Robert Mills
Welcome to the Fourth Wall Content Podcast. I'm your host, Robert Mills.
Actors address the audience directly by breaking the fourth wall in theatre and film. This podcast explores the fourth wall in a different sense.
We’ll share techniques, strategies, and tactics to forge meaningful connections with audiences, users, and stakeholders.
Our conversations with experienced and innovative content, UX and research practitioners will uncover the details of real projects with lessons learned along the way and outcomes of the work too.
Each episode will provide you with practical insights and actionable takeaways to help you meet user needs, connect with customers in a genuine way, or engage stakeholders meaningfully. Let’s get to it.
Welcome back or indeed welcome if this is the first episode you're listening to. I'm very excited to introduce my guest today so I'm going to jump straight to it. Christine is a content strategist with a background in journalism at the BBC, Yahoo and AOL. In 2008 she set up her content agency Crocstar to help public sector and non-profits with their content. She joined Government Digital Service in 2013 and trained thousands of people how to understand user needs, writing clearer language and use the GOV.UK style guide. As well as giving training, Christine mentors content designers at all stages of their careers. Christine, welcome to the show.
Christine Cawthorne
Hello Rob, how are you?
Robert Mills
I'm good thanks. You're all those things I just read out plus a very good friend of mine.
Christine Cawthorne
Yes, we are BFFs actually.
Robert Mills
So I feel a bit more pressure in this chat. I don't know why, you think I would be more relaxed but for some reason I feel the opposite. I hope I do you proud.
Christine Cawthorne
I feel a bit nervous too actually so maybe we should hug it out.
Robert Mills
We'll be fine. We've got editors to help us afterwards. As with all the other episodes I've done and the ones that are coming up I'm going to start with the same question just to kind of set the scene and give our listeners some context. So who is the audience or the user that is going to be the focus of the conversation or the project that we're talking about today?
Christine Cawthorne
Today we are going to talk about a project that I worked on that was about training. So the main user group are the people that I trained but of course with training the people that you train write content for another group of users. So our main group is the people that I trained but with a secondary but just as important group of people being the people that read the information the content that that trained group wrote for. I think that was quite complicated.
Robert Mills
So we've got an internal audience that you're training and they're ready for an external audience. Is there anything you can tell us about the organisation or like who the external audience are or anything around that just to again give that additional context?
Christine Cawthorne
Yeah so the group was a United Nations agency, a very big well-known organisation. They got in touch because they were redoing their intranet and they were doing it along the lines of how GOV.UK was created so basing the content on user needs and they'd seen the work that I'd done training at GOV.UK so they got in touch to say can you help us with our project, how to do it, how to train people and how we can get people to buy into this important work that is quite difficult to get going because it means that people have to change how they work quite significantly or particularly how they write.
Robert Mills
I'm really intrigued by this idea of the internal audience, external audience in a sense of your remit was to train people in how to write and we'll talk a bit more about what that involved and what that looked like and outcomes and things. Did you also have to teach them anything about the audience they were writing for or was there already that understanding in place or was that coming from somewhere else?
Christine Cawthorne
They're quite a big organisation, so they have an HQ headquarters where a bunch of them work and then the majority of the people that work for that organisation are stationed around the world. So they are in countries or areas that are typically at risk of natural disasters, flood zones, earthquakes, drought, lots of difficult conditions.
The people that I was training are writing for their colleagues out in those countries. What's interesting about them is that typically they go out in the field every four years or so. So the people in HQ would be writing content for someone who may be based overseas, but six months previously they might have been in the same team sitting next to each other at work. They tended to know who their audience was very clearly because it was people that they've worked with in person and they have a very clear mission and remit as an organisation. So they're very clear on what it is that they're doing and how it is that they're doing it. They've been around for a long time.
I didn't have to teach them about what their colleagues were doing or who the audience was particularly, but what was interesting was that although they knew who they were writing for and what they were saying, they still had those thoughts about how people read, that people are really interested in what they've got to say, that they've got a lot of time to spare. They still had all of those preconceptions about when you're writing something about how you think about your audience reading it.
