Few in the communications field spend much time delving into the works of cognitive linguists like George Lakoff (georgelakoff.com) or Noam Chomsky. That’s understandable, but unfortunate. The material is dense. However, it can be extremely useful when mapping-out a communications strategy. Research into how our brains are wired to use language and how we understand new ideas is key to effective communications, particularly in times of crisis.

If my years in politics taught me anything, it is this: There are a lot of people in the world who believe everyone thinks exactly as they do. And if they don’t share your belief, it’s because these people haven’t been given enough facts. This is sometimes referred to as the “rational person theory”. You try to influence people with piles and piles of facts, thinking they will be convinced to believe the same thing you believe. Unfortunately, this yields a predictably dull and ineffective communications strategy that doesn’t persuade people to consider embracing your point of view. It doesn’t entice or engage people into grappling with your ideas. To engage people, you need to better understand how language and the brain work.

When confronted with a new abstraction, say a new government policy or a new HR rule at work, we use conceptual metaphors as we attempt to understand this new thing. Put more simply we try to match something we don’t understand with something we do understand, usually beginning with the sentence “it’s like….”

You see examples of this in our conversations every day. Life is a journey, we’re in a rat race or we’re staying on track during the uphill battle that is our career. Conceptual metaphors for politics range from war to games to wargames.

This is particularly important when attempting to communicate something as part of a broader communications strategy. You need to engage people emotionally. You have to nudge them along as they move from the abstract notion to the concrete. Once that is achieved, they can begin grappling with your idea.

What some fail to appreciate is how important word choice is when attempting to help people along the way. As Mark Twain wisely observed, the difference between the right word and the almost-right-word is the difference between lightening and a lightening bug. The American political consultant Frank Luntz (https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz) made a similar observation in one of his books: Whether you call it a rabbit or a bunny makes a huge difference to people. Bunnies are cute. Rabbits destroy gardens. It makes a big difference.

I was reminded of this important when listening to an interview with Anat Shenker-Osorio on the Amicus podcast. The words you choose can make a huge difference. The entire show can be found here:

https://slate.com/podcasts/amicus/2021/02/incitement-impeachment-inevitable-acquittal

Shenker-Osorio is a communications consultant, researcher and author. She also has her own podcast dedicated to politics and language called Words to Win, which can be found here: https://wordstowinby-pod.com . The podcast delves deeply into language, messaging and politics.

Shenker-Osorio suggests a lot of political communications misses the mark in that it focuses and problem identification. She says that’s not an effective approach, since most people are not shopping around looking for new things to worry about. Presenting yourself in opposition to what others are doing seems to invoke a freeze response and “cements the sense that doing anything is futile”. By focusing complaints on others, you give those “others” oxygen (prime example: Donald Trump. As Lakoff said the best strategy is to just ignore him)

Shenker-Osorio gave a fascinating example from her work with economists on the huge difference word choice can make when it comes to influencing people’s perceptions:

“So, let me just give you a super-particular for instance. In an experiment we did a number of years ago, we brought people into a lab and we asked them to think about economic inequality. And we presented them with the facts the way that economists do—this quintile has this much, this quintile has that much, this quintile has that much, ect. We liken this abstraction which is a financial difference to a physical difference, a chasm—like the Grand Canyon. And, wealth is over here, and poor people are over there.“

“And for the other half of the sample, we said the economy is increasingly off-balance. Then we asked everybody “Is inequality a problem for the economy over-all. For our “gap” people, 80 percent of them said no, it’s not a problem for the whole economy. Twenty percent said ‘yes’ ”.

“The exact reverse proportion was true of our “off balance” people. Eighty percent said it’s a problem for the whole economy, 20 percent said it wasn’t.

So why is this? In reality, inequality is neither a gap nor an imbalance. And it’s also both. Because any time we need to refer to abstractions we default automatically and unconsciously to a conceptual metaphor. That’s just how we talk, right?“

(Amicus Podcast, Slate.com, 13 February 2020)

Echoing George Lakoff, Shenker-Osorio believes facts bounce off frames. Each of us has a conceptual metaphor that compares ideas to objects. She says this is the way we make sense of the world.

Telling people just the straight facts and then hoping they will arrive at the right conclusion is hopelessly misguided. To quote Shenker-Osorio, that’s just not the way the world works. People are sense-making machines that use language and their built-in conceptual metaphors to make sense of the world around them.

And you’d better be absolutely certain about the words you choose.

Saying something is part of a “gap” or saying the system is “off balance” can be the difference between a rabbit and a bunny.

An excellent vehicular analogy by Tim Harford, the economist, author, podcaster and Financial Times columnist. The debate he weights in on is whether it’s best to give as many people as possible the first dose of a two shot COVID vaccine, or hold back to make sure a smaller group of people get the second shot, according to the timelines recommended in clinical guidelines.

It’s an issue that was alive in Saskatchewan a few weeks ago.

Harford says with menacing variants increasing risk, the answer is obvious:

Cars are better with two headlights, and bicycles are better with two wheels. But while a bicycle with one wheel is useless, a car with only one headlight might be good enough in a pinch. The judgment here is that a single dose is more like a car with a single headlight than a bike with a single wheel. Given that these vaccines probably prevent the spread of the virus as well as preventing disease, it is possible that even people at the head of the queue might benefit if their second dose was temporarily redirected: if forced to drive in the dark, I would rather that every car on the road had one headlight than some two and some none. With a dangerous virus in wide circulation, we are all driving in the dark.

Source: Is ‘first dose first’ the right vaccination strategy? | Tim Harford

What the military can teach Congress, news outlets, and churches about winning back the faith of the people.

