Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. To join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk, that's S-E-E Change Happen dot Co dot Uk. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going.

Today is episode 95 with the title navigating challenging conversations, and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Michael Dodd. Michael describes himself as a recovering journalist and media communication specialist. When I asked Michael to describe his superpower, he said, being able to ask tough questions in real interviews and enabling people to give great answers. Hello, Michael, welcome to the show.

G'day, Jo. Great to be here on inclusion bytes.

Great to have you. We've been planning this for some months. I'm really pleased we finally got it to happen. So, Michael, you're a covering journalist and you're used to helping people answer tough interview questions. So how does one go about navigating the challenge of having challenging conversations with.

A bit of forethought, ideally, rather than just plunging in and saying what pops into your head. So one of the arts of interviewing people, which is what I had to do when I was trained by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to put people under pressure, particularly politicians, but business people and others as well, in media interviews, is to actually ask questions which they don't really want to answer quite often. And these days I'm much more popular because I actually help people ahead of media interviews or ahead of tough conversations they might have to have with clients, with prospects, with even their own people, let alone tax inspectors. And the idea there is to get them to be thinking about things in advance. So they're thinking about the messages they want to get across to the audience, which may be to one asker or it may be to a massive audience. Beyond that, in the case of media, and it's all about thinking ahead, what are the tough questions they're likely to ask? What we call in the world of australian journalism, blowtorch on the belly questions. And if you think about those in advance, it's often a lot easier to get across what's in the mutual interest of you and the asker and any wider audience to keep everyone happy.

So typically in this kind of the world of work the terms of conversations, probably around performance, redundancy, reprimanding somebody for something. And a lot of people, when they become a manager, don't think about this people side. They're thinking it's all sweetness and light, being in charge and everyone will do as they're told. But the challenging conversations is a learned skill and I'm sure you'd agree with that.

Absolutely. And if you're dealing with people on your own team, taking them with you is not automatic and you've got to make sure you do that. So one of the arts of giving great answers is to get your head in the mind of those who you're dealing with, whether they're asking you questions or waiting for their reprimand or whatever it is. And if you can get into the mind of the person who is your target audience, then it's so much easier to tell them not what they want to hear, what they need to hear and what's in your and their mutual interest for them to hear by thinking it through beforehand. So a lot of my work is to do with media, helping people go on BBC programmes and CNN programmes, and to be thinking ahead rather than just be thinking. I hope they asked me the right questions, because journalists typically think it's their mission to ask you the wrong questions and you need to be ready for it. But what I found, the more I've worked, particularly with chief executive organisations, that's organisations where you get a bunch of chief executives working together to try and help improve their own performance. What I found is, for them, it's not so much media, which is their number one concern when it comes to giving great answers to tough questions, they typically think, well, what am I going to tell this person who I'm hoping will become a customer? Or what am I going to tell the official inspectors? Or if things go wrong, what am I going to tell the official inquiry or the courts? And the same principles apply where it's really important to actually get across a message for any particular occasion and to get across what you're planning to say, not what you're just thinking about on the run.

I mean, people who watch great media interviewees often say, oh, they're really good at thinking fast on their feet, and the truth is, often they're not. But what they are good is at thinking ahead before they do the interview, what they're going to say, and actually, when the right question comes up, saying that, rather than saying what I hope I can say, and getting themselves in a mess. So planning, preparation and practise is really important before all important business conversations.

I've noticed when I've watched politicians on various parties over the years and other great people who would get interviewed a lot, is that when they get asked a question, there's almost like a holding sentence you put out first. It's almost like you go, great question. I'm glad you raised that. So it's that immediate sound bite that gives your brain an extra 5 seconds to process something before you say the next thing, isn't it? And I think that helps you as well, not rush into the answer.

Well, it can if you are taken by surprise. But ideally I would be training people not to do that, just to basically have their great thing they're trying to get across, and to say it up front without any sleazy, slimy politician blabber that they've got to go through before they get to it. I mean, there's a great saying in the world of media training which hopefully won't shock too many of your audience members, Jo, it's that giving a great interviewee performance is the opposite of sex. The reason being is that when you get it right, the climax comes at the start. Now, if any young men listening, don't try this at home in the wrong field. But when it comes to an interview, when you're watching on tv, you want the sleazy, slamming politician to come to the point straight away. You don't want him saying what a wonderful, marvellous question it is and how wonderful you as the interviewer are looking today, et cetera. You want them to get straight to the point, climax at the front.

And that can work in many non media occasions. They're not all of all occasions, but certainly a lot of conversational occasions. That's really important for getting straight to the point.

