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

Show Me the Numbers
Lindsay Williams

Show Me the Numbers

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One of the key components of preparing a presentation, or messages for a media interview, is to find and then communicate key numbers.

If you are at a dinner party or down the pub it is fine to have opinions without numbers. But, if you step into the world of professional communication, my advice is to bring some numbers with you.

In any explanation, numbers give some clear anchor points to an audience. They are often a very quick way to provide the equivalent of the first few broad brushstrokes on an artist’s canvas.

Show Me the Numbers

Gaza is among the most densely populated places on earth.

I was very struck by a hugely useful piece in the FT last week: The Gaza Strip in Charts.  Whilst The FT team had gone to the trouble of publishing some fancy graphics, it was actually some key numbers that I thought provided the most useful insight.

  • The population of Gaza is one of the youngest in the world with the median age (the point at which half the population is younger and half older) below 20. 19.6 to be exact. In the UK the figure is 40 and the global average 30.5.
  • The population of Gaza has doubled since 2000. From 1.1 million to 2 million in 2020.
  • Population density is similar to London but much higher in some places, equivalent to central Manhattan in some areas.
  • The 8 refugee camps in Gaza feature the highest population densities in the world.
  • Almost half the adult population is unemployed.

The FT did not add but perhaps could have done:

  • The Gaza Strip is 25 miles long and less than 5 miles wide.

If you have been consuming lots of the war coverage in the last few days, you may be familiar with these numbers, but if you are not already briefed and don’t know the territory, this quickly gives you a lot of context and relevant information.

Numbers are nearly always essential when building an argument or explaining something. I have my own guidance on using numbers.

Firstly, raw data is rarely useful and always needs comparison or context. To use a happier more domestic example than the horrors of Gaza: lets look at UK Motorhome statistics. It is not useful to know that 11,500 new motorhomes were registered in the UK last year, if you don’t know that that was down on the 14,000 sold in in 2021, and the 15,300 sold in 2019.

Generally, percentages are more useful than raw data: motorhome sales down 18% in 2022 compared to the year before, seems easier all round.

Show me the numbers

Sometimes fractions work better than percentages for quick understanding. We could say new motorhome registrations were down by almost a fifth. I would probably stick to 18% but if it were 48% I would definitely claim it was almost half.

And ratios can be very useful.

6 out of 10 motorhome users are over 55

7 out of 10 motorhome users have no kids at home

4 out of 10 registered owners are women

(Source www.rvia.org)

To bring numbers to life and to create interest, comparison with other familiar reference points is a well-known device. The FT piece mentioned above, compares population density in Gaza to London and Manhattan. Football pitches and Olympic-sized swimming pools are often pressed into service to give a sense of scale to something physical. Apparently ‘the size of Wales’ is a phrase so often used or misused that it has become ‘a thing’ as explained in this BBC article.

As a speaker or writer, you do need to check accuracy and include the source of your numbers, where possible. But also curate them carefully. You can have too many numbers in an explanation, as well as too few.  And you do have to work to make numbers interesting.

Finally, we all know that numbers can mislead, and there is now a whole BBC unit called ‘BBC Verify’, dedicated to fact-checking, as well as the excellent BBC Radio 4 programme and podcast More or Less. But these checks are necessary because numbers are powerful persuaders, and modern life is full of ‘fake news’.

If you believe people no longer trust statistics, it may be tempting to leave out hard data altogether. That would be a mistake.  If you are in the persuasion game you should, I believe, be using a few choice numbers if you possibly can.

The Media Coach team provides media and presentation training as well as some message-building sessions for a wide variety of clients. If you think we might be able to help you or your colleagues, phone +44 (0)20 70992211, to talk to us, or email enquiries@themediacoach.co.uk.

 

Image: Gaza, Flickr – Israel Defense Forces – Gaza Buildings (1).jpg – Wikimedia Commons

Image: UK Motor Homes Creative Comms Licence.

 

 

 

Speaker or Slides Feature
Lindsay Williams

Speaker or Slides? Which Matter Most in a Presentation?

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A very old member of our extended family was on her death bed when my father-in-law went to see her for the last time. She was one of the last of several generations of women who had mostly been, what she would have called, a housewife. As she lay in hospital there was no stepping delicately around the subject of her demise

‘You’ve had a good innings, Annie.’ He said

‘That I have’ she replied ‘but I wish I had spent less of my life dusting’.

A pithy comment that has stayed with me 20 years.

And while dusting may not be so common in the era of handheld vacuums, I have a replacement item on my list of pointless wasted hours of humanity. PowerPoint presentations! Specifically creating and perfecting presentations.

Why wasted?

Because the obvious but largely overlooked truth is that the slides rarely matter much and the presenter is everything. And yet endless hours are wasted by keen young professionals, slogging over 40 – 100 slide decks.