We tend to be quite optimistic about our readers and think that they are wonderful, happy people with no stress and loads of time and really, really interested in what we're saying. I always feel like a horrible person, but that tends not to be true. I like to think about my reader as being somewhat quite grumpy. They've had terrible sleep, they don't care what I've got to say, they just want me to get on with it. So yeah we still had to go through those kinds of conversations.
Robert Mills
Whenever you share anything with a group or train a group or teach a group, it's unlikely that they're going to have the same understanding, the same level of knowledge, the same experience. Yes, there may be some crossovers and similarities, but there will be some differences too. If your training material is the same for all, but the people you're training aren't the same in terms of those things I just kind of started to list, How do you approach it or what sort of considerations did you have to make when training a large group with mixed knowledge and experience?
Christine Cawthorne
That is a very good question. I tend to have a secret weapon when I'm asking people in the intro to introduce themselves, talk about what do they want to learn today or what's their role in the organisation. You can pick up quite a lot about a person in terms of their confidence level and their willingness or their kind of openness to learning.
So that intro, when you're next being trained and your trainer is asking you to introduce yourself, they're not just learning your name, they're learning who you are a little bit as a snapshot. So you can tailor a course as you're delivering it to what people say in their intro. You also need to cater for those people who are perhaps more advanced or more confident or more experienced balancing their needs with people who maybe are coming to this for the first time. So it's quite a tricky thing to do. What you might do is have an exercise that ranges from basic to more advanced. You might have a way for those people that are more experienced to showcase their knowledge. So group work tends to be quite good for that. If you compare experienced people with less experienced people, it gives the ones that have done it before a real chance to talk about how they've done it or, you know, how to do the thing.
Interestingly on training, you're not just learning from the trainer, you're learning from each other. And certainly when we did the GOV.UK work, we trained something like two and a half thousand people over 18 months. And you had a real range of knowledge in the room. So we would have people from all different government departments and agencies together in the same room. So each course, each session was 12 people. And you might have someone from comms and then you might have someone who works as admin support. So the person with comms tends to have more writing experience and certainly more more day-to-day knowledge of doing that. The person who is admin support tends to have more experience in the kind of mechanics of organisation, not necessarily writing. So if you can pair those people together, you can get each of them learning from the other and it sort of reinforces the learning rather than just one person sitting in the front with knowledge and everybody else saying, well, I was going to say, saying, wow, that's actually never happened to me.
Robert Mills
Do you find you have to use a lot of your skills as a content strategist or content designer when you're in that training role? And I know you're a content person training people in content, so I know they're not completely removed, but I guess what I'm getting at is a lot of the work we do is around advocacy and convincing and engaging and adapting to different stakeholder needs and priorities and so on. Do you find that some of those skills come into play during training? Because there might be people there who are like, tell me everything you know, I want to be better, I want to make things different. And there could be someone else who's just like, I have got so many other things I want to be doing rather than being sat in this room right now or sat on this call right now. Do those skills come into play, do you think, when you're doing any sort of training with any size of group?
Christine Cawthorne
Yeah, yeah, I often feel like I'm convincing, I'm persuading someone to listen. And you might do that by modulating your voice, you might do that by being a bit silly, you might do that by, yeah, getting them to talk about something that they're interested in. But yeah, you, it's a hard thing to be trained, I think. I really like training adults because they're so interesting. Everybody's got their own approach, their own viewpoint, their own reason for being there, or they're being forced to be there. So I like the challenge of getting cohesion from the group, you know, getting people to get something out of it, and tailoring what you're saying to them. So either you're giving them an example that's relevant to them, or you're helping them share some frustrations about work, getting them to perhaps ask a question about something that they're not sure about, even though they might be sure about lots of other things. So yeah, you're trying to, you're trying to help people be open. And I always think my job is not to, my job is not necessarily to give people knowledge, but it's to help them get curious about the subject.