Okay, I like that. I like the idea of just being that prepared. And I confess I've not done media training, but I've had people give me advice when I've gone on the radio and done other things. And the best advice I was always given was write down next to you on a piece of paper the key points you want to get across. And whatever they ask you, you answer the questions you want to answer rather than their question, or you fit in your answer that you want to get across, not as a direct response to their question, but as trying to give my message across rather than their message. Is that something you would talk about?

It's certainly something I talk about and get asked about. And the trick is you're trying to do both answer the question and get across a message that's on your agenda for that particular audience. And there is a way of doing that, ideally every time, because if you watch BBC's news night or some other tough question asking programme, an audience member is pretty quick to judge yes, that person is honest and reasonable and addressing the question that the audience wants to know asked on behalf of a competent interviewer. And they don't want a lot of blabber. And they also don't want a politician setting their own agenda. They want them answering the questions that the question asker is asking on their behalf. And so, ideally, when you're trying to get it right as an answerer, you should be dealing with the question because people are asking the question for a reason. But when you're really clever, you can get across the important bits that you've written down, Jo or whoever else is talking, you can cover those as well, where they're relevant.

And so in any particular answer, a really good answer does answer the question, but goes on to get across a message, usually a positive message, on the topic that they're being asked about. So there's a win win to be had between the person answering the questions and the question asker and the wider audience who's listening in.

You mentioned night there, the Fiona Bruce question that she asks these days. And you can just tell that the career politicians launch straight into the party manifesto, don't they? There's kind of this. Here's the facts and figures. This is what I want to tell you. And you end up with just party politics spouting kind of the corporate message, and you never really hear the real truth. And that's what I find.

Well, a good interview is on BBC News Night and other programmes good at persisting and making sure the politician doesn't just get to say what they want to say. It's not a party political broadcast as far as they're concerned. There was a guy who was probably quite a reasonable interviewee, called Simon Hughes. He was a liberal Democrat. And he once famously said, on the Today programme on Radio Four, which is a serious political interviewing programme, he said, I can't answer the question you're asking, but I've got the answer to two other questions that you haven't asked. And this is what they are, and it's quite a glib statement, quite an arresting statement, but that's not really what the interviewer and the wider audience want. They want answers to the questions that they are asking about, not ones which a sleazy, slamy politician or even a reasonable, responsible, honest politician wants to do. But the real trick, and a great answer is effectively to do both.

So you are answering what's asked, but you're also giving across sometimes that extra little bit, which can be your message as well on the topic, which can actually be very helpful for the viewers. I mean, what a good interviewee is often saying sometimes is they'll give the answer, but then they'll say, but what's even more important is this. And providing it's in the territory that's being asked about by the interviewer, then that's perfectly reasonable and often very helpful. And they can often put things in a new perspective, maybe partly for their own interest, but also for the interest of the viewers. And what a really good question answerer is doing is doing that a lot.

Yeah, I certainly watch some really good interviews, and I know people like Laurel Kunsberg and Fiona Bruce on those sort of programmes, Andrew Neal on this week, and they really are good at asking questions and different styles and different directness. But as you say, the tenacity, if you're a career politician or you've got a high position, high rank in some organisation, when you go onto those perennials, you really know that you're going there to be in the lion's den. You know you're going to get the tough questions. You're not going there for a chat and a coffee, are you? So you are prepared. And I think something comes across as this combative type attack and defence, rather than it being a true meeting of minds. It's almost too staged as an audience. That's how I sometimes feel.

Well, as an interviewee, you don't want to be coming across as if you're being staged. There's a nice little expression which I actually got from the BBC, which is all about saying something, but making it relevant at the time and making sure that it doesn't sound like it's pre planned. So the term they use is. It's called planned spontaneity, which your astute listeners will know is an oxymoron. It's a contradiction in terms, but the idea is to be saying what you plan to say when this topic came up, what you planned to say before the interview, and you're saying it, but you're saying it in such a way that it just sounds like, oh, right, yeah, I've just thought of this plan. Spontaneity is a good thing, particularly for people who are inclined to sound like they're a bit too. You know, a lot of the interview is about having emotional punch as well as giving the facts. And if you get good at planned spontaneity, then you can be a much more scintillating interviewee.

Hopefully I'm doing this with you, Jo.

Give me a Michael. Very spontaneous. Spontaneous. Where are we now? We're closing out 2023. And I'm sure most people who are listening in the UK will have heard Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, et al. If you like, talking about COVID and the COVID years and the inquiries. And there's been some shocking. I'm going to call them untruths or misinformation coming out.

How does anyone manage to lose all of their WhatsApp messages every time they change their phone? You'd think that this was really kind of phone 101, isn't it? This is kind of like the very basics, don't lose my messages, don't lose this. But all of a sudden, conveniently, they've gone. Do they really believe the public? Believe them?