Speaker or Slides

I could write a whole book about the importance of consistent fonts, using the grid so everything looks neat, sticking to a colour palette, placement of pictures and text boxes.  Many have already written that book.  And I do care that slides are neat and useful and not distracting.

But the one thing that too many presenters completely ignore, is preparing for their own performance. A memorable, useful presentation is a performance. This is what we mean when we say you are the hero of your presentation. It is mostly about you!

As my colleague, Eric Dixon always says, if a presentation is just about sharing information, it is more efficient to send an email. If you are asking a group of people to listen to you for 20 minutes (or heaven forbid an hour) , the thing that will define that experience for them will not be the slides. It will be your performance.

If you halve the hours you spend preparing the slides and instead spend the time standing front of a mirror (or video camera) and practiseing your talk, you will be able to deliver much better value to your audience. Is there anyone out there who disagrees with me on this?

For more on this:

Harvard Business Review How to Give a Killer Presentation

Forbes 5 Principles For Making PowerPoint Slides With Impact

Hubspot 11 Public Speaking Tips From the World’s Best Speakers & Communication Experts

Our blogs:

Dull Presentations are Endemic but Can Be Avoided

Great science presentations: TED Talk case study

Want professional coaching for a presentation? We can help, online or in person. Call 020 7099 2212.  Or email enquiries@themediacoach.co.uk

Image from iStock

Why repetition is risky
Eric Dixon

Why Repetition is Risky – Especially When You’re Rishi

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Time and again during Media Coach training sessions, we warn about the dangers of repeating the language of the interviewer’s question in your answer.

But time and again, out there in the real world, interviewees fall victim to making precisely that mistake. Even if they manage to avoid doing so in the first few seconds of their response, they often return to it a little later.

And this even happens when they are media-savvy interviewees such as the UK Prime Minister.

Last week provided a perfect example of this taking place. Rishi Sunak was being quizzed about his government’s announcement to cancel the proposed HS2 train project north of Birmingham.

Why repetition is risky

His interviewer – picking up from the words of Sunak’s critics – suggested that this meant the downgraded version of HS2 would be reduced to a “shuttle service”.

When this was put to him by the BBC, Sunak initially managed to avoid the risky repetition:

“It is wrong to describe it as that. Actually, if you look at all the previous business cases that the government of the day, what HS2 themselves said, everybody said, that phase one connecting Birmingham to Euston in and of itself as a standalone project had a very strong case and will bring substantial benefits.”

So far, so good. This is a denial (although not a particularly powerful one) of what the PM thinks won’t be the case and an assertion of what he believes will happen.

But having potentially dodged that linguistic bullet, he nevertheless falls victim to it later – astonishingly after he’d put some 66 words between the interviewer’s use of the phrase and his own:

“For those people now to say that somehow that is a shuttle service is them not being truthful about what they said previously.”

Aaaargh! Those toxic words – the very ones which Sunak believes don’t accurately portray the future – have now come out of his mouth, and he can therefore be quoted saying them. Which is precisely what happened. And what’s worse, not just in the original report but also in the headlines of various news outlets that wrote up the interview.

The BBC website went with “Downgraded HS2 not just a ‘shuttle service’, insists Rishi Sunak”. Interestingly and unusually this story has now been removed. But several other outlets picked up the phrase.

Why repetition is risky

It’s easy to see why this happens. However careful the interviewee initially may have been to avoid the repetition, the phrase has clearly stuck in their mind (which is what powerful phrases do!) and so moments later, when their guard has dropped, they return to it anyway, in order to deny it.

Instead, how much more powerful would it have been for Sunak to have done the following:

1) Firmly denied the interviewer’s assertion, but without using the toxic phrase itself. So instead of saying merely “It’s wrong to describe it as that…”, he could have used a more powerful denial – e.g. “Absolutely not…”, “Categorically not…” or “That’s simply not true…”

2) Then used a bridging word or phrase to transition towards something he would like to be quoted as saying – e.g. “In fact…”

3) Then stated what he believes to be the case in a phrase which is powerful enough to be used as a quote in its own right – e.g. “What we’re proposing now is to return to the benefits of the original blueprint – a standalone service which the very same people once said could be a success…”

Sunak, of course, knows this. His communications team will have told him so time and again. But he’s human, and it happens.

But if you want to prevent the media from writing your headlines – even if you don’t have the news-grabbing potential of a Prime Minister – the same rules apply.

Avoiding having words put in your mouth by journalists is just one of the tips we offer in our regular media training sessions. Call us on 020 7099 2212 or email enquiries@themediacoach.co.uk, if that is something that might be useful to you or your team.

Credibility Matters, feature
Lindsay Williams

Credibility Matters to Most But Not All Interviewees

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A client alerted me to an uncomfortable interview on Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday.

