Can you plan too much as an advocate?

I had to do it again this week. I had to share with folks just why I can’t stand talking points. It’s personal. At this point it’s almost as if I’m on a vendetta against bullet pointed communication in general.

And before you tell me, yes, I know and recognize that this is a strange grudge to hold.

But as I was sitting with a group of prospective advocates, discussing their views on an issue and making plans for upcoming advocacy engagements, they kept asking me to help them write out what they should say to a key decision-making target.

Not today, you devil!

When folks ask me for talking points, the easy way out would be to do just what they ask. To help them craft a sound byte seems like a perfectly reasonable approach. But give me the hard right over the easy wrong on this one, folks.

Talking points can be a great tool. They can help distill the most salient points of an argument. They can even, if crafted well, draw a linear argument that is both succinct and compelling. But the downside of all that scripting is a big, messy, important truth: talking points can erode our ability to tell our own stories.

The natural thing to do with talking points is memorize them. We’ve all done it – even those who’ve never fought for a cause through advocacy. It’s like learning your lines for the middle school play. You take your medicine, internalize the messaging, and when you’re finally on stage you’ll deliver your lines, more or less, flawlessly.

There’s a big glaring problem with that. When we are in an advocacy setting, we are absolutely NOT on stage. It’s not a monologue. In those critical moments we have to be empowered to engage in a bilateral, even multilateral conversation. A dialogue.

When those prospective advocates ask me to write talking points, I almost always move them into a scenario to pressure test those “talkers.” I place them into a contentious meeting setting and I intentionally aim to derail them. Just to see how “off-script” I can take them.

What happens next?

Invariably they reassess and make a big change. Through the evolution of my training they will realize they can’t effectively tell someone else’s story. Even for the organization or cause they are representing. It’s just not natural to speak beyond our lived experiences. Ultimately, that means it’s not compelling either.

So they plan a new way to go about it. That’s where I help. I work with them to build a plan on how to manage the meeting effectively so they have both time and space to break away from “messaging,” and into storytelling.

By the next phase of training – and a new practical meeting session – they’ve often come to a realization: you can, in fact, be too well “planned” to succeed in an advocacy meeting. You can be too scripted, too animatronic.

Planning in the right way doesn’t mean your team will perform flawlessly, rather it means that your team doesn’t need to perform at all; they need to be allowed to make the material their own. And while that may seem uncomfortable for them in theory, in practice it delivers opportunities for us as advocates to let our personalities exceed our politics.

Like in so many other parts of our lives, moderation is the key here. Yes we have to prepare ourselves for these exchanges with elected officials. That’s a credibility play. But we must keep that preparation in check as well. We have to allow room for our own humanity. That’s also a credibility play – and a likability one to boot.