Christopher Balmford & Cinzia Theobald on the ISO 24495 Plain Language Standard

Episode 11: Christopher Balmford & Cinzia Theobald

I've worked in organizations where training is hugely boring, and it's a massive online training program, and I've sat with learning and development directors, and they've said to me, the biggest bane of their existence is that staff keep complaining about how boring the training is. They have to do it. They want the staff to do it. Staff are finding it boring and they're not retaining the information. They are finding ways to be able to just answer the multiple choice and get through it as quickly as possible, so that's a useless use of their time.

*This transcript was corrected with Claude AI. The human version is coming soon.

Bob  Welcome to top of their game, the show where we speak with the people, making communications clearer, fairer, and just plain better. I'm your host, Bob Milstein, a lawyer and plain language trainer, practitioner and advocate today to coincide with the launch of The Plain Game, I bring you a very special episode, an interview with the co-founders of In-Game Learning, my colleagues, Cinzia Theobald and Christopher Balmford. We'll be exploring their respective career tracks and how those tracks ended up connecting. We'll talk about the very important role both of them have played and continue to play at international policy level, and we will, of course, chat about The Plain Game, what it is, why it is and why it might be worth playing. And this time around, the questions might all be mine. Over recent weeks, we did ask you whether there were any particular questions you'd like me to put to them, and you responded. So I've peppered this interview with quite a few of your questions, for which I thank you. And now Christopher Balmford and Cinzia Theobald. Christopher, Cinzia. Welcome.

Christopher  Hey. Welcome.

Cinzia  Thank you.

Bob  Can I just say at the outset, tell me. Intimidated. I am used to just doing interviews with one person. I've never been outnumbered before. So please be gentle with me.

Christopher  I'm sure we will.

Bob  Good. The other thing I should say, by way of full disclosure, of course, is that not only do we know one another, we're friends and we're colleagues and have been, in the case of Christopher and me, several decades, a little shorter. Cinzia. Despite that, I will, of course, maintain my professionally dispassionate demeanor throughout our time together. Okay. All right, here goes. Let's start at the beginning. Cinzia.

Cinzia  Yes, Bobby.

Bob  Tell me, where did you grow up? And what did you want to be when you were a child?

Cinzia  Yeah. So I grew up until the age of seven in London and then in Victoria after that we were ten pound commies came across on a boat, and I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I was still saying, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, probably up until a decade ago.

Bob  Aha. And Christopher.

Christopher  I grew up in Melbourne. Bob. I lived ten happy years in Sydney, but I very much grew up in Melbourne. I grew up in a family of lawyers. My father was a lawyer. My mother was a lawyer, which was much more unusual in those days. Um, I should say. My mother later became the first female Supreme Court judge in the state of Victoria, and I cannot tell you how proud of her I am. Let me say to, um, my grandfather was a lawyer. There was a lot of legal conversation in the house, which I always found interesting. So I just sort of think I assumed I was going to be a lawyer, which I was for a while.

Bob  So these days you're renowned as communicators. Was that a skill that you had as young people? Did it come later?

Cinzia  Um, no. I was really shy. I was a better communicator than I was oral.

Bob  Christopher.

Christopher  I was a sort of noisy person. I still am a noisy person. Not as noisy as I used to be. I spoke a lot in class and did things like that. And the plain language thing didn't come until much later. I always thought I wanted to be a writer. I didn't really think through what that meant. You know, I was a lawyer for a while, and I always thought I'd be a lawyer, but I don't really think I thought much about the communicating thing.

Bob  So it did come to discovering and embracing the world of plain language. How Christopher, did you first discover that field?

Christopher  I was working at the Law Reform Commission of Victoria, had a reference from the then Attorney General, Jim Kennan QC, to improve the clarity of legislation and government documents. Generally. The Commission had had that reference for a while, and as part of its work, it produced an outstanding report dismissing the concerns people have about plain language, which was republished on its thirtieth anniversary. It's so good.

Bob  Do you remember the name of that resource?

