The Professional Communicator’s Holiday Guide to Managing Your Hostile Relatives

A Few Tips to Avoid Disputes, Dyspepsia, and Disinheritance

No matter which holiday(s) you celebrate, now is the time to gather with family and friends.  For many folks in the age of political polarization, however, that’s not exactly a recipe for peace on earth. 

Communication professionals deal with these situations all the time for our clients: helping defuse tension with hostile audiences.  Whether it’s managing an angry town hall meeting, training employees how to handle unhappy customers, or even developing messages haters and skeptics will listen to instead of changing the channel, this is what we get paid to do.

And it’s not just about donning a flak jacket and hoping for the best. Sometimes we even move beyond de-escalation and find a way not only to keep things from exploding.  Sometimes we can achieve greater understanding, or work together toward a common goal, or motivate the hostile audience to change its behavior or ways of thinking.   

The great news is that these techniques can also work at the holiday dinner table to make the conversation with family and friends more productive, and maybe even more persuasive.

Whether it’s professional or personal dialogue, one of the most useful frameworks I’ve found is called the Change Conversation Cycle (CCC), formerly known as the Radical Conversation Cycle. 

Developed by Karin Tamerius for her organization Smart Politics and based on behavioral psychology, it’s a five-step recipe for better communication with a hostile audience.  Even if it’s an audience of one, like your brother-in-law from hell.

Here are the five steps of the CCC, directly from Tamerius’s website:  

  1. Ask: Ask open-ended  questions. Be curious about how the other person developed their beliefs.  Spend more time asking questions than making statements.
  2. Listen: Pay very close attention. Listen to understand, not to respond. Try to hear the values and emotions being expressed as well as the words.
  3. Reflect: Paraphrase what you heard. Name the emotions and values expressed as well as the words. Don’t move on untilthe other person feels heard and understood.
  4. Agree: Express agreement with one or more things the other person said. It’s usually easiest to agree on values, goals, and emotions. 
  5. Share: Present your point of view. In general, sharing a personal story is the most memorable and persuasive way to communicate your perspective.
The Change Conversation Cycle, developed by Karin Tamerius of Smart.org

You’ll notice there are no steps labelled tell, argue, debate, prove, or react.  There’s nothing here about correcting the other person’s facts, or rebutting what they are saying with facts of your own.  In fact, the first three steps are all about really hearing and checking for understanding.

The five steps are fairly easy to remember. More challenging is putting them into practice.

When you’re first using this technique and you’re in the heat of the moment, you may feel like you need the mindfulness of a Zen Buddhist master, the composure of a professional poker player, and the patience of a saint.  Deep breaths. This. Is. Hard.  But trust me: You can do it.  It won’t be easy at first, but almost nothing is easy when you’re a complete novice.  Keep working on it, and you will soon level-up to mastery. 

To be prepared for whatever you may encounter this holiday season, here are a couple of suggestions. 

  • Before you go over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house, put the five steps of CCC on your phone.  (Or, old-school, on an index card in your pocket).  Refer to this cheat sheet as often as necessary.
  • Mentally rehearse some of the possible discussions you might have, especially the kinds of conversational hand grenades your most extreme family member might toss into the mix.  When they say something that would normally push your buttons, consider how you will respond. How will you ask a neutral question?  How will you listen rather than preparing your response in your head?  What would reflecting sound like?  What areas of agreement might you find?  What can you share in return that will help them connect with you?
  • Don’t overdo it.  This is exhausting work. And just like with intense physical exercise, the “muscles” you are training need a chance to rest and recover after a particularly tough workout, or else you’ll reach a failure point.  So if you’ve engaged in a few rounds of the cycle with someone, move on and talk with someone else for awhile.  And definitely don’t waste time using it on social media trolls.  CCC works with people you know or at the very least people who are not able to remain anonymous.  Don’t use it to feed the trolls.   

If you want some practice, check out the “Angry Uncle Bot,” developed by CCC originator Karin Tamerius, which can simulate a conversation with that outspoken relative who’s on the opposite end of the political spectrum from you, whichever end that happens to be: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/opinion/thanksgiving-family-argue-chat-bot.html

Tamerius also leads an active Facebook group where she frequently posts scenarios that give people an opportunity to practice the steps.  So check it out!

Here’s hoping you not only keep the peace until the pie is served, but that everyone leaves the celebration feeling a little less polarized and a little more understood.

Happy holidays to you and yours!

Facilitation

Hey, Peloton: You skipped a step

Six Ways You Can Avoid Peloton’s Mistake, Even on a Limited Budget

By the now, there’s no one on social media who hasn’t seen and/or dragged that Peloton ad. Right? I mean even Wall Street got in on the action, dumping Peloton’s stock in a huge sell-off after the ad debuted.

So many reasons for the ad’s negative reception have been cited in all the coverage that’s followed, from the “scared eyebrows” of the actress who plays the wife, to her physical non-transformation (“Before: Thin and fit. After: Still thin and fit!”), to the slightly creepy documentary video she creates for her husband, that it’s hard to say exactly what part of this ad was the biggest fail.

But critiques of what is in the ad are missing the point. The real critique should be of the process that Peloton followed in creating it. Because it’s clear Peloton skipped a step: Message testing.

