🤷‍♀️ Do you speak human?

Do you speak human?

International organisations can struggle to get through to people these days. They often sound like they are repeating platitudes which have been edited by a giant and humourless committee. There are exceptions: Tom Fletcher, the United Nations humanitarian relief chief, and Annalena Baerbock, the President of the General Assembly are the examples to note.

What they do is speak human. They’ve listened to George Orwell’s warning that jargon and length can all too often obscure and confuse the point, or even act as a disguise for having nothing real to say.

Tom Fletcher is very good at telling stories about what things are like. He spoke at Chatham House earlier this year about how the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs had put together a costed plan to save 87 million lives with humanitarian aid. The equivalent of that entire cost had already been spent on the Iran war.

It gets at something people have probably heard before—that the world always manages to find money for war, and doesn’t seem able to find the money for feeding the starving and vaccinating the kids. But putting it that way, ‘87 million lives, and it’s all been spent already’, really cut through.

What changes your mind?

At my previous organisation, we once asked colleagues what have you read or listened to in the last month that changed your mind about something. With different colleagues, different things would change their minds. Our research director noted he’d normally only change his mind if he read a book, because he’d need a really solid, weighty argument, and an op-ed was not going to cut it. Other people would be more persuaded by a podcast—maybe there’s something about hearing a person speak that they find more convincing.

The take away is that people change their minds based on different things. If you’re trying to change someone’s mind, do you know how they changed their view on something in the past? 

Why should people care about your thing?

If you’re working in an expert or policy field, you probably love what you do and find it really fascinating. You have to ask yourself the slightly difficult question of why should the person you’re talking to care? 

Everyone needs to take a step back and think about where the journalist, politician, or the member of the public, is coming from. They may not know anything about what you’re talking about. That doesn’t make them ignorant. We’re in a world where we can’t know about everything, and that’s why you have a role. But you probably need to link what you care about deeply to what they happen to be thinking about. It’s about stepping back from your own position to empathise with your listener.

Me, not we, is what people listen to

There are people within the UN ecosystem who shy away from the kind of personal communication that Tom Fletcher and Annalena Baerbock use. You’ll see a lot of videos from the two of them walking into a building, telling you, “I’m here doing this.” Some people in the UN system think it should always be ‘we’, that it shouldn’t be ‘me’, that it’s too individualistic. But the personal voice is what people listen to in the current environment of distrust in institutions.

Who can have the conversation that you cannot?

I learned a lot about the value of different messengers at The Elders. They were really good at getting access to serving heads of state, because they were former heads of state and could have a conversation with a head of state that nobody else can have. Not all heads of state respect one another, but there’s still some sense that they’ve had a similar experience, and that they therefore have a shared basis of understanding that no one else can have.

It made me think about peer-to-peer learning, and how people engage peer groups in lots of learning initiatives—this is a high-level version of that. It really matters that when someone has run a country, stood in elections, won an election, lost an election, they speak with an authority that I don’t have, because I haven’t done those things.

Of course it depends on how you reach the impact you want. For UNA-UK, our members want our membership and audience to grow, and they’re much more interested in us making the case in fresh ways to those new audiences rather than going deeper into the insider conversation. How do your messengers change if you are going to have a very wonky conversation for the specialists, or something that is much broader?

Does the messenger have to talk about your thing?

At our 80th anniversary event in January, one of the speakers was Professor Brian Cox (the UN champion for space). He didn’t talk about UN reform or insider stuff, but about the weird uniqueness of Earth and the need not to screw it up. He concluded by talking about how he’d had the chance to tell heads of state at the Glasgow COP how insanely unique and fragile Earth is, and trying to convey to them their level of responsibility. People loved it.

There’s always a risk in our world that you have the same people saying the same things. It was a good reminder to switch things up every so often.

Be kind, but not too kind…

You learn over years of policy engagement to understand where policymakers are coming from. But there’s probably a point at which it’s possible to get too close, too sympathetic, and to be so kind and polite in the engagement that they don’t actually hear anything.

I’ve been to briefings where people tried to inject constructive criticism very politely, and the person having the meeting said, “Oh good, that validates what we already thought”, and you think, ‘Hmm, you didn’t hear what we said’.

Thank you to the 125 of you who have referred colleagues to this newsletter. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.