Well, if you ever find yourself giving answers where you don't think the public will believe you, you're probably going to be right on that. You're probably not going to be believed. And part of what you want to be doing as a person answering questions is to be believed, not just because you're telling the truth, but you're saying it in a way which is credible, it's enhancing your credibility. So it's a matter of getting the truth right, getting the structure of how you actually say it, which is why the climax of the front thing is important, because getting to the number of the matter right up front is really important. But it's also a matter of how you look and how you sound as you're giving your answers. And that's where media response training comes in, where you're practising with people, giving them the tough questions in advance that they might get, but playing it back to them so that they can see themselves and hear themselves as other people hear and see them. And that's a great way to teach, because it's a great way to learn, if you can actually see on the camera that you're looking nervous because your hands are shaking, or you're whopping the sweat off your brow as you're talking, or you're trying to project being in control, but your hands are kind of telling a different story, it's really important to have your body under control and have your voice under control so that you not just are telling the truth, you are sounding like someone who is telling the truth. And allied to that, apart from your actual performance, is often I mentioned earlier about getting across a message.

When you've got a message to get across, it's typically an abstract thing, but what you want to be doing as a great communicator is putting a picture in people's minds, a real picture, so that they can actually see what you mean. So if you're talking to your media audience, or maybe your own audience inside your own company, and you're an important person in the company, what you want to be doing is getting across, say, you might be saying, well, we're making some changes to make the company better. And your people might think, well, heard other people say that it may or may not be true, but if they can then give a real life example of one of the things that they are doing that paints a picture in people's minds so they can see it, then bang, it's believable. So I'm making this up on the spot here. This is not planned spontaneity, but, I mean, if the company boss is saying, well, we know that workers work better when they're well fed on really nutritious, healthy food, which tastes great as well, and we're going to be putting this into practise. And in fact, we've already started because you've noticed that our company canteen has cut its prices to make the food available for whoever wants it. And also they've upped the nutritional content of what they're doing. And we've got top chefs in there making it particularly tasty.

And the audience saying, oh, yeah, that's right, lunch yesterday was fantastic. So what the communicator is doing is ideally not just saying a message, but backing it up with a real life example, which what's in communication terms is hitting a resonant chord. So it's basically activating the brains of the listeners who are saying, oh, yeah, lunch has been really good this past week with this new chef who's come in, and so, bang, what the person is saying is really connecting effectively with the audience.

Yeah, I get that. So you're signposting these messages that you're trying to follow through on and selling a vision, selling a dream as well.

But ideally, it's not just a dream or a vision, but you're backing it up with real facts. So that's where the painting of real pictures comes in, which may be real life examples of something which has happened, or it might be a real life example of something which is being implemented now. And so if we're talking about a fantastic new recreation room. Maybe the builders are sort of coming in this morning and you can see them all up there on floor 13 or whatever, who have brought in the new table tennis tables and the new dartboards and the new exciting electronic games. And you've probably seen them this morning, all being delivered just in time for you lot to play them. So you basically always want to make sure that your messages backed up with real life examples which are happening. Or if you're talking about the vision thing, as President George Bush I in America used to say, the vision thing, which he had trouble with, it's actually putting that real picture so that people can actually see the same vision that you're talking about in a way that's real and believable and that makes for good communication.

Yeah. One of the things I struggle with is having the conversation to tell someone I want to have a conversation, because if you're trying to tell bad news or challenging news, you want to set the scene. Can we have a quiet moment later or quiet moment in a minute? And of course, the first reaction to that is, so what's wrong? What do I need to know? And you try not to signpost too much of the conversation and make it sound too bad or too good. How can people signpost the need to have a chat and feel comfortable about setting that scene without giving too much away and losing the impetus of the conversation?

There's a great professional speaker called Anthony Steers who you may have come across Jo yourself. We're in an organisation where you, I and him are all in it, and Anthony has this great concept of permission to speak and it's basically like, say, if you're making a phone call and you're going to have that conversation, it's no good just bursting into it. The climax of the front thing I mentioned earlier has to wait a bit because you want to make sure that it's a good time for the person. You've got their attention before you're raising what can be a highly emotional topic. So actually, to be saying at the start of that is now a good time to talk about your glorious future career in this company and getting their buy in on that means that when you've got some points to make, a couple of which may be constructively critical, you've actually got them there and they've committed to giving you the time to go ahead and discuss it. So you're not putting yourself in a position as the instigator of this tough conversation where you're not making it too easy for them to say, sorry, I've got time now, I've got to go home, I've got to pick up my kids or whatever it is you're getting buy in right at the start, before you're raising the big issues. And setting the scene correctly is really helpful for when you're getting to the substance of the issue.

So kind of. We need to have a chat. When would be a good time for you? Is a good lead.

