Explaining Isn't Listening
And how we can communicate effectively
When we set out to build an investigative business, I spent a lot of time wondering how I could make my communications background worth something.
It’s worth a lot to me. Constructing your life around a certain skill ends up informing a great deal of your experience. It dictates how you spend your time, what you prioritize, how you have to think.
What kind of business we envisioned or what services we decided to offer wouldn’t matter; that background was always going to be a part of how I moved professionally. But it’s what I’m good at, it’s where I’m effective, and it’s what I love to do. I didn’t want to lose that practice; I didn’t want to atrophy that muscle.
So, in the beginning, I tried to broker that as part of our services. Our baseline offering was pretty much, “Need to unscrew something? Give us a call.” And we had the technical abilities to do that. Has your data been breached? We’ll help you figure out where, when and who. You think someone’s orchestrated a PR campaign against you? We’ll get to the source. Client being publicly defamed? Let’s find out who this anonymous troll is. And while we do that, let me help you navigate the best way to communicate with the public, stakeholders and clients about how this could affect them.
Though I’d worked in reputation management and event response, it was a shift in approach to go from being in-house to a fractional consultant, mostly on a crisis basis.
In certain ways, it’s a tougher place to be. You don’t know the inner workings of an organization or how decisions are made. You haven’t been in all the meetings about long-term strategy, and you may only be able to infer their typical tone through public-facing mediums without actual access to branding or comms documentation.
That’s also the beauty of it. Without those things, you don’t have to play by those rules.
Social and organizational politics influence the way you make decisions when you’re inside.
You know the personalities involved, the history behind decisions, the budget constraints, the legal considerations, the promises that have already been made. You understand why something was written the way it was or why something happened the way it did because you know everything that happened before anyone saw it.
The public doesn’t.
Neither do your clients. Or your customers. Or the reporter reading your statement for the first time. They encounter you and your organization the way most of us encounter each other: with limited context and no investment in your internal reasoning. They don’t know that Legal struck half the statement, or that the CEO insisted on one paragraph, or that a sentence was rewritten twelve times to satisfy six different departments.
An outside consultant occupies an unusual position because we can exist somewhere between those two perspectives. Close enough to understand the objectives, but distant enough to remember what it feels like to be someone with no stake in defending it.
It’s never become a major part of our business.
But when my worlds occasionally collide and a technical investigation turns into a communications problem, or someone asks me to look over messaging before it goes public, there are always the same underlying tensions.
Whether a corporation, an attorney, or an individual, they’re almost always speaking from the position of the knower. They have access to facts the public doesn’t. They know why a decision was made. They know what evidence exists. They know which accusations are unfair and which criticisms misunderstand the situation.
And when you’re standing in that position, it’s incredibly tempting to communicate from it.
To explain.
To correct.
To educate and elucidate (I just like that word, will find any excuse to use it).
After all, if people just knew what you knew, surely they’d understand.
But that’s rarely how communication works.
We’ve spent the better part of a decade telling people to “do your own research.” We’ve encouraged skepticism, demanded transparency, and taught people not to accept authority at face value. Then we’re surprised when a statement that effectively says, Trust us, you’re misunderstanding, lands with a deafening thud or worse, hostility.
Being right isn’t the same thing as being persuasive.
Most people who contact a company to complain, leave a one-star review, or criticize a public figure aren’t arriving with the bandwidth for or even intention of a thoughtful exchange of ideas. They want to feel heard. They want to know someone understood what they were actually saying before deciding whether they were right or wrong. If your first instinct is to demonstrate why they’re mistaken, you’ve already positioned yourself poorly.
That doesn’t mean agreeing with them. It doesn’t mean validating misinformation or abandoning your facts. It means recognizing that understanding almost always has to come before explanation.
I think that’s easier to remember when you’re outside looking in.
When you live and breathe an organization, a product, a client, or even your own reputation, criticism feels like it deserves a rebuttal. Misunderstanding feels like it should be corrected.
Sometimes the most effective response isn’t the one that proves you’re right, but the one that makes the other person feel like you understood why they thought you were wrong.