One of the rites-of-passage for any new entrepreneur is being interviewed for the first time by a journalist. It can feel daunting, in terms of how you present yourself to look confident, and what to say. Making the most of the opportunity often comes down to how you frame your story, writes Hugh Mason.
I started my career in broadcast TV when I was 24. After a technical training, it seemed very strange to spend the day thinking about ‘stories’. A few years back, I had signed up for a degree in Physics thinking that would empower me to23 reveal The Truth about life, the universe and everything. Like a lot of engineering-minded folk, I assumed that it was enough to state the facts as they are and the brilliance of the technology would speak for itself. All that fluffy-bunny communications stuff was for touchy-feely advertising creeps.
I found myself plunged into a world where everything seemed grey. Twenty years on, many of the start-ups I work with say they feel the same way. They find it hard to connect and be understood by customers, investors and potential partners. There are some good reasons why.
Cognitive scientists like George Lakoff have revealed that it’s very hard to get away from emotion when we use language. I find his work fascinating to read because he unpicks the hidden layers in what we say and the way we say it … not just the individual words we use but the metaphors we use to express ourselves too.
Think for a moment about the way we might speak about two people arguing:
- He won the argument.
- Your claims are indefensible.
- She shot down all my arguments.
- Their criticisms were right on target.
- If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.
The underlying metaphor here is war or struggle, where it’s hard to imagine any solution but one side winning and the other losing. But we could think of an argument as negotiation, where the objective is to engineer a win on both sides.
In another example, a hundred years ago it was common for writers to describe the scientists they saw as heroes who “force Mother Nature to reveal her secrets”. Phrases like that have an underlying metaphor of rape. Perhaps it’s not surprising that we now have global warming and a host of other ecological problems.
So what’s all that got to do with start-ups? My point is that the frame we cast around a story matters. There is, in practice, very rarely one version of The Truth – only different peoples’ stories about what has happened, what is happening, or what is going to happen. Watch the movie Thank You For Smoking if you want to see that idea pushed to the limit with great humour.
I often find that media interviews fall into broad categories, each of which is a cliché, but which can start to provide a starting point around which to frame up what you want to say. They are fall-backs for busy journalists scratching their heads and asking themselves: “… there’s something interesting about what this person’s saying … but how do I position them?”
Here are some examples of how you could position yourself:
THE SURVIVOR – Someone who’s been through an unusual experience.
Here the audience wants to know what was it like? What would you do differently if they were doing it all over again. If you are asked to give this kind of an interview, be as open as you can in describing feelings, not facts, because that’s what everyone wants to hear.
WAR STORIES – Someone whose long experience gives them great insight.
This is the classic pattern that journalists use when interviewing veterans from an industry. We want to know what are the top three mistakes the great person made which have taught them the most useful lessons? We don’t want a great long boring rendition of great-things-I-have-done. We just want two things: a few nuggets of wisdom we can use and, ideally, for the Great Man or Woman to show some humility, introspection and to reveal something of their personality. That gives us hope we might be great one day too.
ON THE BRINK OF ADVENTURE – Someone who is about to do something interesting (eg sell their business, complete a deal).
Here we want to know – how did you get here, how do you feel right now and what do you think is going to happen next? Help us share the excitement and anticipation – those feelings are what hook us in. The journalist can patch the facts of the story around what you say.
KILL THE SACRED COW – Someone who realizes that conventional wisdom is open to challenge.
‘Young Turk’ companies positioning themselves as disruptive can often get media attention this way. Everyone likes to see a little David catapult a stone at Goliath once in a while, because most of us are little guys too. Why is the accepted point of view open to question? And if it’s not true, what does that mean? The trick here is to appear insightful and helpful rather than coming across as an rebellious teenager.
THE PUNDIT – Someone whose experience and gravitas means they can comment on a major event.
If an interviewer sets you up this way, it’s good to express an opinion in terms of how it relates to your personal experience. Root what you say in real experience and you gain gravitas. Speculate on the basis of no evidence and it’s easy to come across as a know-all – the chin-stroking armchair critic in the corner.
It can help both interviewer and interviewee to talk explicitly about how the interviewee is being ‘set up’ and the story ‘framed’. I once made a series of short films for the BBC following a Formula 1 team in the run up to a new racing season. I wanted to frame the chief engineer as a hero, so I set him up as the guy whose design was on trial out there on the track. Would the $10m invested in his ideas prove the key to success in the weeks before the season started, or would the car just turn out to be meh. Either way he was a hero for sticking his neck out.
Trouble is, the iron laws of mythology say that heroes have to face a struggle, otherwise they can’t be heroes. Off camera, the engineer would tell me about all the stuff that was keeping him awake at night. But as soon as we started turning over he denied that there were any challenges to overcome. Everything was OK. No cause for excitement or alarm. Thanks mate – you just screwed my story!
There are many narrative patterns that we are all conditioned to recognize from childhood, even if we don’t always see them for what they are. So next time you speak to a journalist, stand up in front of an audience or give an interview, don’t forget that you often have a choice about how you frame up the facts. It’s your story after all.