WFSE/AFSCME Communicators Conference

By Jim Wavada and Dolores Mitchell

This year’s AFSCME/WFSE Communicators conference on April 20-21, 2012 at the SeaTac Hilton came at the conclusion of a brutal legislative session in Washington State. We saw the beginnings of a Wisconsin-style effort to “blame the public worker” for the Great Recession. 
The Tea Party Republicans were after our jobs and they made no secret of it.  We had to scramble and lobby our friends aggressively to preserve our basic rights to organize and to preserve our contract.  Thanks to some “confused” Senate Democrats, lovingly referred to as the “Roadkill Caucus,” it was a very close call. 

This conference was the perfect antidote to the post adjournment depression that had settled like a ground fog on many of us.  It showed weary survivors an effective way to fight back, reframe the issues, expose the villains, and show the public the real heroes that we all are. In short, it was great!

Blaine Rummel, AFSCME Associate Director of Communications, started off the training with a rousing presentation on the recent fight for Wisconsin, which continues with a hotly contested and expensive June recall election against Gov. Scott Walker and his legislative allies.  Blaine demonstrated how everyday union rank and file members can communicate our bigger message about collective bargaining rights more effectively than anyone else.

Here’s a clue—make it personal and understand the basic elements of a good story.  A mid-morning plenary session led by Deb Kidney and Korey Hartwich of AFSCME International taught us just how to do this.  Facilitators led groups in an exercise designed to demonstrate the power of personal stories.  Some were moved to tears by the heart-wrenching stories from the Council 28 members who stood between clients and catastrophe in so many cases. With effective storytelling, we help taxpayers and voters understand how our jobs help them to live better, safer lives.

The second day of the conference allowed participants to focus on one of two topics--working to be more effective public speakers or learning to use social media like Labor Web, Facebook and Twitter more effectively. Korey Hartwich led the training on effective public speaking and WFSE Council 28’s own Laura Reisdorf led hands-on computer lab training in the use of Facebook and Twitter. 

The training closed with a report on values-based communication and training on how to use the new Heroes Handbook v1 from communications consultant Ella Andrews.  This report and the handbook are the culmination of a year of research into how to effectively communicate our progressive values to voters and taxpayers.  Andrews walked us through using the basic elements of good story telling: a hero with tools, a villain with weapons, a threat to be countered and a quest that is noble.

This storytelling approach to communications comes out of hard science.  Cognitive research on the connection between neural activity in the brain and decision-making revealed that our amigdula (that small piece of the brain that generates our fight or flight reactions) generates most of our decision-making and helps us define about what we value most.  We then use our higher brain function in the cerebral cortex to gather and organize the factual data to support the decisions we’ve already made about how we feel about something.

In other words, the facts don’t matter if they don’t jive with the emotional attachment we have to an idea.  Appealing to the cerebral cortex, where we test and process facts, is a waste of time until you have successfully appealed to the amigdula, popularly referred to as our lizard brain. 
Conservative communications guru Frank Luntz, wrote Words That Work, based on this same research.  His handbook of the anti-government rhetoric has been used by antigovernment lobbies for a decade with a lot of success. Luntz learned that facts don’t matter, if you don’t first get people onboard the same emotional, values-driven train as you. Luntz realized that to change a person’s values system, you must first send a convincing message to their amigdula, often referred to as their “lizard brain—not their cerebral cortex. 

That’s the major insight inspiring the Hero’s Handbook we all received as part of this training.  The small handbook is chock full of survey-tested language for expressing values that union workers embody.  It lays out the basic elements of a hero/villain story and suggests how to put your story on the correct side of that line using carefully chosen words. Best of all, this incisive training regimen is going to be available to all union members.  WFSE Council 28 will be sponsoring a “train-the-trainer” session on the Hero’s Handbook in the near future.  Look for locally available versions of this training soon.

They could have named this year’s annual Communicators Conference the “Eye-popping, Totally Awesome, Finally We’re Going To Fight Back, What a Great Way to Tell Your Story” Conference.  But that would violate most of what we learned that weekend in SeaTac. Instead, we’ll just make a note that it was one of the better organized and effective trainings that WFSE Council 28 and AFSCME have ever offered, and that more is coming.