Absolutely, yeah. That's so much better than you've got to be in my office right now, when they might be working on something that's massively important for the company or massively important for themselves and they won't be able to focus on it. So, yeah, getting that permission to speak at the right time is a great concept, and so I would recommend it ahead of tough conversations, which could feature blowtorch on the belly questions and even brilliant answers if the scene is set right. It's so much easier for a win win to be established between the two principal people taking part in the conversation. Yeah.

I've been naughty in my life, as most of us have, and I've been on the receiving end of challenging conversations and I've experienced mastery, for want of a better way of describing it, of people who are able to fit, to be, lead you down this tunnel and there's nowhere to escape from it, basically. They're very good at asking the questions, so they've obviously got an agenda. They know where they're trying to get the conversation, and all you can do is tell the truth, or lie, I guess. And there's the two options, and if you want to tell the truth, they just keep honing in. And I've noticed this as well. They start by describing a big picture and then ask you to sort of re explain a smaller part of that picture and then a smaller part of that picture and a smaller part of that picture, and eventually you get to the end and you're focusing on one tiny detail. But you started massive, and I found it's a really great way of getting me to hone down on the answer they wanted.

Well, that's something that I learned to do as a blowtorch on the belly interview on behalf of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Often, I mean, supposing you mentioned someone called Boris Johnson, a british prime minister, who is lovable to some, but critics have said, quite rightly, that sometimes he has an interesting interaction with the truth. And so when you're interviewing someone in that league, it may help to start when you're actually into this conversation by asking that general question like, is it important for prime ministers to always tell the truth when they're dealing with important matters concerning health? Right? So typically what might happen next is they'll say, oh, yes, that's important. And then in that sort of focusing down thing you mentioned there, Jo, you're then saying, well, why was it, when you made this particular announcement about the COVID crisis of the early 2020s, did you say this when the truth was that? And so because they're already locked into a general agreement that, yes, a prime minister should tell the truth when they're dealing with matters of public health, they're kind of bound to give you an honest answer rather than tell a lie at that point when you're focusing it down. And if you play your game right as a question asker, you can do it in such a way that you're seeking the truth as a questioner, and it will become clear to the audience. If someone is not suddenly giving honest answers, that will be obvious. And as an interviewer, it's a win for you. If you can be asking questions in a way where at least the audience can see that the person is not telling the truth, that is kind of like a win that you've achieved on behalf of your audience.

I mean, so much better if they do tell the truth and are seen to be telling the truth. But if they're not telling the truth, a good question asker, like a guy who used to work for the BBC called Jeremy Paxman, who was on that news night programme, and he was particularly good at that, Laura Koonsberg, who you've also identified, she can do that very effectively as well. And so there is a skill in asking the questions in the right sort of order to put the person under pressure to answer. But one of the important things from an answerer's point of view is to make sure you're telling the truth at all times. I always say, don't say anything other than an exact truth, because if you're being led down a path of questions which you've mentioned and you suddenly find that the person wants to change from their policy of telling the truth to not telling the truth, it will probably be bleeding obvious to everyone, which is, from the answerer's point of view, not a good thing. So definitely only tell exact truth.

And also, someone once told me, it's always easy to remember the truth because it's the truth. Everything else becomes a story. And then you have to refabricate and readjust the story. And no matter how good you are, you can never remember the entire story and all the different nuances and all the different interactions.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I'm always pushing people to tell real life examples, not theoretical examples, real ones. Because when you're telling a story that really happened to you about maybe an interaction with a customer and where your company got it right and did some fantastic things, and the customer thought you were fantastic by telling it as it really is, it's easy to remember because you've got that picture in your mind which you're projecting to the minds of your audience. And if you're sticking to the truth, then that's a great thing. And, yeah, giving real life examples is a way of helping to do that, which is a good thing for the universe.

Yeah, I do a lot of panels, discussions, a lot of q a stuff, and my approach to that would be if someone asks me something like, which company do you know that is doing this the best? And I say, well, I don't have specific examples of a company doing that myself, but I am aware that these organisations are highly regarded in that sort of sphere. But I don't have personal real life experience. All I'm doing is giving you hearsay or opinion. So I would tend to frame it in that way rather than tell it as my truth, if you like.

Well, yeah, sometimes you might, on behalf of your company, let's say your company is company x, you might have a fantastic, happy customer, which for various reasons, doesn't necessarily want to put its hand up and be used as an example. And so sometimes you move for what's called the specific to the general when you're telling the story. So you can say, let me tell you about a real company where we did something fantastic for them. I won't give their name because we don't have an agreement to do that with them. But what happened was this, and you tell the real story as it really was, but you're not invading the privacy of the company. And so you can be telling truth sometimes on different levels, sometimes you can be telling the truth at a more general level to protect confidentiality, but sometimes it's necessary, often when you have got permission to actually tell some absolute nitty gritty details which give credibility to the story and meaning that the listeners can only be concluding, oh, yes, this has to be true because it's so detailed and specific. So there is a plus as a communicator to be telling real life stories with some really good nitty gritty details that add to the credibility of you, the person trying to get across your message.

