This is an old post. Some of the examples are out of date, but the message is still the same.
When I was in the rat race, the “good news/bad news sandwich” (GNBN) was much touted. One of the things I learnt about it was that it is only something you were expected to give to other people. No one ever seems to give it to you… or do they?
The GNBN technique is how you’re supposed to impart bad or negative news to someone by starting off with some good stuff, then cover the bad news, then round it off with more good stuff. It’s a pathetic and childish attempt to disguise the bad news, that’s all. And it’s made worse by the ineptness of those trying to do it.
There are a number of problems with the technique. The main one is that most people can see right through it. I said that no one seems to use it on you, but that’s only because it doesn’t work if you have a mind of your own. If you’re being chewed out, you’re being chewed out, and no amount of waffle about inconsequential “good things” can hide that.
You see, the bad news portion is usually hugely significant in terms of the collection of events that make someone’s life go round, whereas the good news parts are ridiculously insignificant when measured on the same scale. A good example would be the results of an interview for a new job within your company. GNBN might deal with it using the following elements:
- you gave a really good interview and we were impressed
- you didn’t get the job
- you have a future with us and shouldn’t be discouraged
If you’re naïve enough to be mollified, even for a short time, the simple fact is you didn’t get the job that you had your heart set on. Your career (and your bank balance) really needed it, but now you’re consigned to at least another year in the same position, with the extra humiliation of knowing you’re not good enough. This will probably be even worse when you find out who did get it (and how bad they are), and you start to realise the extreme social awkwardness that this will create – the new job holder will most likely be gloating or patronising now that they’re senior to you, even without trying.
Do you really feel better about all that because you gave a “good interview”? Have you considered the multiple meanings “a future with us” carries (i.e. you can stay where you are, but you’re likely to get the same result in future because someone senior doesn’t like you)?
GNBN will really have helped you, won’t it?
GNBN is one of those things that is sound as a general principle, but which has been grabbed by successive crops of wishy-washy coachinistas (new word) as being The Answer To Everything. A huge problem with it is that it doesn’t work when the relative magnitude of the bad news is huge compared with the good news parts, or if the bad news and good news are poles apart in terms of relevance and importance.
I remember a while back having a school teacher as a pupil. On one occasion our discussion went like this after we’d pulled over to deal with a mistake she’d made:
“Aren’t you supposed to wrap the bad news with good news?”
“OK. I like what you’ve done with your hair, and those are nice shoes you’re wearing. But I’m more concerned about how you just drove over the edge of that roundabout, swung out to take the wrong exit without looking because you accelerated, and forced all those other cars to slam on their brakes. You ought to be, too.”
“All right, I take your point. I was only joking though”.
And this illustrates the point about magnitudes, relevance, and importance. Even if I’d sandwiched her mistake with how well she’d riven down a quiet road earlier, and how competently she’d dealt with the traffic lights and crossings in the shopping precinct (which I’d have already commented on separately, anyway), these two things were hugely insignificant and irrelevant in terms of what had just gone wrong. The possible consequences both now and if she did it in future when out on her own (not to mention what would happen if she did it on test) were massively more significant.
Bill Gates, in his book Business At The Speed Of Thought, makes it clear how he feels about bad news…
An essential quality of a good manager is a determination to deal with any kind of bad news head on, to seek it out rather than deny it. An effective manager wants to hear about what’s going wrong before he or she hears about what’s going right…
You focus on bad news in order to get cracking on the solution.
He says a lot more, but you get the point. And he’s absolutely right. Many ADIs – who already believe we should be teaching yoga, Buddhism, aromatherapy, and all kinds of other crap – would do well to get a grip and start dealing with things properly. Learners will learn a lot more if we teach them to accept they made a mistake, live with it, and to fix it for next time than they will from all the politically correct New Age claptrap some think we should be peddling.
Think about that: why should trying to teach people to acknowledge their faults and strive to eliminate them be less desirable than pandering to their insecurities and trying to make them look good when they just tried to kill you and themselves in a 1 tonne lump of machinery?
Over the years, of the 99.9% of pupils I’ve taken to test who have been 100% ready (yes, I admit that I have taken a small few who weren’t), on the occasions when they have failed I have often said something like “well, you only got three faults, so you’ve got to look at it positively”. I forget the number of times they have replied:
“But I still failed, didn’t I?”
They’re not as stupid as the current crop of New Age driving instructors think they are.
GNBN has a place… sometimes. If someone has negotiated six crossings perfectly, misses a pedestrian about to walk on to the seventh, and then does the next few properly until you can pull them over, a GNBN sandwich is easily applied – and quite rightly so. But if they pulled away from their house perfectly, tried to drive across a busy junction without checking (and with cars coming both ways) because they didn’t even see it, and then dealt with an empty crossing satisfactorily, trying to contrive a GNBN routine out of it is a waste of their time and money.