New Transport Minister, Mark Harper, ‘took one for the boss’ and accepted an interview on Radio 4’s Today Programme, despite the fact that the media is awash with rumours about cancellations or delays to HS2. The boss, Rishi Sunak, was himself fielding questions about HS2 that he was refusing to answer, whilst dropping plenty of hints that he had other uses for the eye-watering HS2 budget.

Credibility Matters

This Today interview is uncomfortable because Harper, under very persistent though polite questioning from Mishal Husain, says again and again he will not speculate on rumours that the second leg of HS2 is about to be scrapped. He had to do that 11 times in five minutes.

I have always said that the hardest questions are the ones where you can’t tell the truth and you can’t lie. And that your only defence is a form of words that sounds credible.

Well, Harper had his form of words or reactive lines: ’We have spades in the ground’, ‘We are getting on with building the line’, and ‘I am not going to speculate on rumours in the media’. Sadly, none of it sounded the slightest bit credible.

Everyone knows something is afoot. Grant Shapps, former transport secretary, has been the most direct he said it would be crazy not to reconsider this very expensive project. 

No one wants to tell the truth (yet), presumably because it is being saved for an announcement at the Tory Party Conference, or perhaps because  the Prime Minister has decided the link between Birmingham and Manchester needs to be scrapped but he hasn’t yet persuaded the rest of the cabinet. Either way, for now, ministers can’t tell the truth and they can’t lie.

When I talk to clients about holding the line and not being bullied by journalists into saying something that they don’t want to have in the public domain, they all think of these awful political interviews that defy all logic and credibility. However, business interviews are rarely if ever so pointed.

The reality is that most business interviews:

  • Are less high-profile
  • Involve more credible reasons for not telling the whole truth
  • Have an audience with a less sophisticated understanding of what is actually going on (it would be less obvious what the obfuscation is about)
  • Have more choice about whether to do the interview or not

This Mark Harper interview is just the latest in a long line of examples where politicians have had to earn their stripes by proving they can survive a grilling and avoid answering persistent questions. Some fail to pass the test. For example, Jeremy Paxman’s demolition of Junior Treasury Minister Chloe Smith in 2012.

In these situations, all Westminster watchers know the game. No one from the government side cares about the credibility of that one minister or that one interview, because they have bigger fish to fry.

Personally, I feel that this is one ritual that damages democracy and our trust in politicians.. I think a more honest line would work better, for example ‘there will be an announcement on Monday, please wait’ or ‘it’s being looked at again because it is so expensive, but there is no final decision’.  I believe shredding the trust of your listeners, being blatant in your disrespect for intelligent questioning and failing to use a credible reactive line is disastrous in the long run. But for Mark Harper, on this day, credibility did not matter.

And, in the meantime, Mishal Husain proved she was a tough journalist and Harper proved he was a loyal minister and could take the heat.

 

 

 

seven-bin policy feature
Lindsay Williams

Why the Seven-Bin Policy Was Doomed From the Start

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In my view, the seven-bin policy – which we should all theoretically support – was never going to hit the mainstream. [If you are not familiar with this news story, check out BBC coverage here.]

seven-bin policy

And that is because of a simple but remarkably resilient rule: all lists should be three, at least in the theatre of public or mass communication.  The seven-bin policy broke the Rule of Three.

In another lifetime, I clearly remember a clever chap at the National Association for Gifted Children explaining why there were seven types of intelligence. I was briefly on the National Executive Board of this important organisation. Whilst I was interested in the list, which was based on the work of Harvard Psychologist Howard Gardner, I knew I would never remember all seven categories.

As a BBC and Reuters journalist, I cautiously advised my senior colleague not to try to run through the list during an imminent Radio 4 interview.  He was adamant it was essential. On the day, he tried, got as far as number three, and was interrupted with a pointed and unhelpful question.  He never got back on track. I pretended I hadn’t heard the interview.

Why do threes work and longer lists work so much less well?

Perhaps because when things come in threes there is both brevity and rhythm. The three can often represent a beginning, a middle and an end, and three of something is so much easier to remember than four, five, six or seven.

Many articles and books have been written about the power of three, and there are many different explanations about why three is so powerful in this context.

My colleague, Eric Dixon, likes to evidence the robustness of the principle by reciting a list of children’s stories that are built around three: Three Billy Goats Gruff, Three Little Pigs, Three Blind Mice, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, etc.

I like religious references such as the Holy Trinity, the Three Wise Men, Peter denying Jesus three times and the simple: Holy, Holy, Holy.  I am told that three is also important in the Koran and in Jewish mysticism. All religions are – among many other things – about marketing a set of ideas.

But my personal favoured explanation for the power of three is one based on neuroscience. It suggests that the human brain is, above all, a ‘pattern recognition machine’ and three is the minimum number you need to create a pattern. Surely it is clear that even a simple ‘three’ – morning, noon and night; breakfast lunch and dinner; an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman, for example– will provide a nice little dopamine hit!

