Ampel Confusion
I recently came across an interview with a politician who addressed the issue of communicating with the public in the following way:
People want us to do a good job and they want to understand where we’re going as a government.
When asked why different parties in government say different things, the politician said:
We are all saying the right thing, just from a different angle.

What I understand are three things, none of which will increase my confidence:
- As long as you’re doing a good job, you don’t need to communicate.
- The government is going somewhere without the people.
- It’s okay to send out different messages as long as they’re all true.
And yet it would only take small changes to tell a completely different story. A different angle, if you like.
Let’s have a look.
Disclaimer: I am not expressing any opinion or judgement on what the parties or politicians interviewed are doing or what their intentions are. The statements above are taken out of context and are only used here to illustrate how they can be misinterpreted by the audience and how this can be avoided.
The Issue
Consider a law that gives more money to poor people. What does it say? Well, it could say many different things, depending on who is communicating it.
Some might say that it is the responsibility of the rich to help the poor. Others say that the poor should help themselves. Some say that money given to the poor will be spent immediately, helping the economy. Others say it’s everyone’s money and they deserve to benefit, not the poor or the local economy. The stories are as varied as the people. But for whatever reason, in the end there will be those who support the law and those who don’t.
We all have different opinions. We can be united by a vision or divided by opposition. Whoever communicates controls the message and has the power to sway the majority one way or the other.
Is it a good idea to give that power to the first person to pick it up? To use that power without much thought? Or to give it up by sending conflicting messages?
Facts Don’t Speak for Themselves
People want us to do a good job.
Undeniably. But is good work that is never communicated really good?
Of course, one could argue that laws will always be communicated - more or less adequately - to the stakeholders. But in a democracy, which is ultimately based on the decisions of the people, isn’t the population one of the stakeholders?
The public never sees good work. The only part of your work that will ever reach the public is what is said about it. By you or by others.
When you communicate, you enable your audience to participate in your work. You enable them to agree with you or, if they continue to disagree, to do so in an informed way.
If you don’t communicate, people will eventually start to question whether you’re doing anything worthwhile. If you don’t communicate and others do on your behalf, you are at their mercy. If you don’t communicate, you give your audience no chance of understanding you and every chance of ignoring, misunderstanding or resenting you.
So what you really want to say is:
People want to know we’re doing a good job.
Wording Matters
People want to understand where we’re going as a government.
Yes. But do people just want to understand what the government is doing, or do they want to be involved in the process?
In an autocracy, people knowing where the government is going might suffice. In a democracy, shouldn’t the people determine the direction, or at least be involved in the decision making?
Of course, people do not necessarily choose the right direction. Nor do they tend to agree on a single one. Different people, different stories. That is why politicians act as leaders. If they start driving the action and acting like heroes instead of guides, people will begin to say that “those above” are making laws that hurt them. Just as employees are much more likely to obey rules to which they have committed themselves and which are not imposed on them by management.
You might argue that this is not what the above phrase implies. And yet I stumbled over it, and I’m likely not the only one. One word can make a difference. What if Neil Armstrong had said, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for NASA”? Would the achievement have been celebrated in the same way? Would people outside of NASA or outside of America say that we went to the moon? I think not.
This is what takes so much time when preparing a communication. You have to consider what different people will hear when you say something. Problems of wording seem small. But their consequences can be huge when what is heard is very different from what is meant. It is not just laws that need to be carefully worded.
What you want to say is:
We need a vision of where we’re going as a country.
Confusion or Convergence
We’re all saying the right thing, just from a different angle.
At this point we assume that the government has a vision of where the country needs to go to best serve the people. There’s a plan to get there, with each step consisting of some work to be done. Now, assume politicians have agreed to communicate both the vision and the steps to get everyone on board.
If you stop there and don’t make sure you agree on how and what to communicate, you are likely to end up communicating different things to the public. After all, each party has its own point of view. They may even be talking about the ‘right thing’. But the angle they choose, the difference in wording and the twists of reasoning can make the ‘right thing’ look very wrong to their audience. Even to their supposed allies.
If you are a single entity, like the government, you need to send out consistent messages, otherwise you will be perceived as different parties going in different directions and your vision will be lost. Your audience will be left confused and wondering what you want. You may have communicated, but not well.
Of course you can come from different positions and angles. But you need to communicate how they all come together.
You need to be able, but never required, to say: We’re all saying the same thing.
How to Solve the Issue?
It all comes down to the definition of done, as it is called in agile project management, which is a list of requirements that need to be fulfilled in order for a task to be considered complete.
In programming, this definition of done includes documentation and testing. Why is this? Every software developer knows that adding documentation to code is important, and yet every software developer has written code that remained undocumented and spent hours trying to understand that code after some time had passed. Writing documentation is tedious and time consuming. That code may never need to be touched again.
We’re focused on getting the job done, whether it’s writing a new law or developing a new feature, not on potential future problems. Even if potential future problems have a high probability and a high penalty. We have tunnel vision and no time to focus on anything but the process.
In other words: We need to make communication part of the process if we want to avoid our work being torn apart by those we forgot to include.
Dare to Communicate
In science, communication is part of the standard procedure. At the moment, that communication comes in the form of papers. This is all well and good, but it turns out that how well we communicate affects the outcome.
Look at the story of penicillin. Alexander Fleming was the first to confirm that the fungus Penicillium rubrum kills bacteria. He published his findings and came up with the name for penicillin in 1929. He thought it would be useful as an antiseptic. Unfortunately, no one believed him. In terms of usefulness, that is. If Fleming had gone to the newspapers and convinced them that he had just discovered a drug that would save more lives than any before, scientists would probably have been forced to concentrate on simplifying the development process rather than bemoaning it. As it was, penicillin only went into mass production 14 years later because a few scientists refused to give up on the prospect of one of the most important discoveries in human history.
14 years is a lot of time to save people’s lives.
Communicating well takes time and effort. Sometimes it is risky. But can you afford the alternative? Boasting is suicide. But silence is like not living at all. If you believe in your work, speak up for it.
Photo by Tsvetoslav Hristov on Unsplash.