Ros Atkins on... The art of explanation
On 30 November at the Intellectual Forum, journalist and BBC presenter Ros Atkins shared his approach to communication and some of the personal and professional experiences which shaped it.
In his new book, The Art of Explanation, Ros describes how a system he first devised while an undergraduate at Jesus College is still the foundation of how he approaches communication and explanation in his work as a journalist.
In the first few minutes of his talk in Frankopan Hall, Ros explained how that system came to be. “I developed it a couple of hundred yards away in North Court in Jesus College as a pretty green teenager arriving from the wilds of West Cornwall, faced with the first few history essays of term and thinking, this doesn't look viable”, he said. “I was just thinking, my goodness, I'm being given an essay question, a list of twenty books, and a see you next week?”
The system Ros eventually devised to understand the information he was being given and to communicate his ideas in supervision essays has stayed with him through his long career in journalism. “It's still the same system I used when I was anchoring the BBC's coverage of the 2019 European election”, he said. “When I anchored the BBC's coverage of the general election in 2021, I used the same system”.
Over the course of his talk, Ros explained several of the tips and routines for effective communication that have served him well in those big professional moments. They included: practising what he’s planning to say out loud so that he’s comfortable expressing what he needs to say in the moment when it matters, when the camera turns on; “chunking” information in his mind so that it’s possible to remember large numbers of points without referring back to written notes; and having a “hands plan”, or an idea of what he’s going to do with his hands while he speaks so that they add to what he’s saying instead of distracting from it.
Ros recalled a few key moments from his career when effective communication skills he had practiced was particularly crucial, including a trip to South Africa to film a documentary that took an unexpected turn. “Back in late 2013, I was on a flight to Johannesburg. And as soon as we landed and everyone was turning on their phones, you could tell something serious had happened, everyone's phones were going. And overnight Nelson Mandela had died”, he remembered.
The BBC asked Ros and his crew to change their plans and drive to Soweto, the township where Mandela was from in Johannesburg, to cover the news. “Very quickly after I got there, the BBC was saying, ‘Are you there, can you start broadcasting, when can you go on air?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we're good to go’. And we get another call going, ‘OK, you're going to be on in ten minutes’”. Even though he had very little time to prepare, Ros was able to deliver a concise report on how Soweto was responding to Mandela’s death by falling back on his long-practised routines and methods for effective communication.
Throughout the evening, Ros emphasised that, while his specific circumstances might be different than ours—most of us will never find ourselves having to report on the Greek debt crisis from a rooftop in Athens, for instance—the communications tips he suggests will still be useful in important moments in our own lives, be they business meetings or job interviews. Most of all, he wanted his audience to take away that practice makes perfect when it comes to effective communication. “I'm not saying preparation makes it easy”, he said, “but I do think that there are some simple things that, if we all do them, can have quite a marked impact on how we communicate”.