So if you are someone who writes content and you're great at language, then maybe you would benefit from being more curious about your audience. So I'm good at writing, but how can I tailor that writing to the audience? Or maybe I'm someone who is really busy, and I've got a lot of knowledge, so I'm comfortable in what I know. But maybe then you would, what you might take away from the training would be that you become curious about using plainer language.
So it's not necessarily that you come to the training and you know nothing, and you leave and you know everything. Hey, I wish I was that good. But I try and tell stories about why these areas are important, why plain language is important, why user needs are important, why tailoring your content to the platform is important. So I try to tell stories about that in a way that's meaningful to each person so that they come away and think, oh right, okay, that's interesting. Oh yeah, that's a good reason. Or yes, I'll remember that because that's really important. You know, I've learned that it's really important for people to be able to read in plain English. So yeah, I try and get them curious about different elements
Robert Mills
I'd like to delve a little bit into your process, if I may.
Christine Cawthorne
You may.
Robert Mills
Thank you. I mean, you already started talking in quite a bit of detail of the things you wanted to maybe communicate and get them curious about and get them thinking about and some of the sort of potential outcomes. But how do you plan those sessions, especially when people have those different levels of experience and competence and needs that we've covered, how do you plan what those sessions need to cover and understand, you know, what it is that you need to take to those sessions and actually train everybody in? I appreciate you may have had some guidance from the organisation itself, but I'm sure that you've got your own process for figuring that out.
Christine Cawthorne
What you might do is you might do a training needs analysis. And if I talk about this project specifically, we had 120 people who worked in HQ that put stuff on the intranet. We knew that we had 120 people that would have to go through the training, not because they couldn't write or had never done it before, but because they were changing the way in which content would be created. So there was an HQ team, intranet team, quite a small team, but they were changing. So instead of each team being responsible for their own section on the intranet, it was now going to be controlled centrally.
So the navigation would be controlled centrally and you could add content, but you would have to make sure that it met a user need. And also, as with many, probably every, organisation, there was quite a lot of siloed working. And so they wanted to change that to, if there was content or information that was looked after by a couple of teams, that those couple of teams would work together to produce the content so that there's no duplication, there's no stuff that gets out of date.
We knew that there would be 120 people that needed to be trained. And we sent them all a survey. So we wrote this survey. We asked them how they used the intranet. So we spoke to them as if they were users and producers for it. We also gave them the opportunity to self-report on their knowledge and skills and what they felt that they wanted to learn. What you'll often find with training internally is there's always a bunch of people who aren't really that bothered about training, but there's always a bunch of people who love training, they love the focus on them and their career, they love to learn, they're excited about it. So if you ask people what they want to learn, you will often get a very positive response, you'll often get lots of people being engaged. So we asked them what they wanted to learn or where they felt that they had gaps in their skills.
What was interesting about this group is that they were not based in the UK, so they're based in Italy and it's a global organisation. So one of the languages that they have to produce is English and they tended to talk to each other using English, even though they weren't necessarily English themselves. So you had a whole bunch of people who are Italian, but you also had people from all over Europe, all over the Americas, different countries in Africa, so loads and loads of languages. We knew that we were going to train in English, fortunately for me, and we knew that they would be writing in English, predominantly. I think they do translate into three or four other languages, but they would all write in English. So there were a lot of people who had confidence gaps, maybe if we put it like that, with writing in English, even though they spoke in English at work and they had been writing in English, they were able to do it, but their confidence didn't necessarily match their actual skills. The training needs analysis helped us to say, right, okay, we will definitely cover then how to write in plain English, but we'll also do a section on what plain English is because culturally, and I knew this from talking to the HQ team, culturally they tended to use quite formal language, and so asking them to write in plain English would be very different to how they were used to writing. And so what that means is that instead of just going straight into the practical, here's how you do it, we would need a section, or we would need to talk about the reasons for changing it and spend a little bit more time on that.
