214. From Crisis to Clarity: Simplicity, Feedback, and the Art of Being Heard

Sometimes the biggest communication challenges can be addressed with the simplest of ideas. My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I am excited to speak with my friend Greg Burke. Greg worked in a variety of media, newspapers, magazines, wire services, and television, including for Time Magazine and Fox News. He also worked in communications at the Vatican. He did strategic communication for Pope Benedict and was the spokesperson for Pope Francis. Greg is normally shuttling between Madrid and Barcelona, where he teaches public speaking in crisis communication at IESE Business school. He's currently a fellow in the Distinguished Careers Institute at Stanford. Welcome, Greg. You and I have had lots of fun conversations in the past, and I'm glad to have those conversations now on the podcast. Thanks for being here. 

[00:00:58] Greg Burke: It's great to be here. I've been a big fan of the podcast.

[00:01:00] Matt Abrahams: You started your career as a reporter, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on how to ask good questions and how to help people feel at ease answering those questions.

[00:01:10] Greg Burke: Interesting. I'm not sure they teach you that when you study journalism, but I actually learned that from my father. My father, he wasn't a reporter, he was a pediatrician, but he was genuinely curious about people, places, and how things work, and never afraid to ask questions. So I think actually the key thing is that curiosity and real interest. If you ask an open-ended question to somebody about their job, about how that works, they'll open up. Let them speak, is another important thing. I think my father was very good at that. He was unassuming, he wasn't aggressive, and let them speak. 

[00:01:47] Matt Abrahams: So I think this idea of, I do think curiosity and generosity. Generosity in terms of giving people the space to speak and a good reporter gives that space. 

[00:01:57] Greg Burke: It is amazing what people will tell you when you give 'em the chance. 

[00:02:00] Matt Abrahams: That's right. And if you are gracious enough to give them the time to do it and then ask more questions, I think makes a lot of sense. You started in the written word as a journalist who would write articles. I'm curious, what best practices did you end up taking away from that, that you could share about how to write clearly and concisely? A lot of us struggle with that. 

[00:02:20] Greg Burke: Yeah, really interesting. And I feel very lucky about my first couple of jobs. My first job was a police reporter outside of New York City, small paper, but it's better to make your mistakes at a small paper, Port Chester, New York. And I think the thing I learned there was get your facts straight. It may sound really simple, but not always. They, there are different spellings to names which sound the same. And when you're a police reporter, you wanna get the name right, you know, you're talking about somebody getting a DUI or worse.

[00:02:51] And much more importantly, my second job was at a wire service, United Press International. And it was loads of deadlines. And so just throwing stuff at you, write it, get it out. And I think the lesson there for everybody is, I don't wanna say there is no such thing as writer's block, but you don't have the luxury of a writer's block. And don't let you're looking for perfection ruin your chance to do good writing. Get something down on paper, set a deadline for yourself, get it down, and then you'll fix it up. I think that's extremely important. Then you can keep getting it more concise, getting it clearer, but get it down, get started, and that's a really big help.

[00:03:29] Matt Abrahams: I have to admit, I am a very nervous writer. I would much rather speak than write. It is really painful for me to write, and I think part of it is what you talked about, that notion of perfection. I want it to be right. It feels to me more permanent than when I speak something, even though I'm speaking to video, that lasts a long time too. So detail, be detail oriented. Make sure you get the facts right. Make sure that you just get started. And what I heard you say at the end of that answer was this notion of you can fix it later. So I assume editing and review is an important part of the process. 

[00:04:02] Greg Burke: There's a load of that, and I think this is true for writing and, and also for oral presentations. You know, you can video yourself if you have a presentation, then look at it and say, okay, I'm gonna change this and this and this. Editing, I think, is key.

[00:04:15] Matt Abrahams: I'd like to dig a little deeper because both of those bits of advice that you talked about, artificial intelligence, AI can help us with. I'm curious what your thoughts are on AI and its impact on written communication.

[00:04:25] Greg Burke: My thoughts from AI have gotten mostly from one of our colleagues here at Stanford, Rachel Konrad. I, I think she has a very good read on AI, which is, AI is like having a whole load of interns. They can deliver good things, which you have to put together. The voice has to be yours. The point of view has to be yours. I think that's a perfect description of AI. Yes, many good things they're putting on the table. You still have to set the table. You have to put it together. 

