---
title: They asked how you'd fix it. You told them it wasn't broken.
source: https://talkforimpact.com/writing/they-asked-how-youd-fix-it/index.md
lastmod: 2026-10-12
---

# They asked how you'd fix it. You told them it wasn't broken.

In a room going through cuts, everything you say is heard as an answer to the question people walked in with.

{{< img src="img/writing/they-asked-how-youd-fix-it/01.jpg" alt="An audience seen from behind, hands raised, in linocut style" caption="" >}}

Early this month, in the BBC Radio Theatre, the director general Matt Brittin spoke to his staff. The BBC is cutting up to 2,000 jobs. It announced the plan in April and has been rolling it out in instalments since June, when Brittin set out the first phase and told staff it was ["a doubly difficult time for everyone"](https://news.sky.com/story/bbc-to-cut-hundreds-of-jobs-and-review-programmes-as-part-of-major-downsizing-13554952). More announcements were due within days.

Many of the questions were about who was paying for it. One person called the BBC "an incredibly top-heavy organisation" and added: "All the 'doers' are getting cut." Another said: "I don't want to hear about savings when bosses get huge salaries."

So many came in of the same kind that Anna Foster, the Radio 4 presenter hosting the meeting, gathered them into one and asked it herself. The deputy director general, Rhodri Talfan Davies, answered it directly: changes at every level, and, he said, some of the steepest at the top.

Then someone cited a [Guardian piece from that week about low morale](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/oct/05/bbc-morale-dented-job-cuts) and asked how the executive team proposed to tackle it. Brittin took that one himself.

## What he came to say

He had come with something else. Brittin spent twenty years at Google and started at the BBC in May, and what he brought to the Radio Theatre was a vision, along with a demo of a redesigned iPlayer: push decisions down, build and test digital products fast, accept that it is fine to "experiment and fail".

He wanted the BBC to "be more Elvis", by which he meant "a little less conversation, a little more action". And in the same speech, from the recording [Deadline obtained](https://deadline.com/2026/10/bbc-silicon-valley-revolution-matt-brittin-1237148887/): "I'd like us to celebrate activity less, and outcomes more."

Those two lines pull against each other. I can guess the bridge he had in mind, but he left the room to build it, and a room in the middle of 2,000 job cuts builds it out of what it walked in with. "A little less conversation" sounds different to people who came to the meeting wanting one.

## An answer to a different question?

His reply, [as the Guardian reported it](https://www.aol.co.uk/articles/bbc-boss-faces-barrage-staff-140151000.html):

*"I don't dismiss the impact of uncertainty on everybody, but we also have a really powerful, motivated staff and I don't think that narrative applies to everyone. I don't underestimate how it does affect people, but I don't think it's quite fair to say that's the morale."*

It looks like he answered the one he would have liked to be asked. Someone asked how the executive team would tackle low morale, and he answered whether morale was low, then concluded that it was not, or not everywhere, in front of the people who had just told him it was.

He may well not have meant it the way the room took it. Deadline describes him as trying to lift staff out of the gloom of the job-cut announcements, and some staff told Deadline they came out energised. But the Guardian's account of the meeting opened with a barrage of criticism, and one insider told Deadline: "He mentioned getting smaller several times."

## Their question first

We tend to prepare an all-hands like a broadcast. We decide what we want to say, rehearse it, and get ready for the hard questions so we can answer them without losing the thread.

But in a room going through cuts, the hard question is what people came for, and everything we say gets heard as an answer to it, whether we meant it that way or not.

The question the room is carrying has to come first, answered on its own terms, before the vision and before the demo.

## "I can't tell them morale is low"

A director general cannot stand in front of the whole organisation and agree that morale is low. Saying it out loud could make it worse, and people would quote it back at him.

But taking the question seriously does not require agreeing that morale is low. A leader with several turnarounds behind him once told me about an operation he had been brought in to rescue after a dispute had shut it down. The workforce had every reason to push back on whoever arrived next, and they did.

He did not tell them their anger was a narrative. He held a town hall every week and started from what they kept asking, why, before he asked anything of them. That included the pay claim he turned down, where he told them they deserved a rise and then explained why they could not have one.

And week after week he kept doing what he had told them he would do. What came back, in his account, was: *"I don't like it, but at least I know why."*

They still did not agree with him, but now they could work on it together.

## What You Can Do

Before you write what you will say at your next all-hands, write down the question you think the room will bring. Then ask three people from different levels what they expect it to be, and open the meeting with their answer, whether it matches yours or not.

## Find out where you stand

[Take a Snapshot](https://app.talkforimpact.com/try/snapshot?utm_source=website&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=they-asked-how-youd-fix-it): six questions about your last high stakes moment in front of your people, to see where your message may be drifting.