Yeah, I like that. It's a really good technique. One thing I also wonder sometimes is when you're being coached to give great answers or competent answers, I sometimes wonder, the echo chamber, if you like, in which the people are coaching them in, is everybody caught up in their own self truth and their own kind of minority view, or they all kind of talk themselves into. Yeah, this sounds believable. When you actually take out to the light of day, a member of the public was thinking, how could anyone ever believe that? So did the circle of advisors sometimes create this problem and this myth of.

Belief, if you like, I think there's potential for that. I mean, if you take someone who by sort of universal agreement went on television, I think it was that programme, news night you mentioned earlier, BBC programme, it was a guy called Prince Andrew, known around the world, and he was asked some very tricky, very clever, very specific questions. And I think, and this is Dob's theory, I don't know this for a fact, but that he had some kind of coaching, but it wasn't very good and I suspect it got locked into that circle. So at one moment, I won't give your listeners all the details, but it's still there, I've checked. It's still there on the Internet. If you want to google it, put in Prince Andrew, Emily Maitless, BBC News Night interview. And it's all there. But there's one time where he's trying to show that a witness who's been giving evidence against him in the court of public opinion wasn't telling the truth.

And she was saying that when she was dancing with him before various activities which as a prince, he shouldn't have been engaging in with her, happened. She was saying he was sweaty and he was saying because of his heroic actions in the falklands, that he couldn't sweat. And there are pictures all over the media of showing Prince Andrew looking very sweaty indeed in certain circumstances, and it just didn't quite ring, you know, the truth needs to guide you. And if getting back to your circle of advisors, if they did that in practise with him and they say, oh, Andrew, that sounds great, it didn't pass the court of public opinion. So what I typically do when I'm working with a company is say I'm working with the sales team who are obviously trying to make the company's products look great and sound great, but also credible, I will typically get by agreement, the chief executive to pop in at, say, we've been working on it all day, get the chief executive to come in at 330 or 04:00 in the afternoon and have a look at the answers they've been giving. And that's a really good kind of reality cheque, which sometimes doesn't happen. So he might be saying, listen, George, what you're saying there sounds great, but you've got to remember that that particular product has got this particular flaw that you need to be honest about and you're getting that kind of reality cheque to stop that group thing happening. So when you do hear someone giving answers that you think a reasonable person would just say, that can't possibly be true, that circle of sort of incestuous advisors who have got into a group think stage could be happening.

So my aim is to typically work with a videographer who plays stuff back and the person themselves can see it and they're often pretty good at saying, yeah, I need to improve that answer, I need to change what I'm saying on that, to make it more credible and to show it to outside people within the circle, but not there for the advice, to give an objective reaction, and that can make them all the sharper and all the better when they have to do it for real.

Yeah, I get very frustrated at people who fail to recall conversations or detail or things that have happened or I don't recall, or I'm not sure about that, I don't remember. And I wonder whether I really trust a prime minister or a cabinet member who can't remember what they did a year ago in terms of a big decision. You think, well, hang on a minute, you can remember this, this and this, but you can't remember that. It's like Prince Andrew. He can remember exactly where he had that pizza, which town it was, who he was with, the shoes the waiter was wearing and how much the bill was, but he couldn't remember certain other details. So it's almost like this specific learnt story and everything else is kind of just vague, isn't it?

Yeah. And as a media trainer, you've just got to be aware of that. And I generally find most people, and it's partly influenced by the fact that they might be going on tv, where everybody can see what they're saying, including people in their own team who know where the bodies are buried, and that normally concentrates the mind. And generally, when I'm training people, I find them overwhelmingly very honest, which is very good, which is what you're trying to get to, honest and credible. So what you want to be doing in the training is to be subjecting them to when they've got the thrust, or what they're going to say worked out, to be throwing in as the trainer surprise questions which they weren't exactly expecting. And typically, if they're talking straight, they find that you will find they will be telling the truth. They may have to make some adjustments on some occasions, which is important before they get out there and do it for real. Generally, I find people are sort of concentrated by the occasion and the actual process of recording, playing it back, critiquing it, actually helps the truth process and helps them to be very comfortable and confident when they're doing it for real.