So you can tailor a course to an organisation depending on what they know about themselves or what a training needs analysis will bring up. And also then it helps you position why you're training them on a certain thing. So it's not just you're going to learn how to do it, and it's A, B and C, it's why we're doing A, why we're doing B, why we're doing C. And the second part of that is not only how to frame what you're going to learn, it's also how long you spend training them. So is it a half day course? Is it a full day course? Is it a week long course? Is it a six week course and there's homework? You know, all of those things come into it. Almost the longer you give something, the more importance it takes on. So we decided to create a full day course. And we would do quite a lot of practical exercises in writing in English, and then editing content to make it more easy to read, particularly for those people who were less confident with their English.
Robert Mills
I have a whole cascade of questions following that. Did you go there in person and train 120 people in one go? Were there, so was it literally one day of training? Was it smaller groups over a series of days? What did that look like, the actual training itself?
Christine Cawthorne
Yeah. So what we did was we split the 120 into groups of 10, 11, 12. And we mixed up people from different teams going to each training session. That's quite useful for a few reasons. One is that it gives people an opportunity to see more of the organisation, make more relationships internally, particularly if what you're trying to do is break down those silos. It can really help to have people just spend a day together.
It's also useful because it gets people kind of out of their normal team dynamics. So maybe someone that's more quiet usually might, will have the opportunity to be a bit louder, should they wish, or someone who maybe is top of the team, top of their team, not a job title I've heard of, but we'll go with it. People who are maybe team leaders, that's how you say it. Maybe they're in a group where someone else is more senior to them. And so they naturally fall into a different position in the team dynamics. So it's quite useful for just mixing around that dynamic.
We decided to do a one day course and we did it over six months. I went over to Italy six times in a year. I'm only saying that because it was great and I would love to do that again. Will travel. It was amazing. So we went over, yeah, so we did the six. I think that was how it worked out. I haven't done the maths, but I am words, not numbers. So yeah, so we went, that was quite a good thing to do to spread it over time in that way, because what you get on a big project like that is that the first few people that you train are quite unsure as to what this project is, what you're doing there, what's expected of them. So you train them and you give them quite a lot of attention, quite a lot of answers, quite a lot of support, and then they go back to their teams and they tell their teammates what the training was like, what they learned, whether it was good, bad, indifferent. And then the next set of people you have already know a little bit about it. And so then, you know, they need slightly less support. They still need support, of course, but perhaps slightly less because they've heard a little bit already. By the time you're halfway through, the people coming are like, oh, I've been really looking forward to this training course. I'm really excited. I know what's going on.
I mentioned the HQ Intranet team. They had a dedicated person that was supporting the people coming on training, people with their writing. So they were really well informed about the project as a whole, what's coming next, what's expected of them, and all of that kind of stuff. That was all based on GOV.UK as well. And yes, so by the time you're halfway through that project, you're three months in of the training part, people are generally pretty well informed. They know what's expected of them. You don't have to do quite so much convincing as to why this is important, particularly if you've done the first few sessions, if they've gone well. And what I normally try and get is if you do the most resistant group team or the people with the hardest content first, it's tempting to start easy and get harder. But actually, if you do the really difficult stuff first, then you've got a really good example to point to with your other teams who might say, oh, it's really difficult. Our content is about X, Y, or Z. And you can say, well, actually, we have experience of that. We did it with this team. And here's what they did. And then they start learning from their colleagues. You can put them in touch. You can chat it through. And that tends to be a good way to approach it.
Robert Mills
It's such a great insight into the whole process and how much work goes in before those sessions. I think sometimes that can be a bit invisible. So it's really interesting to hear from your perspective for the project. I just want to go back ever so slightly to the part of the conversation around the people you were training where English wasn't necessarily their first language. Were there any other considerations you had to make because of that? Perhaps the examples that you talked through or anything else? I'm just really interested in the impact that would have had on the materials themselves.
