3.3.1 Preparing the Team - Techniques

 

On this page, we now move to building on the three principles outlined in the previous section and give practical advice on how to apply these principles to the task of preparing your team for the challenging discussions around campaign implementation. It’s rather easy to talk about openness, civility and engagement, but it’s a different matter to put these into practice in your campaigning work. In this section, we outline three techniques to help your campaign team in this effort.


Technique 1: Start conversations with a purposeful willingness to be open.

As mentioned in the discussion of principles, the basic idea is to open a conversation where you are asking questions to learn the positions and feelings of your audiences to build empathy, find some shared ground, but still put your own position on the table. This may sound like a weak approach in terms of advocacy ambition, but in such discussions, many people in the middle have never had the chance to engage with other perspectives in a conversation where they are being listened to and this approach can have powerful outcomes.
 
An underlying assumption has to be that your middle segments are worth listening to and that they have legitimate concerns about the issue. So, in opening the discussion you are trying to “explore each other’s conversations”1 by listening to understand, but also trying to be understood. Drawing on campaigning2  and negotiation practice3 , the following are some practical techniques to employ:
 
a.     Make a safe space to talk:

  • Be respectful, calm and helpful in the discussion.
  • Open by identifying a shared purpose for the discussion, but also be authentic and hold your ground.
  • Lay the ground work for an inclusive discussion.
     

b.     Listening to their story:

  • Ask opened ended questions, e.g. “tell me more….”, “help me understand….”
  • Acknowledging the feelings of your audience.
  • Ask them to personalise their story, if possible.
  • Paraphrase their words to clarify and show you understand.
  • Focus on messages starting with “I” rather than “you”, which can sound accusatory and upset the balance.
     

c.     Holding your ground to broaden the debate:

  •  Add your views and position using a “Yes, and..” approach, which seeks to broaden the conversation rather than starting conflict.
  • Acknowledge your own feelings.
  • Bring relevant personal experiences to the table to humanise the discussion and add your own views.
  • Don’t get stuck in the opposition frames, but rather respectfully disagree and change the frame.

 
Such prescriptions are difficult to follow without first seeing them in practice. So, let’s start by looking at an example of a campaigner in this position and adopting at least some of these techniques:
 


CASE of door to door campaign with the middle from the Leadership LAB4
 

 

The case focuses on citizen engagement and the video shows a campaigner engaging a potential voter on her doorstep. “In this conversation, recorded in March 2016, a Leadership LAB volunteer speaks with a voter in Los Angeles on including transgender people in non-discrimination laws… This is an edited version of a longer conversation. Some names muted for privacy”5 .
 


 Looking at the application of the techniques outlined above, you can see that the campaigner really creates a positive, inclusive and engaging atmosphere and manages to move the opinion of the potential voter over the 30 minutes of the conversation. The key turn in the conversation is the ability to make a connection between her own experience of being treated badly due to being different, to his own experience, to her niece’s experience and then back out to the law. This overlap even turns the woman into an activist by the end: “let them be who they are” – “let it out, hiding it is worse”.
 
Further insights into the approach can be gleaned by breaking down the approach according to the techniques outlined above:
 
a.      Safe space to talk:

  •  The atmosphere is constructive, open, non-judgemental, with positive reinforcement 95% of the way, until there is a chance to push back on some things, but only at a point when the campaigner knows a good connection has been made.
  • The campaigner connecting the personal experience of being treated differently to his own experience is a nice way to bond.

 
b.      Listen to their story:

  • There is much positive reinforcement evident, and even when some nasty stereotypes are thrown out earlier on, the campaigner stays in the positive zone.
  • The campaigner acknowledges her feelings all the way, e.g. “I’m very sorry to hear about that”.
  • He makes a big connection to her personal story of being treated differently and also to that of her trans niece. 
  • He uses ‘I’ all the way until he’s sure he’s on more solid ground, and it’s only then he starts using ‘you’ to then overturn the stereotypes.

 
c.      Holding your ground to broaden the debate:

  • The campaigner’s management of his own triggers is impressive, and he doesn’t react to quite offensive stereotypes at the start.
  • He immediately starts referring to the niece as her/she, thereby drawing a line in the sand.
  • He uses the ‘Yes, and ‘approach to add his own experiences –  his transgender friend and the fact that he is gay.
  • Adding the personal experience builds a bond between them.
  • Once the campaigner knows that there is some empathy established, he is able to go back to her initial statements on transgender and especially this discussion of the threat of transgender people to children and takes these points on quite forcefully.
 