But I will tell you one story where happens to be from the real estate industry, where I was training a group of people in a real estate company, all but one, who seemed to be scrupulously honest, and they realised that they knew there was going to be some interviews about something dodgy that the company had done, which the company agreed was wrong, and they were being trained to say how it was wrong, why it was wrong and why they'd be committing never to do it again. And we had one person on the training and I think he was a person who just couldn't tell the truth. And there are people like that out there. And the sort of climactic moment of the day was our press conference at the end, where they had to. If this story got really big, which there was a danger of, that a number of them had to appear together and face the press, which means getting questions, not just from one journalist, but a whole bunch of journalists. And so we actually planned a bunch of journalists asking questions and everyone stuck to the script, which was the truth, which was, yes, they'd made this mistake and they'd done it wrong, but this one guy just couldn't bring himself to do it. And there he was at the press conference and he was denying that the whole thing had ever happened, which made everyone else look like liars and didn't work. So the day ended.

Normally, immediate training day ends on a real high, where people are thinking, yes, we know what we're to say, we know how to tell the truth in a way that stands up to scrutiny. But this one was very different because they just all ended up hating on him. And it was quite clear that the higher ups in the company were not going to get let this guy loose before the media, because he just couldn't do it. That's extremely rare, but as a trainer, it's your job is to make a company aware of that. If they've got someone on the team who's like that, make sure they're never put anywhere near the media or in any other occasion where truth matters, which is a lot of occasions.

In government or somewhere like that, maybe.

Yeah. That person in real estate, as far as I know, he's not in government, not in politics. But if the occasional person does get into politics, is like that, it's up to their peers to scrutinise them and make sure they're not put in a position where they can be let loose to say whatever truth they manufacture themselves at the time. Beware.

Yeah, we see this recently. I mean, there's a couple of other car crash interviews that I can recall in the recent times. One is the Captain Saton Moore foundation, the building of the Aquaspa, aka a swimming pool, and the misappropriation of lots of money and syphoning off expenses, for a better word. And then we had the Baroness moan PPE interview, which, again, was another car crash. And for me, both of those had an element of privilege and arrogance and inhibition around them, where they believed their own pr and they believed that people would believe them. And clearly, the public opinion was completely opposite. And I think you mentioned earlier about telling this story and painting these pictures of the truth, and they're filling that in. And these people didn't do that, did they?

Yeah, clearly not. And in the case of Baroness mode, during the course of the interview, there were remarkable moments of honesty, which I believe, which was that she was saying that she had repeatedly told lies to the media, which give her some marks for honesty about being dishonest. But in terms of the whole context of how the public viewed that, they absolutely turned on her. I know this for a fact, because I put up a couple of posts on social media at the time, and my aim is always to just. In those sorts of posts is, I'm a professional communicator. I want to focus in this post on the communications issues, not anything beyond that. And in her case, I couldn't control it, as the poster. And while I was saying, I want to sort of discuss how well she did in the interview and what lessons can be drawn from it.

It was an amazing amount of vitriol from ordinary members of the public who were wanting all sorts of terrible things to happen to her as a result. Now, it probably was a result of her communication strategy, but fundamentally, they were wanting her to be taken out of the House of Lords, for example, which a right thinking person might well, think. But for me, trying to marshal the conversation on just the communications issues was a bit of a fail. And the test she didn't pass was the social media test in terms of people believing her. And I suppose, having set it up, saying, well, yes, I told all these lies to the media, and then she made a point which wasn't really very endearing about, it's not a crime to lie to the media. The court of a public opinion may agree with that. That's not a crime on the books, but, yeah, you can't be sent to jail for that specifically. But what does it do to your own credibility? In her case, not very much.

And a price has to be paid for that.

Yeah. As a baroness, as a peer of the realm responsible in the House of Lords for law setting governance, arbitration of right and wrong, lying to the media is actually lying to the people.

Yes, absolutely.

Not the media.

That's a really important point to make. And that's one of the virtues of media training, where ideally, you can play it back on a big screen and, like, we're a very modern big television set and people can sort of see that. Well, if I said that and I didn't get it quite right, it's there on the big screen for everyone to see, and everyone I know will be telling me that what I said wasn't accurate. And the shame of that, and it's a great process in a way, because it actually encourages this fundamental principle of only saying exact truth. If Baroness moan had been through that process properly, and maybe I don't know what she had in the way of advisors, they clearly weren't collectively very good. Yeah, she may well have taken a different approach. And as you say, sometimes there is a kind of arrogance in people who have put a false picture in their head and they think, well, if I believe it, I can make everyone believe it, and it tends to come unstuck. So a good media training process picks that up and helps them before too late it is.

I did a tv documentary several years ago on Channel four and we spent a lot of time being interviewed. And always in the back of my head was, I call it kind of like the mum test. Would my mum be proud of me? Would I be proud if my mum was watching this? So that was kind of my moral compass around telling the truth. Not over sharing, sharing the right amount, but knowing my mum was going to watch it was always my kind of benchmark of understanding of the world, if you like.

