🍁 You may remember François Fillon’s famous slip of the tongue. While serving as French Prime Minister, he stood before the National Assembly and mangled the French term gaz de schiste (“shale gas”) as gaz de shit.
That is precisely the subject of a case study I use in my project communication courses.
With one difference: the participants are going on a journey to Quebec!
The story in a nutshell
In the early 2010s, several oil and gas companies, backed by the Quebec government, began exploring for shale gas. On paper, the project was supported by sound technical and economic arguments. But it was socially blind: not all stakeholders had genuinely been taken into account.
The story had all the makings of a blockbuster and triggered a major backlash among residents in the affected regions. The press seized on the issue. Emotions ran high. Local people reported strange smells near their homes. Citizen groups formed. Writer and theatre director Dominic Champagne became one of the leading figures in the campaign.
In short, a modern-day epic.
For a training course, there is nothing better than examining a major public project involving numerous stakeholders and grounded in real-life anecdotes.
Immersion in a different sector
This is the Nova Train approach: immersing participants in a story they can analyse, complete with its stakeholders, failings, conflicts and communication mistakes. They must take a position, craft messages, adapt their language and respond to events that are sometimes unexpected.
Articles and archive footage add depth to the case. We are no longer simply talking about project communication: we step inside the story.
When participants surprise themselves
I recently delivered the course Project Communication: Building Lasting Relationships with All Stakeholders, using this story as the central thread. The group brought together representatives from several sectors: the public sector, agricultural software and digital services.
We began by mapping the stakeholders. The participants then worked on speeches tailored to different audiences, learnt how to sell the problem before presenting the solution, and built a communication plan that took account of the project’s different phases and potential resistance.
During a role-play exercise, one participant had to announce the start of the initial extraction work to a fictional group of journalists.
He steadied his voice, structured his message and answered objections with unexpected confidence. A performance worthy of a real press conference!
That, too, is what training is about: those slightly magical moments when someone reveals a strength they may not have known they possessed.
The power of transposition
Stepping into a case that is far removed from their own sector helps participants gain perspective. They can no longer retreat into familiar habits, technical expertise or answers already used within their company. They must look at the situation differently and draw on other abilities.
Taking participants out of their usual professional environment does not distance them from their problems. Sometimes, it allows them to see those problems more clearly.
If you would like to design a training case that challenges your teams to work differently, let’s discuss it in an initial meeting.