 

Technique 2: Build your ‘emotional armour’ to take on challenging discussions.

Many on the progressive side have been exposed to the views of the middle and it can often be quite a challenge to engage with their views. The good news is that those in the middle are generally well-intentioned people with concerns that campaigners need to engage6 . Nevertheless, if you have grown up in the world of human rights defenders, then the views of the middle can sometimes be difficult to take and indeed, may trigger angry responses from progressives. In triggering this anger, there is a danger of losing your emotional balance in the conversation and this can come out in various ways that are generally not helpful and often close the door to a conversation that would otherwise allow you to empathetically engage your audience.
 
So, how can you prepare yourself to avoid such large scale emotional swings in discussions? This is a process we call “building your emotional armour”. To be clear, this does not mean being inauthentic in discussing your feelings or shutting down emotionally; rather it means doing so in a way that you don’t close the door before there is a chance to get to a meaningful exchange. 
 
A comparative preparatory process we thought useful to introduce is how a lawyer prepares a witness who will have to handle hostile questions in testimony and indeed, the legal profession has a process that is very illustrative in this regard, called getting the witness ‘inured’ for testimony, so that “the witness is not predisposed to unconstructive hostility while in the deposition”7 .  This process of inuring the witness involves making them familiar with the assumptions of the opposition, the expected questions, and giving them a chance to rehearse their responses under intense pressure. Basically, it involves becoming very familiar with the opposition’s approach and viewpoints, so that really any input, question or accusation will not be something surprising and won’t therefore, trigger potentially unconstructive or over-emotional responses. It’s important to reinforce again that this does not mean being cold or unemotional, but rather it entails maintaining emotional control.
 
In practical terms, how might you become inured or put another way, how do campaigners build emotional armour to avoid unhelpful emotional responses? Following the legal example, maybe the most important starting point of this process is to expose yourself to the views and positions of the middle target audiences and also to watch for and learn what are your own triggers! Our workshop participants have found this process difficult, but the following have helped:

  • Being exposed to frame maps to understand the arguments used in detail;
  • Being exposed to polling research to further understand the people and their positions;
  • Personifying the middle though coming up names and profiles for middle segments;
  • Role playing around the middle – literally having to role play someone from a middle segment and also, role playing the process of engaging the middle;
  • Observing message testing focus group – this may be one of the most useful process where campaigners experience the verbal and non-verbal responses of the middle segments to their campaign elements.

 
Over time and based on such multiple opportunities for exposure, many of our Narrative Change Lab participants have found it got a lot easier for them. Outside of the support structure of a lab, there are other more obvious ways to become more familiar with the arguments, language and people in the middle:
 

  • Relatives, parents, friends or people you talk to on the street invariably belong in the middle and taking the time to listen and engage with them can help.
  • Reading the newspapers of the middle
  • Watching the TV and news programmes of the middle
  • Burst your social media bubble and follow some of the opinion leaders and media outlets of the middle.

 


Technique 3: The only way to learn these approaches is through practice and feedback – learning by doing.

While it is indeed a challenge to adopt a more engaging and conciliatory approach with an audience whose opinions campaigners often disagree with, with a thorough preparation process and practice, this kind of communication becomes easier and more effective. Learning these techniques is like learning to make effective presentations or negotiate effectively, i.e. it really is only something that can be learned through a process of practice, feedback and reflection. We spend significant time on such practice and reflection sessions with the participants in our Narrative Change Lab, and in the techniques and guidelines outlined in this section, we do our best to start you in the right direction. We encourage you to do role plays in your team and if you have the chance, get them to video you as you take part and discuss this together in a safe space. Start using the talking points for your campaign to build your role play and also, as the first real meetings happen, make sure you make time to discuss and deconstruct them in the team to reflect on how well it’s going.


 

PLANNING CHECKLIST
Step 3.3 Prepare the team
  • Are your team onboard with the need to take a constructive, dialogue-centred approach based on the principle of civility in this campaign?
  • How are you going to expose your team to the arguments and prejudices they will face in the campaign exchanges and so, build their emotional armor? 
  • How are the team going to become proficient in this dialogue-centred approach?

 

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