It's probably a very healthy approach. So, yeah, I might be guilty of using the same principle with people that think about someone who is in the company who knows really well because they've been in the company for as long as you have and they know all about the good things the company's done and a few of the bad things as well. And I suppose if I go back to the real estate person who wasn't telling the truth if you could get them to be thinking, well, what would person x in the company be thinking when he sees you on that tv screen saying something that he knows is not true and you know is not true? Wouldn't it be best not to say that? That may prove to be persuasive.

So think about this hypothetical company. So something's gone badly. PR disaster. We can call it a kind of a me too moment. Some sexual misappropriation. The CBI. Sorry, let's dive into the CBI.

There something so theoretical, but yeah.

No, no, it's not theoretical. Their entire reputation was. Incredibility was undermined in an instant. So did they do well? Did they do badly? I mean, what's your interpretation of what the correct step should have been to limit risk, manage the communications and deal with that aftermath? Because it seems to me they got it wrong as well.

The fact that you're mentioning it quite some time afterwards probably underlines the point that they didn't do everything right. And I think people now at the top of the CBI would probably be tending to agree with you that they didn't get it all right. So often you go beyond in training about a particular situation and you're dealing with the fundamental principles of a company. And people who talk about values, values of people and values of companies. Quite when they do it well, they're typically doing it well for the company because if the fundamental values are there and they're ingrained in the dna of the organisation then the kind of situation that you mentioned there is much harder to happen. And, I mean, when it does happen, absolute honesty is important, as is when something happens. And people, the question askers are aggrieved because they've been hurt in some way, maybe physically, maybe reputationally. One of the important principles in that kind of situation is to make sure that people talk to the heart before they talk to the head.

So often mixed in that is like a real apology that's effective is very early on introduced into the conversation and the sorrow that the person speaking on behalf of the company is feeling because of the way they got something wrong in the company and realising that people have been adversely affected by that and acknowledging that the company needs to do things to make up for that, whether it's paying compensation or whatever it's doing, is really important. So when I'm teaching people to answer tough questions, I've typically got two formulas, or formulae, as we say in Latin, and the first formula you can use in most cases, which are cases that are not especially emotional, and then there's a second formula for when they're really emotional. And in the second formula, which sometimes needs to be incorporated into the first, needs to acknowledge that you're talking to real human beings, some of whom have been hurt or they're professionally angry, if they're lawyers, perhaps on behalf of people who've been hurt. And it's really important to get people to talk about to other people. Talk from the heart first, before they get into all the technical complications of the situation. So heart before the head, when something's gone wrong, is a really important communications principle, because you're talking to real people and they will react like real people do, and you've got to be aware of that.

So pathos before logos.

Yes, I was going to say, I was talking Latin there, but not for one word. The Greeks probably had that. Right. Yeah. Perhaps we should bow to a greek scholar such as yourself. So you want to define audience. The pathos is with empathy and sympathy, is that right?

Empathy and sympathy are different sides.

Is a logic element. Yeah.

You're saying talk to the heart, not to the head?

Yeah. So you do need to get around to talking head. But typically, if someone is worked up about, and they're questioning you about something which has affected them, maybe they've been injured in a company explosion, which should have been prevented on the production line or something, and they're really angry that they haven't been properly compensated and they're in a discussion with the managing director, probably the new managing director, then the new managing director needs to talk to their heart first, before the head, because once they've actually got across the emotional points they're trying to make, then the human brain, on behalf of the aggrieved person, can then cope with the logos, as you say, the logic of the situation, and listen to it in a more calm, peaceful state of mind, having had their emotions touched first.

That can be difficult, though, when you got litigation and lawyers and people like that. Radical candle. Absolute honesty is admitting liability. It's saying sorry is admitting liability, and many organisations, probably their chief executive, is probably not empowered by the shareholders or by the board to make a statement like I'm sorry. Without. And then the COVID up is. It just reeks of a cover up. And I think what we find sometimes is that the immediate apology to the heart takes the heat out of it, rather than a holding position, which sometimes you end up creating a lie or creating a story.

And people are more upset and more angry about being lied to than they probably were about the original act. You can diffuse a lot by being open straight away.

Absolutely. It's so long ago. I haven't got the details at the top of my head, but I can remember enough about a company called Thomas Cook, which was a very successful travel company for a long time. And they had. Something went wrong on one of their holidays, and there was a child who was, let's say, adversely affected by something that they did. And they didn't talk to the heart before the head, they didn't sort it out. And they had to wait until the old boss got kicked out and a new boss was brought in who was prepared to tell the truth and talk to people emotionally as well as logically, and acknowledge what the company had gone wrong. A lot of bad stuff happened to the company between the two bosses, because the first one, just as you say, wasn't getting the company to admit to the truth and to the sort of emotional impact of what their bad holiday had done.