Christine Cawthorne
This was a really, really interesting part of the project. So they were based in Italy, but people from all around the world. So they didn't necessarily have English as a first language. But of course, they were being trained in English and they were writing in English. So a couple of things spring to mind. One was that culturally, that organisation is very formal in the way that they write. And a few of the people on the training course were Italian. And they were saying that even in Italy, culturally, you tend to write in a very formal, I think one of them said, floral style, which I thought was really interesting. You see it in the civil service over here, but apparently there it's very much the more formal, the better. So we were doing two difficult things there. One is that you're making people do a training course in English about writing in English and not only writing in English, writing in a different style to what you're used to.
But the other thing is, so we did a practice, a pilot course. So I gave the training session to the intranet, the HQ team, to get feedback, to make sure it was covering what we wanted. Was it practical enough? All of that kind of good stuff. And then at the end, so people in the HQ team were again from different countries. It was quite a small team. But one of the people that we were working with was English. He had been there for a while, but he said at the end, don't forget about idioms. So jargon, technical terms is one thing, but don't use idioms. And of course, suddenly I thought, oh no, what have I been saying? So even things like, here's the lay of the land, you wouldn't say that because it doesn't necessarily translate. And so that was so interesting to me to, I always try and speak in a fairly plain, straightforward way when I'm training, of course. Otherwise, you're not practicing what you preach, but here was this whole extra level of planning what I was going to say before saying it. I'm just making sure that there was no subtext. I was saying, if you ever tried to speak without subtext, it's actually very difficult.
So yeah, I really liked it as an exercise. It was very difficult, but it was, yeah, it was yet another thing to think about, which was, okay, how do I help these people understand this stuff that is really important, but it's also really difficult for them. So I need to make it as easy as possible for them. So yeah, that was good fun, actually. I liked that bit.
Robert Mills
Stuff like that is always fascinating. Even doing this podcast, reading back transcripts, I've suddenly realised the sort of things, the habits I've got when speaking that I was just not aware of, you know, how I start sentences and things that I do. And it's been a bit of a rude awakening, I have to say. But yeah, I'm sure that sort of stuff has stayed with you on other training and you're probably very, very on that now, making sure your idioms are appropriate or not there at all.
Christine Cawthorne
It's quite something to have someone write down weird things you've said and then relay them to you. He delivered it in such a nice way, but I of course, went home and mulled over it for ages. Even saying mulled over.
Robert Mills
What are you doing?
Christine Cawthorne
I've learnt nothing.
Robert Mills
Right, I'm going to take us now to two of our favourite things ever, measurement and outcomes.
Christine Cawthorne
Thought you were going to say chocolate and wine.
Robert Mills
That can come after, once we’ve stopped recording. How did you measure the success of the training?
Christine Cawthorne
We did a couple of things to measure success. The first thing that you will often find in training is we gave feedback forms and people were chased to fill those forms out. So that was quite interesting. So literally everybody that went on the training filled in the feedback form and we looked at those before the next session each time. So we were changing the course, tweaking it each time. I find looking at feedback forms quite difficult because you poured your heart and soul into that day and then someone comes back and says something like, don't think we needed to spend all day learning how to make a sentence simpler. But then you'll often get someone else saying, oh, I was glad of the amount of time we spent practicing. So you have to balance it out.
My favourite two bits of feedback are always the course is too long and then you'll always get the course was too short. That's how you know the course is the correct amount of time. Oh yeah, I said before, but we'd run the pilot session for the team to make sure it worked and the timings were there and everything. There was a difficult bit in the course. So we did the kind of classic content design training, which is you go through user needs, user stories, headline writing, structuring content, writing in plain English, editing content. But the user needs bit at the beginning is often conceptually can be a bit of a leap. And you tend to do that at the beginning of the course, because the rest of the writing content builds on what you've identified as the user needs. So conceptually, it was quite, a challenge, maybe to get people to understand what I was talking about. I’m laughing, and actually, it was pretty successful. The people that we were training, they weren't content designers, that was not their job title, they tended to be more in the kind of administration type work. So we were asking them to get their head around something that was outside of their comfort zone. So we chased feedback quite quickly, certainly in the first couple of sessions to make sure that we were pitching that right, not too advanced, making sure that it made sense. You don't want people being like, yeah, yeah, in the session, and then going away and being like, I don't really know what you're talking about. So yeah, so we were quite keen to check that that was working.
