Speaking Truth to Power — A Summary (2024)

This week’s blog is a bit different. Rather than hearing my thoughts, it is a summary of the key points from the book ‘Speaking Truth to Power — How to have people listen to your advice and act on it’ by Martin Stanley, a British Civil Servant.

This book is helpful for all policy experts who want decision-makers to listen to their advice. It is hard to speak frankly AND be heard.

The book starts with the barriers to getting your advice listened to:

• There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders want to hear, so we sugar-cost our opinions when talking to them. In hierarchical organisations (like most public services), sugarcoating can take place at each level of the hierarchy until the truth is hidden, potentially with devastating effects.
• Senior executives and politicians often have authoritarian personalities, leading them to reject even good advice.
• Ministers find it harder to understand or accept challenging advice because the nature of politics has taught them it is better to pretend infallibility, and they usually do not have any experience in managing large organisations.
• Even decision-makers who are happy to listen to expert advice and analysis may often make decisions you do not understand. This is usually because they have different aims and motivations from people giving them advice.

The meat of the book is then focused on how advisors can overcome these barriers.

• Understand that you need to consider various factors about the people you advise, including their character, aspirations and the constraints within which they operate.
• Make the right first impression.
• Don’t open discussions by disagreeing or confronting them.
• If you can, take your time and wait for the Minister to accept that you know what you are talking about before you attempt to challenge their views.
• Be aware that relationships can struggle due to a lack of personal chemistry, differences in experience, educational background, age, or even class;
• Think about interpersonal dynamics. Keep it professional.
• Look for moments when you are needed, when you can build the bonds that should exist between the decision-maker and the trusted adviser.
• Understand what’s important to the decision-maker. What you envisage as policy objectives is probably only part of the picture in the decision-maker's head. They may also have political or personal goals to consider, so frame your advice in ways that the decision-maker will see as helping them achieve their own goals.
• Listen to Blaise Pascal’s 17th-century advice: before disagreeing with someone, first point out how they are right. Then help them discover a counter-point for themselves so they can change their own mind.
• Adopt your Ministers aims as your own whilst gently — and a little later — suggesting that there might be better ways of reaching the desired objective.
• Find ways to challenge the boss’s ideas without challenging the boss. Criticising your boss’s views, performance, or talent is unlikely to help you win the argument.
• Fight ‘groupthink’ when developing policy by fostering an environment of ‘reasonable challenge’ — one in which people are expected to challenge each other and where it’s seen as important that they do so.
• Challenge with courtesy and politeness.
• Be prepared to explain the logic and reasoning behind your alternative view and provide evidence.
• Choose your moment and your medium.
• Raise issues in a timely manner.
• Accept if the eventual decision remains unchanged.
• Provide thinking time for the Minister.
• Learn to deploy psychological techniques such as transactional analysis (social interactions are analysed to determine the ego state of the communicator (whether parent-like, childlike or adult-like) as a basis for understanding behaviour.
• Use phrases that help the decision maker to think about an issue “the Prime Minister might….”
• Enlist the support of a trusted source.
• Use benchmarking to set expectations. On being told that “X achieved something similar within Y months after spending Z”, Ministers may come to appreciate they’re unlikely to do it much faster or more cheaply.

The book contains a few words of caution to finish:

• Silence sounds like consent — the inclination to remain silent or to acquiesce — to live to fight another day, to give on this issue so that you can be “effective” on later issues — is overwhelming.
• Forgive people their off days.
• Never forget Hans Christian Anderson’s Parable — The Emperor’s New Clothes. It is your job to ensure that doesn’t happen to your Minister.

As someone who has been advised and been an advisor and made countless mistakes in this space, I would add one more thing to the list — invest your time in building the relationship. It is easy to become too busy with day-to-day tasks and forget to think and act in ways that build the relationship and make it easier to provide difficult advice and be listened to.