, ‘my job is …’ in reference to regulation and the use of AI in government. He was able to give the impression that the UK government was a world leader in AI, innovation and his own particular passion, AI-enabled education.  It was all a bit obviously self-serving, but it was relatively well done.

It has to be said, there wasn’t a challenging question in sight and Sunak did give Musk a number of gushing compliments. This was certainly not journalism, but then it did not ever pretend to be.

If Elon Musk was not one of the world’s richest men and most far-sighted and successful technologist, he would have been a very unimpressive interviewee.

New Scientist writer Jeremy Hsu was among those frustrated by the superficiality of the chat. He pointed out the chat focused heavily on utopian futures and theoretical risks of superhuman intelligence, instead of actual harms caused by AI systems already deployed by tech companies.

Andrew Rogoyski, an AI expert at the University of Surrey, told the Guardian : “It seemed odd to juxtapose the success of the AI summit in achieving international consensus with the views of a single tech billionaire, especially as the conversation focused in the ages-old AI meme of killer robots and job losses.”

But as a lay person, at the end of the interview, I had a much clearer understanding of why we might soon have to pay for social media and why this might be a good thing (it will deter the bots). I understood for the first time that all robots must have an off switch or a ‘safe word’ which was a completely new idea to me. I was forced to think about the huge potential of AI in education in a way I had not come across before and I am entertained by the idea that AI might deliver a world where ‘no job is needed’ and we ‘won’t have universal base income, we’ll have universal high income’.  And I had not woken up to the huge risk that in the next 12 months, AI may be disrupting democracy at the neighbourhood level all the way up to national general elections in a long list of major countries including the US, UK, India, and Indonesia.

From a media strategy point of view, I have always been hugely sceptical about long-form interviews because it greatly increases the opportunity for serious gaffes. But here the long-form worked for both parties and the audience. It gave space to allow Musk time to think and find the words, in a way three minutes on Ian King (Sky) or CNBC would not have done.

And while this was not a deep dive into the world of AI, it was a very accessible primer by a Prime Minister and a rock-star entrepreneur. It had pace and humour, was delivered without jargon, and it was anything but boring.

Image from YouTube

 

Christine Lagarde Feature
Lindsay Williams

Lunch with Lagarde: the Art of the Profile Interview

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I love a profile interview and this week’s Lunch with the FT guest is one of the most impressive female figures on the world stage: Christine Lagarde, current head of the ECB.

Christine Lagarde

Christine Lagarde

Martin Arnold’s article is behind the FT paywall but if you do have time, opportunity and inclination, I would urge you to read it. Beautifully written and a fascinating insight into a world leader.

But for those who can’t read it all, let me pick out a few highlights and explain the media training learning point.

Lagarde knows how to show humility without looking weak.

…I (Arnold) bring up an early faux pas when she was asked at an ECB press conference for her reaction to rising alarm over COVID-19 deaths in northern Italy, which was pushing up the “spread” between Italian and German borrowing costs. Her ill-judged answer was: “We are not here to close spreads.”

The remark had an instant effect on Bond markets, which fell sharply as investors priced in the likelihood that Lagarde was moving away from the commitment, famously made by her predecessor, to defend the Euro ‘whatever it takes.’

Lagarde points out in the FT that her comment was technically accurate but she indicates she knows it was a mistake without actually saying so –  which would have made a quote and possibly a headline. Instead, she shares an anecdote.

“I talked to colleagues and friends after that,” she says, listing Jay Powell, chair of the US Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, his predecessor who is now Treasury Secretary, and Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England, among those she called, as well as (her predecessor) Draghi. “Most of them, not all of them, but most of them said: ‘Welcome to the club, we all did the same thing. We all screwed up’.”

I cannot but believe this was a rehearsed anecdote. Lagarde almost certainly guessed this question would be asked. The answer comes close to admitting a mistake while both excusing it and ensuring the reader understands she was in good company. If I was deeply cynical, I would say even using an expletive to ensure the context is quoted.

A good media performer uses real stories to illustrate key points. In this case the point was: ‘It may have been unwise, but this is the sort of thing that happens to all central bankers.’

Share something from your youth

In preparing clients for profile interviews, I am always urging them to share little nuggets from their personal lives; details that helped shape them as leaders. Sadly, most cannot remember anything interesting or are reluctant to share. Lagarde has her stories to hand and deploys several, all of which flatter her but in a way that is subtle.

Mother anecdote

One example is the role model her mother provided.

Her mother Nicole became “a huge inspiration”, she says, sounding a touch emotional. Nicole raised four children on her own after Lagarde’s father Robert died when she was only 16, while also “multitasking to the extreme” by working as a language professor, riding horses, racing rally cars, singing in a choir and sewing dresses. “She always wanted to be elegant,” Lagarde says.

This is a wholly positive story about the influence of a strong, hard-working and elegant woman. Plenty of reflected glory here.

Swimming anecdote

Then there is there is some details about her teenage years.

“A member of France’s synchronised swimming team in her youth, the 67-year-old still uses the breathing techniques she learned to deal with stress. “When I hear some governors, I go,” she inhales deeply using her abdomen. “And then you smile.”

This is a story that shows Lagarde was always a disciplined high achiever, but it is still relatable. She demonstrates she is not unfeeling; she does get irritated and does need to exercise self-control.

There is plenty more in this vein, all written up by Arnold who weaves the report of the conversation around details of the restaurant, the menu choices, chat about Lagarde being ‘almost teetotal’, having a ‘sweet tooth’ and her gift of home-made marmalade.

When it comes to writing or storytelling these little details transport the reader or listener … I call it the ‘power of the specific’. I have written about this before in this blog. You could easily argue it does not matter that they chose from the set menu and had marinated salmon to start and risotto as the main. But the details make you feel you are sitting at the table with them.

All in all, a delightful, well-written profile of an extraordinary media-savvy woman.

Photo: Christine Lagarde by Adrian Petty/ECB (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/)