Also, the HQ team was supporting people in the creation of their content. So we could see quite quickly if people were creating content in the same way that they'd always done, you know, 50 page PDFs, or whether they were changing the style in which they were writing. So we were also, as well as the feedback on the course itself, we were able to see the outcome of the training in the writing also quite quickly. So yeah, so that worked quite well.
It's one thing to give training, but it's another to support people after they've been trained. You have to support them to be able to work in a different way. So they undergo the change during the training, and then afterwards, they are changed. This is the theory. Often training doesn't work if they're not supported afterwards. So it's not just about the day, it's about afterwards, they come back and they are different, or they all do things differently. And so people have to be allowed to try out, get things wrong, get supported, talk about it, you know, all of that kind of stuff. So yeah, this project was very good for making sure people were supported afterwards.
Robert Mills
That's great. It's such a great level of measurement in terms of the success there. You've mentioned the brief about the outcomes. Is there anything more specific you learned in terms of the outcomes of the work, either for the internal audience that you were training, or indeed for the external audience of those that were consuming that final content?
Christine Cawthorne
Yeah, so we do have some results, some stats. Okay, so we trained 120 people, tick, they all rewrote their contents, and then they were supported afterwards. We also did a train the trainer course for them, which was quite interesting. So they would be able to train anyone who maybe came back from being in the field or joined an HQ team and needed to be able to write content for the intranet.
The project launched on time, I'm pleased to say. And then they gathered some stats about the intranet. So based on what it was like before they redone it, and then afterwards. So before it was classic intranet, every team managing their own pages. And then afterwards, we've got this user needs focused, very pared down site, very task focused. So here's some stats. Search increased by 55%, meaning that people were looking for stuff, not, not just going and then not being able to find it. We had quite a big reduction in duplicated content. Here's an interesting one for you. Page load speed was reduced by 48%. So again, remembering those people that are out in the field in places that typically have pretty bad infrastructure, including access to the internet, and they tended to be on older bits of kit. So maybe older phones, older laptops, so the reduction in page speed time is really important because it means that they're able to get the stuff that they're looking for more quickly, and no risk of the thing not downloading at all. They also did reading score analysis. So their reading scores came down. So it wasn't the only thing they measured, but it was part of what they were looking at. And a year or so later, they were named as one of Nielsen Norman's top 10 intranets.
Robert Mills
Wow.
Christine Cawthorne
Which is good. And then a couple of years later, they won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Robert Mills
Wow. Wow.
Christine Cawthorne
The whole organisation, not just the intranet.
Robert Mills
So you're practically a Nobel Peace Prize winner by association?
Christine Cawthorne
You know, I was there, therefore, I won it for them.
Robert Mills
And now I'm asking you about that work. Technically, if you see where I'm going, I need to update my LinkedIn profile.
Christine Cawthorne
I think you won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Robert Mills
One of the things that's been most interesting to me in the conversation is the level of effort made to set the organisation up for success long term. So it's not just parachuting in and doing the training and then, see you later. Good luck. I love that notion of training the trainer, and also updating the course and iterating on the course as you were receiving feedback so that it was always the most useful and most helpful course, all those kind of things that you were doing to allow them to have that long term success training other people, making sure everybody was consistent where they needed to be and had the same level of understanding. It was really interesting to hear that kind of side of the project and the work that you were doing.
Christine Cawthorne
Yeah, I think it's interesting to think about training as a long term investment rather than we've got a problem in the team immediately, get some training that will fix it because training is part of that part of the solution. There's also extra stuff to look at such as how to support people afterwards, making sure that they're getting trained on the right thing in the first place. Maybe it's not that people don't understand about user needs, but maybe it's that they don't have access to analytics or users so that they can't tailor their content. So there's extra stuff to look at when you're building a course.