[00:04:55] Matt Abrahams: Right. Your own personal voice has to come out and the connection you can have. Like me, you have the good fortune of teaching at a world renowned business school, IESE. And I'd love to know a bit about the lessons that you teach your students. Can you share with us two big lessons that you try to instill regarding communication to your students? 

[00:05:13] Greg Burke: Yeah. One of my three is grab them at the start. And that's true if you're writing or if you're speaking. If you're speaking in front of a crowd and you say, can everyone hear me all right? Or if you say, oh, I'm nervous, 'cause I don't normally speak in front of this many people, people are gonna be searching for their phone, they're gonna be looking at, what's the weather gonna be like this weekend? I'm supposed to play golf. Whereas if you say, think about your most embarrassing moment in your life, people are probably gonna start thinking that, and you can up the ante say, okay, do you think you could win if we had a contest here in this room now, and whatever. But grab them at the start.

[00:05:52] Then what I would say with your main points is punch and pause. Make your point, and let it sink in. I think of people, especially when they're beginning, they don't use the silence enough in public speaking. And then the third point is really not about the content but the process. Get feedback. Get feedback from your colleagues, get feedback from the kind of people who would be in the audience or who would know what the audience is gonna be like. And I think that's so helpful. And we see that at IESE all the time. We have the big lecture classes. We do a bootcamp, uh, public speaking bootcamp at the beginning of the MBA and the lecture classes are seventy students, but then we do smaller groups of eight or nine or ten. And in those, I find it fascinating every time things that the students pick up on that I don't necessarily get. And that's like you really learn from that kind of feedback. 

[00:06:44] Matt Abrahams: Feedback is so critical in all communication. Most of us are so busy doing what we do, and we have all these other demands that we just get it out and we don't take the time to get that feedback. And as you just implied, we are not the best judges of how our information will land. 

[00:06:59] Greg Burke: Yeah, there are a lot of examples of that. I think most of us think about it when it's quite important. But I think there are a number of important things you have to look at. It might just be an email, but a sensitive email at work because you are angry, something happened, you feel like you suffered some sort of injustice one thing or another. Well, be careful about sending that off in the first five minutes. I think the twenty-four hour rule is good on that one. And even a better rule is somebody wise and with experience look at that and say, is that the right tone? Is that what I wanna say? And sometimes you have to write really tough things. That's part of nature and that's part of life. But I think your point is well taken. Too often we, oh, gotta get it out, gotta get it out. And we don't ask that feedback. Doesn't take a whole lot of effort. 

[00:07:44] Matt Abrahams: My colleagues and my wife are my editors in chief, and they help give me perspective on the things that I speak and the things that I write. I really like that idea of parachute in, get engagement at the start. I believe attention is our most precious commodity, and if I can't get your attention, I can't engage you and enlist you. So finding a way to start, asking a provocative question, telling a compelling story, giving a startling statistic, those are all ways. I really appreciate that advice. And I'm gonna take from you, maybe even steal from you, the notion of punch and pause, because a lot of people feel like I just gotta give all the points out all at once. And you have to give that moment to let people sink in and process. And I like that idea of punch and pause.

[00:08:24] You've got lots of valuable advice to share with everybody, but I really want to talk about one particular experience you had. So you served in the Vatican where you led strategic communication for Pope Benedict and you were the spokesperson for Pope Francis. Not typical jobs most people have. Before I ask you about some specifics, can you give us insight into what your job was and any guiding principles that you followed to make sure your messages were clear and consistent?

[00:08:49] Greg Burke: I would say clear, consistent, and timely. When I was brought into the Vatican, that was 2012, it was a time when there were leaks of documents. It was a sensitive period, and I think where the Vatican was often caught on the back foot. I think I was brought in to try to help it become a clear and a consistent message. And a timely message, which is often not the Vatican's strong point because the institution's been around for two thousand years and doesn't think the same way a startup here thinks. Like we have to be in this and do this now and react to this immediately, or the way a political party or a government necessarily thinks. It's got the ultimate long view of history, right? Now, having said that, I do remember somebody just when I arrived and he pointed out something interesting to me, about the difficulty in an institution as, as broad as it is, of always being on message, believe as Pope Benedict was making a trip to the United States.