No message, no material, no media should ever get this far in a campaign without audience testing. Repeat after me: Don’t rest till you test. That testing should involve the most diverse, largest group of people the budget allows. (And honestly, budget should never even be a barrier, because there are numerous ways to message test on a shoestring. Keep reading for some tips). And yet, Peloton’s mistake is one that organizations make all the time. In the rush to get a campaign underway, they skip this critical final step.

Too often, the root cause is that a lot of people around the table are too busy high-fiving each other and agreeing that what they’ve created is fabulous. Sometimes the whole group may not love it, yet there’s peer pressure or reluctance for someone to speak up. But more often than not, the problem is that the decision-makers around that table are not representative of the audience they are trying to reach. They can’t be. Even if they started from a very similar place, simply working on the campaign, having the inside knowledge, and being part of the creative team biases them. When you’re not objective, you can’t see any flaws. And when you’re not part of the real, unbiased audience, you can’t know if your message will resonate or flop. (This is true even if your creative team includes people of the same race, ethnicity, age, gender, and socioeconomic status as the audience. However: way too often your group is more white, more male, and more affluent than the target audience, and that’s an even bigger recipe for disaster. More diverse, intentional hiring practices could help here, but I digress).

What to do? Well, if you’ve got a multi-million dollar advertising budget like Peloton, don’t spend it all on production and air time. Convene multiple focus groups. Conduct some one-on-one interviews. If you’ve done your initial audience research well, you’ll know which segments need to be represented here. Your audience groups may differ demographically (gender, income level, race, and geography, perhaps) and psychographically (such as current exercise habits, attitudes toward fitness, or willingness to invest in self or others, for example). Because both a pro and a con of any focus group is that people riff off of each other, and therefore may influence one another, a single group is never a best practice. Multiple groups, comprising thoughtfully considered segments, are the way to go when it’s possible. We know that Peloton did not do enough of this kind of testing, or that they somehow executed it poorly. Otherwise, that ad would never have seen the light of day in its present form.

But what if you don’t have Peloton’s multi-million dollar marketing budget? Then you’ve got to be even more careful to avoid a failed message. So often, the justification I hear for cutting corners on audience research or message testing is “lack of resources.” What’s really happening here is lack of imagination. Any organization can get outside its insular inner circle if it thinks creatively about how to reach people. And you don’t need a boatload of cash to do it.

Here are six ways to test messages on a shoestring budget:

Test before you invest. Get your first feedback when you are at the storyboard, concept, or text-only phase, before you sink money into video production, graphic design, or printing. It is much easier to make changes at this stage of the process than post-production. But this is not enough. You’re going to need to test the final product too, to make sure nothing happened along the way. Peloton’s concept may have looked okay on paper, but then along came that actress with the scared eyebrows.

F this. The “F” in this case stands for friends, family, and fellow co-workers who have not been involved in developing your campaign. Any of these folks can be part of your initial testing panel. Segment them as much as possible to represent some of your key audience groups. Formalize the process by developing a research guide with deliberately crafted questions, and capture the data you collect in writing. If your message relates to something obscure (like acoustic ceiling tiles or insulin pumps) and your intended audience is very narrow, you may need to expand your list of “friends” to current clients. But trust me: You can come up with a short list just from folks you already know.

Represent. Almost any audience group will have formal or informal leaders — “key informants.” If you don’t have the resources to recruit or reach an entire group, reach out to these key informants. Start with industry or trade group officials, leaders of community organizations, bloggers, or people who serve the audience you are interested in. For example, need to reach new mothers, but can’t afford to talk to many of them? Contact leaders of local moms groups, La Leche Leagues, WIC clinics, mommy bloggers, or daycare operators and interview a representative group of these intermediaries. They know their audiences and can give you a good snapshot of what they’re thinking. Often, such leaders and influencers will talk with you for free.

Phone it in. You can save significant time and money by hosting focus groups or conducting one-on-one interviews remotely. Skype, Facetime, Zoom, and other platforms allow for video focus groups at low or no cost. Allow people to see the message or ad electronically, or send them documents in advance by email or snail mail. Instead of renting a facility, providing food, and paying $75 per person to get people to come to you, people will often be willing to participate for as little as a $10 giftcard. Throw in a drawing for a chance to win a bigger prize, and you can sweeten the deal further. Use your key informants (above) to help you recruit participants.

Bring it to the people. To minimize the resources required to find and recruit participants, go to where they are. A booth or a table at a local event or festival your audience attends can put you in the right place for intercept interviews. A small giveaway or a chance to be part of a drawing for a larger prize will often be the only incentive you need to entice participants.

Up close and personal, but in a limited way. If you do have a marketing budget, even a few traditional focus groups or in-depth interviews can shed light on your audience’s reaction to a message. Best practices suggest working with a professional research firm to create your research plan and interview guide, which means much of the cost is upfront, and additional interviews or focus groups should cost less. Depending on venue and whether you outsource services such as recruitment or transcription, the cost of a single professionally moderated focus group, including participant incentives of $50 each, might be as low as $1,800, and additional groups might be as low as $750 each. In-depth interviews could be as low as $750 for the first one and $150-$200 each for subsequent interviews. (Of course, renting a facility, paying recruiters, or having the data professionally analyzed and reported with recommendations for action would add to the cost).

No matter how you get your message testing data, listen to it. Don’t be afraid to make changes or even scrap an idea if your audience reacts negatively.

Adequate message testing will always cost you less and take less time than investing in and recovering from a failed campaign.

Just ask Peloton.

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