And also, I've started doing this thing recently, which is offering mentoring after training. So often, certainly in content design, there's this big advocacy piece that we have to do and that can be quite exhausting. So we're talking more and more about how to do that in a way that's right for you personally, whether you should be doing it on all of that kind of good stuff. But some post-training mentoring sessions are also quite helpful because it helps people to do that self-reflection. Maybe it helps them to see whether they need to manage up, whether there's an issue in the organisation. Maybe it's the way that they're approaching something. There's different things to look at that we're not machines. We can't just learn something and then put it into practice. You have to be in an ecosystem, an environment that lets you do that.
I feel like I learn more. The more that I train, the more I learn about other people. And so having a bit of one-to-one time can be really valuable for people, particularly if there's something that they're not sure about, that they learned about, maybe their curiosity was piqued, but they're not sure where to turn next or how to bring that in. Perhaps they're interested in something else, but it's not traditionally content design. And so how to balance those competing things that you're needing or wanting to do at work.
Robert Mills
And I know that you offer mentorship separate to any kind of training as well, and certainly as part of the Crocstar content community, which you run. So we'll link to all that good stuff in the show notes if anybody's listening and thinking, aha, I need some help. Absolutely.
Right, I'm going to bring us to a close by putting you in the spotlight now. Can you think of a time recently when you've been the audience or you've been the user, and what have you watched, what have you read, or what have you listened to that might have provoked a reaction or stirred an emotion, and it can be work related or otherwise?
Christine Cawthorne
I went to see some comedy the other week. This is obviously not work related. I didn't know much about the show before I went. And it turned out to be a story about a guy who essentially looks after his uncle throughout the last few months of his life, the uncle's life. And it was a show about belonging, about family, about experiencing the whole of life. And yeah, the good, the bad and the ugly were in there. Oh, there's an idiom. And it was really very touching, very affecting. I came away thinking a lot about what it means to age, what it means to choose your family, what it means to experience all of the aspects of life, obviously some more enjoyable than others. And so yeah, I was the audience for that. And that when I looked around at the audience, there were all sorts of people, all sorts of ages, all being moved to tears as I was. So that was a kind of masterclass in getting people to understand a particular story about a particular moment that we will, well, in theory, all of us go through. So yeah, that was good. I like anything that increases your empathy. But it just means that I'm walking around crying all the time. So you got to balance it.
Robert Mills
I love that answer. I love asking that question because we get such different responses to it. You know, we've had poor customer experiences, a book that somebody's read and your answer with that comedy. But I also love it because for me, it taps into my interest of all things like media studies, my degree was in journalism, film and broadcasting. And so it’s almost like an innate response to analyse media texts and things. And I love the idea of those collective experiences. So when you go to the cinema and go to the theatre and go to like a comedy show, you're having your own very individual experience because of what you're feeling and what sort of day you've had and how you can relate to the content or not. But you're also having a collective experience with either the people that you're with that you know, or the wider audience of complete strangers. It's just something about those collective experiences, that brief moment in time where everybody is just sharing something really special. So thank you for that answer. That was a great way to wrap us up.
Christine Cawthorne
Total pleasure. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to reflect on that because yeah, I came away a little bit changed. And I think that's a chapeau to that man, that comedian.
Robert Mills
Brill. Christine, I could talk to you all day and no doubt once we stop recording, you'll get a gazillion messages off me on several different channels, as is always typical for us. But for now, and for the benefit of our listeners, I am going to bring it to a close. So thank you so much for spending time with me today. Talking me through that project, that work and your wider experience of training and content work. I really appreciate it.
Christine Cawthorne
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Robert Mills
Thank you for listening to the Fourth Wall Content podcast. All episodes, transcripts and show notes can be found ay fourthwallcontent.com. Good luck with your content challenges and I hope you can join us next time. Bye for now.