[00:09:46] He said, I remember he told me, there were three or four different sort of top level Vatican people who were interviewed about the trip and talked about it, and they all said good things, but they all said different things, which was interesting because I thought, wow, how different from a political machine where, here's the message, we stick to it. Having said that, one of my main points was just, let's stay out of the weeds. Let's keep it as simple as possible. Twitter and actually Instagram were good ways to do that. And we've talked about how they were easy means to deliver a simple message directly. I always said, you Pope Francis had a pretty simple message. God loves you. God forgives you, share the love, you know, and I, let's work on variations of that. 

[00:10:33] Matt Abrahams: This idea of simplicity, I think is really important. A lot of us add a lot of complexity to what we say, in some cases, just to show we're really smart. In other cases, because the issues we're talking about have lots of nuance and detail, but getting one crisp, clear, simple idea, at first, I think is really important. It sounds like that's a lot of what you help do is bring that simplicity and consistency. 

[00:10:56] Greg Burke: Smart people normally like showing how smart they are, right? We'd have old fashioned press conferences and people would read really long statements, and I'm like, that's not the way we're transmitting things today, and we're always trying to cut that down.

[00:11:08] Matt Abrahams: In your many roles that you've had, certainly at the Vatican, you've had to deal with challenges in crises. You've talked about the leak that happened. Can you share a story or two about crises that you've had to manage and help us understand perhaps some best practices we can employ when we find ourselves in challenging situations?

[00:11:26] Greg Burke: Yeah. I think this started long before I got there, but the biggest crisis has really been one of the biggest crisis in the Catholic Church for hundreds of years, was a sex abuse crisis, which blew up in 2002. I think one of the key things is being willing to admit you've made mistakes. And people don't like doing that, in companies and churches, in organizations, in nonprofits, in, in whatever. And I was always impressed, Pope Benedict wrote a letter to the people of Ireland and was really hit hard by the crisis, by the change in the times, and he basically said, I totally understand if you never wanna cross through the doors of a church again. And I thought that was incredibly noble of him and the right thing to do.

[00:12:09] And, and that, that is a lesson because that's not easy. I think that's not easy and people look for ways to go around it. He was also asked, Pope Benedict was asked a question one time in, uh, the interview, don't you think people take advantage of the crisis to attack the church? And his answers were always very measured, reasonable. And he said, perhaps, but to the extent that the charges are true in any of these cases, it's good they come to light. And that was just an amazing admission of we're not afraid of the truth, and I think that's incredibly important and a lesson. So those were some challenges. On a positive side, I'll tell you an interesting one.

[00:12:45] Pope Francis wrote a document called Laudato Si’ on the Environment, believe it was 2015. It's called an Encyclical, which is a Vatican name for a long document. It was interesting, it will come as no surprise to anybody that most people don't read a hundred page document coming out from their church, and certainly not most of the faithful and maybe even others in leadership positions. And so it's very interesting, the one thing we did, I got the help with some wiz kid who could really put things together, and I think I gave him five days. And I said, I'm gonna come up with ten points from a hundred page document. I need you to put it into a five minute video and we're gonna do these points in Italian, in English, and in Spanish, so at least cover half the world.

[00:13:30] And in the end, I think we only had space for seven of the points, but, and the video lasted six minutes, not five, but I think it was a great new way to get out an important message. It wasn't easy, but how do you take a hundred page document and get your six or eight key points outta there? And I think we come back to the editing thing, separating wheat from chaff. And when you're writing, sometimes we're attracted to this just because we wrote it. And it's interesting what you can learn there. I think it's Stephen King who says, kill your darlings. You know? I mean, when you're too attached to something, watch out. Show it to somebody, get some feedback, but that's a great process to learn.

[00:14:10] Matt Abrahams: I appreciate that when I asked you about crises, you gave a positive and one that was certainly negative. And the take home message I think that I heard was one, acknowledge it, take responsibility, allow for the discussion and discourse that happens as a result. And then from the positive example you gave around the environment, it's really finding ways to highlight the significant important points and then find the channel that's appropriate for delivering it. So Greg, before we end, I like to ask three questions. One I create just for you and the other two I ask everybody. Are you ready for this?

[00:14:42] Greg Burke: My moments arrived.

[00:14:43] Matt Abrahams: So, because I know you, I know that one of your passions is playing golf, and how has having an outlet like golf been helpful to your communication? And how has your experience handling challenging situations helped you in golf? I can imagine a calmness, a focus is helpful.