Whatever the alchemy, the Rule of Three is easily observable in everyday life and you ignore it at your peril.

Whilst seven bins would make recycling much cheaper, few households were ever going to work with seven bins. Three is the limit.

Now if you wanted to get crafty you could have:

  • 3 bins
  • 3 things that should never go in a household bin but should be taken elsewhere (compost heap, charity shop, fabric recycling collection point, for example)
  • Top 3 ways to reduce, reuse and recycle

But that is 9 things on the list I hear you say! And it is… but it is also a ‘3 x 3’, another magic formula in the art of teaching and communication.

If you would like help preparing for a media interview call us on 020 7099 2212 or email enquiries@themediacoach.co.uk. All our training is bespoke and we are happy to talk through exactly what you need and suggest ways to teach this quickly, efficiently and memorably.

 

SEXI or Pyramid Communication Feature
Lindsay Williams

SEXI or Pyramid Communication?

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I know which I prefer.

SEXI is apparently a mnemonic device used by university debating societies. I only know this because someone pointed out to me that this had featured in a recent Guardian article by Simon Usborne entitled:

Don’t steamroll, and go easy on the stats: how to win an argument – without making things worse

I have been unable to find many references to this but SEXI is helpfully explained at the end of The Guardian piece.

SEXI or Pyramid Communication

Nottingham University Debating Society

‘Make a Statement (S), offer an Explanation (E), then an eXample (X). And then detail the Importance (I) of what you’re arguing.

For example: “We should spend less time looking at our phones (statement), because it’s eroding our mental health and ability to connect with people in real life (explanation). Excessive smartphone use has been proven to increase anxiety (example) and this matters because poor mental health among adults can have an impact on everything from workplace productivity to interpersonal relationships (importance).” 

In my mind, the way one prepares for a debate, a panel or any free flowing exchange of information such as a media interview is all pretty much the same. You need an engaging, easily understood, compelling argument.

As many of my readers know, at The Media Coach we have our own way of teaching these things; and although I think SEXI is a clever mnemonic, this doesn’t satisfy me as much as our admittedly somewhat similar, but in my view superior, message-building formula:

Sizzle – Numbers – Example

To begin with, for us the sizzle is more than a statement: it is a statement made in a fun or engaging way, usually using a metaphor. We strongly argue that this opening gambit should be something more than just a statement. If you are dealing with the media you want it to be quotable, but even if you are debating, you want it to be memorable. To repurpose The Guardian mobile phone example, we might suggest:

Mobile phones are eroding our mental health…

Mobile phones are a curate’s egg: Many benefits but also some very serious costs…

The damage done by mobile-phone addiction, is just beginning to be understood…

Is your phone hacking your brain?

All the words here in italics are metaphors. Metaphors are a common way to get a quote. You may recognise some recent ones:

Rishi Sunak spoke in July about ‘rip-off degrees’

António Guterres, also in July said ‘the era of global boiling has arrived’

Last week Keir Starmer promised to ‘repair the bridges the Tories have burnt’

Of course, these metaphoric phrases all needed explanation but people don’t need reminding to do that bit.  I do have clients that have a special section in the messaging template for the explanation, but I find it unnecessary.

What SEXI dubs eXample, I would replace with hard evidence. I am all in favour of story, anecdote and example but not at the expense of some facts and numbers. Arguments without evidence quickly begin to sound hollow.

The phrase ‘Excessive smartphone use has been proven to increase anxiety’ for me is very weak. I want to know which authoritative source says so and if possible, what the numbers are.

As for leaving the bit on why the argument is important, until the end of the message, my journalistic training would make me want that much higher.

Stories, anecdotes or examples, told with some colour (by which I mean some tangible detail) and some context, are hugely influential and should definitely be included. They fit neatly at the end of a narrative but also at the very beginning. Almost every self-help book starts each chapter with a story. Almost every TED Talk starts with a personal anecdote. It is a successful and influential formula worth borrowing. We often suggest people start presentations with a story. But whether they are used at the beginning, in the middle or at the end, these stories should be prepared, crafted, shortened and rehearsed.

Our message-building formula is adapted from Pyramid Communication which I have written about before here. For a media interview, I tend to recommend three messages which I frame with a Message House. It is easy to remember and seems to work like a charm.

So, I vote pyramid over SEXI.  However, the important thing is that those constructing an argument prepare more than bland statements and include explanation, evidence and substance. However you do it, it takes a bit of thinking about.

If you would like help from The Media Coach team with your Message Building, sexy or not, just get in touch either by ringing 020 7099 2212 or by emailing enquires@themediacoach.co.uk.

 

Photo credit: Matt Buck, CC BY-SA 3.0