In re-reading Supercommunicators for this week's episode, I realized that much of the design work I do on campaigns, big or small, over-indexes on the message architecture.
I even look back, with a lot of dread, on the sheer hours my entire team wasted in the Prime Minister's Office...
Our unit, the Strategic Communications team, would spend nearly every minute we had at our desks, reviewing and fine-tuning the news release, Q&As, backgrounders, message event plans, and a whole slew of communications products that had already been drafted by some poor soul in the department, then reviewed by a long chain of wordsmiths before it made its way to the political staff.
And the whole process was repeated once these "near final" drafts were sent to the the Privy Council Office for a similar back-and-forth before the now fully-rewritten products were sent to my team for yet another round of reviews. We would make edits, get input from the Policy, Issues, and Stakeholder teams before applying a fresh round of edits. Then, we'd ship those back to the Minister's Office, fight it out on the edits, and repeat this mind-numbing process for days, if not weeks at a time. For every single announcement, no matter how inconsequential.
All for what? So that the press gallery could take a quick glance at them, along with a handful of Canadians who accidentally refreshed the government website when they were trying to find the closest Passport office?
Yes, this was the misery of being a comms staffer in government. We honestly felt every word, every comma, and every edit made the difference, and would play a small part in swaying public opinion.
Of course, we were wrong. We knew it at the time, which is why we explored new ways to reach our audience. But, in hindsight, and with the benefit of Charles Duhigg's book in my brain, I think the medium is only a part of the solution. The environment is the other part.
The screen is a barrier to our message. Here, we had a group of trained moderators who themselves had experienced the power of empathic dialogue. And they couldn't spread their experience to others online.
Duhigg chronicles the story of a group of people who agreed to meet up in Washington to talk about their (opposing) views on gun control. They spend a weekend together, and learn how to talk about such a personal and sensitive issue with empathy. Over the course of the weekend, they have genuinely good conversations and realize it's possible to disagree with someone, without hating them for their views. They're so excited by their positive experience that they agree to serve as moderators in a Facebook group, to test if they can scale this approach online, and in a larger group setting. And of course, it bombs. It wouldn't take long for participants to start calling each other Nazis, fascists, and idiots.
You contrast this with another story in the book, an experiment in which warring Muslim and Christian football players aren't given any playbook for how to get along, but are placed in conditions, on a pitch, with rules of play that left them with no choice but to get along.
They weren't told to get along. There were no key messages that got them onside. And yet, these soccer players were 49 points more likely to still be training together six months after the experimental league ended. The environment, with its constraints, had far more impact than the message.
Which takes me back the countless hours we spent designing the message in the PMO. Was that the best use of our time? I never felt it was. I now wonder what would have happened if we focused on designing the right environment for delivering the message.
I'm not sure how this would actually look like. Yes, we focused on the envrionment when designing the media event. The staging, the backdrop, the photo-op – these are all an attempt at shaping the environment. But the media event is a one-off, it's transactional, and it only serves a very small audience. We tell ourselves it serves a larger audience, that the perfect photo op will make it into the news clip, and telegraph the image we want to our intended audiences. But we forget that the image is transmitted in a totally different context. And the small screen filters what we intended, and hits the viewer in environments we cannot really control.