[00:14:59] Greg Burke: I'll tell you one thing, golf allows you time away from your phone, right? As as someone told me, I'm aging myself and I had a friend in television and he said, oh, you gotta start playing golf. You only have to look at your Blackberry every three or four holes. So I should be a better golfer 'cause that is more or less when I started. But I think actually, I think this is incredibly important for connecting with people. You can play golf by yourself, but connecting with people, the less you have your earbuds in and the less you're looking at your phone, the more you're establishing human contact, and that's fantastic. And then I think the other funny thing about golf and all this is just you have to have a sense of humor because golf is tough. I mean, it can be incredibly frustrating. I think it's key that you maintain that sort of approach to it where, hey, I have to have fun. In terms of public speaking when people are nervous have this incredible fear of public speaking, I always tell them, listen, it's not like golf. You can actually get better at it. And that's true. We've all seen it.

[00:16:00] Matt Abrahams: Right. That's an important point for all of us. It doesn't have to be golf, but some physical activity. I know you like to hike. I like to do martial arts. It could be playing a musical instrument. In all of those cases you're learning and developing a skill through practice. I mean, when I take a golf swing, I have immediate feedback of what I did right or wrong, 'cause I, I'm always looking where it went, it doesn't go straight. But the idea is that we have these opportunities in our lives where we work hard to learn something and we can apply those same skills and practices to our communication. And point well taken that it gives you a way to connect to people and it gets you off your devices so you can connect in a real personal way. Question number two, and you have been around a lot of interesting communicators, who is a communicator that you admire and why?

[00:16:43] Greg Burke: My guy will surprise you, he's, but, but he'll be a sign of hope for a lot of people because he dropped outta college because he was too timid, he was afraid to speak too much in public, and he's the head of a charity. I help out with a charity called Mary's Meals, Magnus McFarland. Great big Scottish guy who, salmon farmer, twenty years ago said, the best thing I can do with my life is feed really poor kids and really poor countries, giving them one good meal a day at school. And he's now doing that, feeding more than two and a half million every day. And he has to give speeches all the time, which is pretty interesting. And I think he's the embodiment of something I learned long ago, which if you care, they'll care. And you hear him speak and he is so passionate about it, that you care too. I think in terms of being a, a, an effective speaker, he is incredibly effective.

[00:17:38] Matt Abrahams: If you care, they care. The contagion of your emotion and passion is so true. Final question, Greg. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? 

[00:17:48] Greg Burke: Okay, my first two aren't gonna be a surprise. My third might be a surprise for you, might not. Know your audience, and know your audience well enough to make them smile, is what I say. Second is practice. Now by practice I also mean, if it's an oral presentation, do a video of yourself. Look at it. Have someone else look at it. If it's written, edit it, cut it down. Never go over the time. Never go over the time. How many times have we done that? So edit there. And we talked before about it, part of that practice is feedback. You wanna show it to one or two people or three, they, depending on the importance of the thing, but I think anything of moderate importance, you wanna bounce it off one of your friends or colleagues. And the third, which may or may not surprise you, have fun.

[00:18:32] Again, if it's a eulogy at a funeral, you might not wanna have fun, although sometimes those remember really nice moments as well. But I think overall, I have fun for anybody who is afraid to get up in front of a group, and there are a lot of people. Just remember this, you've already learned how to ride the bicycle. Now it's just how fast you wanna go, how far you wanna go, and that's incredibly important. Again, people are rooting for you. They're not against you. Almost all the cases, when we're getting up in front of a crowd, they want us to do well. They want us to succeed. So have fun. Make 'em smile. If you can make 'em laugh. 

[00:19:09] Matt Abrahams: Bringing levity to communication can make a, a tremendous difference. Know your audience. Something we've talked a lot about. Practice, especially practice, and getting feedback on it. And then having fun, being present, bringing levity, really important. You helped us have some fun. You certainly brought a smile to my face and you gave us some good clean takeaways that we can all leverage to be clear, concise, and engaging in our communication. Thank you. This was wonderful.

[00:19:36] Greg Burke: Thanks a lot.

[00:19:38] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about crisis communication, please listen to episode 22 with David David Demarest. This episode was produced by Ryan Campos and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With thanks to the Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram and check out FasterSmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language Learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, AMAs, Ask Matt Anything, and much more at FasterSmarter.io/premium.