Source: The Mystery of Trust | Comment Magazine

I commend to you this interesting article on the issue of trust in institutions. It can be found in Comment Magazine, a publication I hadn’t heard of until it was referenced during the February 11th 2021 edition of the Slate Political Gabfest.  Editions of the Gabfest can be found here:

https://slate.com/podcasts/political-gabfest

The Comment article is dated January 12th, 2021 and written by Amanda Ripley, who writes books and magazine articles on “human behaviour and public policy” according to her bio. One of her books, “The Smartest Kids in the World–and How They Got That Way” was a New York Times bestseller.

Ripley begins with the counter-intuitive observation that public trust in the American military–and militaries around the globe, is both startlingly high and quite resilient. A 2020 Gallup poll found 72 percent of Americans trust the military “a great deal or quite a lot”.  In France, the number is higher. Similar polling can be found in the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain.

That means trust in the military in many countries is higher than it is for institutions like the church, financial institutions, the media and government.

The question, of course is why? Ripley says the history of trust in her country is mostly a story of scarcity. Yet without trust in a society’s institutions, little of significance can be accomplished:

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that this may be the most important question of our time. Society grinds to a halt without trust, as we get brutally reminded every news cycle. We cannot contain a pandemic unless we trust politicians and scientists. We cannot educate our children unless teachers, families, and mayors have some level of faith in one another. We cannot keep our communities safe without trust between police and the public. We will never reckon with climate change without trust. Trust has become the nonnegotiable prerequisite to a functioning civilization in the modern world”

And yet some institutions are notably able to maintain consistently high levels of trust. In an attempt to answer the ‘why’ question, Ripley surveys the research and finds it both “interesting and incomplete”.

However, in her mind, it all comes down to three equalities: ability, benevolence and integrity. 

Ability seems fairly obvious. If the public believes an institution is able to perform its basic functions at a high level of confidence, that will generate public trust.

Ripley sees benevolence as that sense an institution has your best interests at heart. She says integrity implies having strong values and adhering to those values rigorously.

She cites the examples of Google and Uber who may get high marks for ability but low marks for trust and integrity. Ergo, they are not well trusted. Also cited was higher levels of trust for small businesses, which may benefit from people believing their owners have stronger values and are less motivated by pure profit.

Trust becomes hugely important as governments across Canada attempt to grapple with how best to manage the economy during the COVID-19 epidemic. The public is being asked to do things for the common good that would have been seen as unthinkable a year ago. Compliance in the practices that will save our lives depends on people having trust in their governments.

My observation from my time in Saskatchewan politics was that the public will support most reasonable things a government proposes, provided they are still willing to give said government and its leader the benefit of the doubt. Once that is gone, little more can be accomplished.

Ripley’s article certainly puts more meat on the bones of my anecdotal sense of how trust works in politics.

I’m ceaselessly amazed by the bad presentations I see on any given day. It’s almost like people aren’t trying. Rarely are thoughts expressed with clarity and brevity.

What people must understand is that a bad presentation is more than just a lost opportunity. It’s an act of sabotage. Failure to communicate effectively can cost you support. It generates confusion and generates extra work. Your initial failure to consider the audience and apply critical thinking sabotages the possibility of generate new critical thinking down the road.

Here is a link to a presentation I made recently on how to build a good presentation:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vQ_JWPBtRpK_RwIzruixCvGw3HPpHoJoANsfHpLC8SOQGkSK2fqQaP5GoMhMYRQEg/embed?start=false&loop=false&delayms=30000

“If I can make Willie Horton a household name, we’ll win the election.”

Lee Atwater and his dark arts were featured prominently in an excellent New York Times piece today. This story is a signal reminder to all of us: politicians go negative because it works; In fact, it works like a hot damn. You should consciously and deliberately try to resist.

Keep this in mind this Fall as you join people across North America and head to the ballot box in upcoming provincial, civic and potentially national elections. Make your best effort to engage candidates with nuance. Find out what they think. Find out why. Find out where they differ from you and find out why. Look at platforms, look at policies. Try to embrace those who share your values. Try to understand those who don’t.  Avoid letting someone else define a candidate for you.

Do your best to resist the inevitable ad hominem attacks if you can and try to engage at a deeper level. We’ll all be the better for it.

This week, the British educational system is recovering from the chaos caused by using an algorithm to determine who gets into elite universities. This writer argues the debacle has laid bare historical inequities left unresolved for decades. She wisely suggests this may be time for a transformation in the national conversation about education, equity and student success.

As politicians and parents across Canada grapple with how to safely get students back to the classroom this fall, perhaps its time for a similar national conversation.

As has been often said, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

 

Source: Let’s use this exams debacle to transform England’s schools | Education | The Guardian

So, a top epidemiologist and the head of the Federal Reserve in Minnesota decide to write an article together. It’s tough advice, but I find it extremely compelling: Don’t give up on lock-downs too soon. They say the next six months are crucial.

“And the next six months could make what we have experienced so far seem like just a warm-up to a greater catastrophe. With many schools and colleges starting, stores and businesses reopening, and the beginning of the indoor heating season, new case numbers will grow quickly.”

This interesting article argues Boris Johnson’s government may not have the bandwidth to achieve it’s Global Britain aspirations.

 

Britain wants to go global at a time when globalization is in retreat. It has cast off from the world’s largest trading bloc when the world is more divided than ever into competing regions. And it is trying to carve out an overseas role just as the coronavirus pandemic has crippled its domestic economy.

As quoted today by Kara Swisher in today’s New York Times