And they paid the price. So having chief executives who are empowered by their shareholders, or who make sure they're empowered by their shareholders when they've got something to say, that's important for the public to hear beyond just the company share price, that's really important. And so getting it right in terms of human interaction, as well as in terms of the rights and wrongs of the situation, is very important right at the outset. And you can build good communication on that foundation if you get it right.

It's so much easier for the new person to come in and just dump all of the problems on the person who just left, isn't it? When you think about football management, the football manager leaves, new person comes along. All the reasons everything was bad was that other person. So you can just demonise, throw them under a bus and bury all the communications issues, all the problems you ever had, and saying, I'm the new person, it's different under me. They were the bad person. I guess that's why we see companies hanging people out to dry sometimes, because it's easier to lose that news that way, isn't it?

Absolutely. And shockingly enough, Jo, it even happens in politics. I mean, there was a british prime minister for a couple of weeks called Liz Truss. And, yeah, she made some very bad decisions in her limited time in office. And exactly what happened to the football manager there happened to. Well, she ultimately saw that it was time for her to go and she went very quickly. And then the new prime minister, a guy called Rishi Sunak, who at the time we're speaking, is still the british prime minister, he's come in as the new person to try to sort of fix up some of the economic problems caused in those chaotic two weeks of trust prime ministership. So it happens in politics, happens in business, and making sure things pass the truth test early on for any organisation, political or business wise or other, is really important when you're trying to communicate your way to success.

Yeah, I don't know if it's canny by design or just by coincidence that the trust intervention of, what, 45 days or long, less than 50 days, created a firebreak between Rishi and Boris. So if Rishi had taken straight over from Boris, he couldn't have escaped that regime because he was part of it. But the trust created all that confusion which allowed Rishi to come along, buried everything under trust and almost ignore Boris and come out the other side as being a new think. I don't know whether that was design or just good luck for Rishi.

Yeah, well, if there was a great machiavellian mind in the british conservative party who actually planned that, with hindsight, you might be saying, well, that set them up better than they would have been without those chaotic trust days as prime minister. But I suspect politics being what it is, it wasn't quite as planned, deviously as that, and hasn't been quite as successful when you're trying to replace one regime with another, having a short intervention from someone else in the meantime can be successful. I mean, you'll notice sometimes in the business world, sometimes you'll get the chair of the company, will become the chief executive for a short period of time before handing over to someone else. I think that happened with BP once and they got themselves in a media mess over a massive disaster to do with leaked oil on the beaches of the coast of America. And the chair stepped in and was bossed for a little while before handing over to someone else. And that same kind of firebreak effect, which I'm not sure how well that was planned, it probably wasn't, but it did ultimately get the company in a better position and a better position to tell the truth to the public. Having got a sort of a not so credible person at the top, out of the way, not in one bite, but in two.

I think it's probably true to say that the ideal candidate to take the business forward is not necessarily the ideal person to deal with the problem you've got right now. So that fire break, putting an interim in to deal with that situation better at talking to the press, better at being in that environment, is not necessarily the person who's going to take over. And I think that's probably a very good strategy to find the person you really want for the future and then deal with the problem now differently.

Yeah, I mean, just in individual terms. There's a saying which you hear a lot these days, which is very. You hear it a lot because it's true. I think what got you here won't get you there. And so your skills as an individual, which got you to your standing today, may not be great for you for the next 20 years. So you need to improve and learn and change. And I think we can apply the same thing to companies in a way where what got the company success and the people who mastered that success may not be the people to take it into the future. And sometimes you need that interim little change in order to put you on the right track.

Michael, it's been absolutely fascinating talking to you, and I know we could keep talking and talking, and no doubt we'll bump into each other at PSA meeting sometime in the next month or so. So thank you so much. It's been an absolute honour to have this conversation with you and learn a bit more about challenging conversations in the media or elsewhere. Thank you.

That's great. Well, hopefully in your next media conversation, Jo, with the mainstream media, it'll work out. All for the good.

Yes, I hope so. I hope so. Well, thank you for listening. You, the listeners out there, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for getting to the end, and hopefully you've taken lot to it of inspiration from this. If you're not already subscribed, please do subscribe to keep updated on future episodes of the Inclusion Bites podcast. That's B-I-T-E-S. Please share the love, tell your friends, tell your colleagues, because I've got a number of other exciting guests lined up over the next few weeks, months and hopefully even years.

And of course, if you'd like to be a guest, I'd love to hear from you or any suggestions or feedback. So, jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk and finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood and it's been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you. Today. Catch you next time. Bye.