Why I’d Rather Give Someone a Framework Than a List of Dos and Don’ts
There are plenty of perfectly sensible things we can tell somebody in a media training workshop: Keep your answers concise. Don't speculate. Avoid jargon. Get to the point. Don't repeat negative language. Make sure you communicate your message.
None of this is necessarily bad advice, but sooner or later, somebody asks the question that I think separates an OK workshop from a really decent training session: ‘How?’
- How do I keep my answer concise when the subject I'm talking about is incredibly complicated?
- How do I get from the question I've been asked to the point I actually need to make?
- How do I stop myself waffling when I'm under pressure?
- How do I make something technical understandable without dumbing it down?
Telling somebody what they should do is relatively easy. Giving them a practical way to do it is much harder. And this is one of the reasons frameworks have become such an important part of the way I train.
The ‘how’ is where training really starts
I didn't sit down one day and decide I needed to invent a collection of frameworks, they developed much more organically than this, largely because I kept noticing the same gap in media training.
I remember sitting in a workshop many years ago alongside a very respected journalist. He'd spent a good part of the beginning of the session establishing his credentials, including plenty of photographs of himself interviewing some very impressive people. There was absolutely no question that he understood journalism or knew how to conduct an interview.
Then one of the participants asked for an example of how they could actually approach something we'd been discussing. And he handed the question to me, the communications person in the room.
This has always stuck with me.
Knowing what a journalist wants is valuable. Understanding how interviews work is valuable. Being able to spot when somebody has given a poor answer is valuable. But training requires another step.
You have to be able to help somebody work out what to do instead.
Over the years, this became increasingly important in the way I designed my own workshops. I didn't want people to leave with a page of notes telling them to do this and avoid that. I wanted them to have practical ways to organise their thinking and approach the situations we'd been working on when I was no longer sitting beside them.
And the feedback I've had repeatedly since tells me how valuable this is.
People thank me for giving them actual frameworks. They tell me they can see how they'll use them again and again. They've got something they can come back to long after the workshop itself has finished. For me, this is the ‘how’.
A framework gives the advice somewhere to go
Take the Bridging Technique, something that's been taught in media training for years.
The framework itself is ABC: Acknowledge, Bridge, Communicate: Acknowledge the question, use a Bridge to move from it, then communicate what you want or need to say.
It's a useful framework, and one I've used for years. But I began to see a problem with the way it was often taught.
The most important part is the C.
If somebody spends too long acknowledging the question, makes an obvious bridge and then gives a fairly thin response at the other end, the person asking the question has every reason to go straight back to where they started. You haven't really moved the conversation anywhere.
So I started putting some indicative proportions around ABC when I taught it: roughly 8% Acknowledge, 2% Bridge and 90% Communicate.
They're not scientific percentages and they're not intended to be. They're a simple way of showing where I want somebody to put their effort.
And then came the more important question: how do you make the 90% work?
This is where I developed my Stepping Stone Technique.
Rather than treating the C as simply the place where you deliver a pre-prepared key message, I help people think about the stepping stones they can use to bring this part of the response to life. How can you expand on something useful? What evidence, example, explanation or context could take the conversation somewhere more interesting? What can you give the journalist or audience that makes them want to stay with you rather than immediately return to the original question?
This is a good example of how my own frameworks have developed. I didn't throw away an established technique because I wanted to put my name on something different. I kept the part that worked and developed the part where, from years of watching people use it, I thought they needed more help.
And I think this is an important distinction for trainers.
You don't necessarily need to invent something completely new. Sometimes the opportunity is to understand an existing framework properly, see where people struggle to apply it and develop the ‘how’ that makes it genuinely useful.
You don't have to invent everything yourself
There's a danger, when we start talking about methodologies and frameworks, of making them sound like proprietary secrets that every trainer needs to invent from scratch. I don't believe this.
When people come through The Media Trainer Method®, I share five practical frameworks I use in my own media training. They're welcome to use them. They're welcome to adapt them. If they find one works brilliantly exactly as I teach it, I'm perfectly happy for them to take it into their own training room and use it.
This is part of what they're learning. And ultimately, I want the person receiving the training to get the best training they could have.
But I also want those who take part in The Media Trainer Method to understand why the framework works.
What problem is it solving? Why is it easier for somebody to remember than a collection of instructions? Where might it need adapting? Is it still useful for this participant, this situation, and this communication environment?
Because frameworks shouldn't become another collection of things we repeat simply because somebody once taught them to us.
I've written elsewhere about the 7-38-55 rule and how Albert Mehrabian's research has been repeatedly simplified into the claim that 93% of communication is non-verbal. It's a useful example of what can happen when an idea becomes so familiar in training rooms that we stop questioning where it came from or what it was originally trying to tell us. You can read more about it here: The 7-38-55 Rule: What Mehrabian Really Said About Communication
The lesson I take from this isn't that we should become suspicious of every model or framework we encounter. It's that, as trainers, we should understand the things we're asking other people to use.
Sometimes this means taking an established technique, as I did with bridging, and developing it into something that works better for the people in front of you.
Sometimes it means deciding a familiar piece of training wisdom doesn't deserve a place in your workshop at all.
And sometimes it means creating something new because you keep encountering a problem for which ‘do this’ simply isn't enough.
The best frameworks have a life beyond the workshop
For me, this is probably the real test. A participant shouldn't need me standing beside them to remember what to do.
When they're sitting opposite a journalist six months later and get asked the question they really didn't want, can they reach for something we worked on together?
When they're preparing for a panel discussion, podcast or presentation, can they use one of the same frameworks to organise what they want to say?
When they're under pressure and don't have time to remember 27 different dos and don'ts, have I given them something simple enough to come back to?
This is why I'm much more interested in giving somebody a usable framework than an impressive-looking slide full of advice. And it's also why I don't think the trainer's job finishes when we've identified what somebody needs to do differently.
‘You need to be more concise’ is feedback.
Helping somebody understand how to become more concise, giving them a way to approach it, letting them try it, and then helping them refine it is training. There's a big difference.
Finding the ‘how’ in your own training
If you're already delivering media or communications training, it's worth looking at your own workshop through this lens.
- Where are you giving advice?
- Where are you telling people what good looks like?
- And where are you actually giving them a practical way to get there?
You may already have the beginnings of frameworks without calling them this. If there's an explanation you find yourself giving repeatedly, a sequence you use to help people solve a particular problem, or a way of thinking that consistently makes something click for participants, there may be something worth developing.
This is one of the things I want people to start thinking about through The Media Trainer Method®.
I'll share the methodology and frameworks I've developed through around 20 years of delivering media training, because there's no reason for somebody else to spend 20 years reinventing them. But I also want them to understand what makes them work, adapt them when they need to and recognise opportunities to develop approaches of their own.
Because knowing a lot about communication gives you a very good foundation for becoming a media trainer. Knowing how to turn this knowledge into something another person can actually use is where the training begins.
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