Christopher  Yeah. Plain language in the law. We should put it in the show notes. Funnily enough, it's just been recently translated into Japanese by a language organisation in Japan, and I was working at the Law Reform Commission in a research role. And before that, I've been a solicitor in a big law firm and managing legal documents for clients, mainly in the property area. And the commission, as part of its reports, did demonstration rewrites of documents, and the people working on the plain language project had rewritten, I think it was a commercial lease. I can't quite remember. And they asked me to put on my property law hat and review it, looking at the original that they'd been rewriting and looking at the rewrite that they had written and making sure that the rewrite was accurate and nothing had been left out or glossed over or whatever. And I really enjoyed that. Like, I was just amazed at what a good job they'd done and how clear it was. And, you know, it was a type of document I was very familiar with. Then I did find some, let's call them holes in it, which we worked together to rapidly fix. But that was the moment when I thought, oh, this is really useful and this is really interesting and this is really worthwhile. And you know, I reckon I can do it. That's where it started.

Bob  And was there a particular person or mentor who drew you into this?

Christopher  Yeah, there was a guy called David Kelly who was one of my mentors. I've got a couple, him and Annetta Cheek, who was the second interview in the podcast. Really good friend of mine, David, led the commission's work on plain language. He was also a professor of English from Sydney University. Doctor Robert Eagleson was heavily involved for a few years. Other people. Loan Scheme and Mark Duckworth. And in these discussions around these documents, at the start I was saying, it can't be done, it can't be done. And I gradually realized that I was losing these arguments and that these people were actually convincing me that it could be done. And, you know, then, like Paul on the road to Damascus, as they say, I fell off the donkey and changed my mind and became a zealous, plain language advocate, practitioner, obsessive.

Bob  And what about you?

Cinzia  I was working in health, and I was working for the largest health service in Victoria at the time, and I had probably ten portfolios. And someone said to me, You're now taking on health literacy? I've never even heard of it before. Didn't know what it was, took it on, loved it, but couldn't give it all of my attention because of all the portfolios I had. But then I changed my role and ended up working in an organisation that was working in the engagement space with multicultural communities, people seeking asylum, refugees, people experiencing significant disadvantage. So we were writing a lot of documents for those communities because they weren't understanding the documents that the government were putting out. So that's kind of where I got a passion for it. And then Covid hit, and that's where with all the public health orders that were changing every week, communities were not understanding what they were supposed to do. They were chatting on WhatsApp with relatives in other countries, and they were getting their advice from them. And of course, our rules were different. Melbourne was the most locked down city in the world, I believe, and they just weren't getting it right and their lives were at risk and so were other members of the community. So that's where I got heavily into health literacy and writing in plain language for those communities.

Bob  And for the benefit of listeners who are outside of Australia. It's important to note that Melbourne is an extraordinarily diverse city from a multicultural perspective.

Cinzia  Not only is Melbourne hugely diverse, but I was working in the city of Greater Dandenong, which is the most culturally diverse local government area in Australia, and I think the second or third in the world, we're one hundred and fifty languages are spoken just in that local government area.

Bob  I understand you've had some engagement with the Department of Health and you submitted some documents to them. How did that department respond?

Cinzia  They responded very favourably. They were brilliant. And in the end, we ended up working closely with them and the local council, and we got huge grants to work as intermediaries, if you like, between the multicultural communities and the Department of Health and writing more documents.

Bob  Now, who was the we in this. What was the name of the organization you were in? Okay. I asked Christopher whether there was a person or mentor who was a particular influence. Anyone in your world?

Cinzia  We won an award for that Covid work, and Christopher's the person who presented the award to me. And I had kind of looked up to Christopher for a very long time and was kind of in awe of him then. So he's been a really strong mentor for me in the plain language space, and got me into volunteering for various plain language organizations, um, which has been fantastic and introduced me to the international plain language world. And Anita also has become a mentor for me too.

Bob  We're here to talk about plain language. Why should companies and organizations ever care about plain language communication?

Christopher  To my mind, there's four broad reasons. The first one is that plain language help makes the documents. The organizations write more efficient. They save money by having documents that are clear. There's less helpline calls, less follow up calls. Fewer things need to be done twice. Things go more smoothly. There's a tremendous research from the Norwegian Language Council, which I think is called Norwegian. I'm not sure of my pronunciation. They commissioned a report from economics, which shows that a local government project in Norway, based on several projects, got a return on investment of between thirty percent and three hundred percent. Some of you listeners will know that from listening to Turin Braxton's interview a week or two ago. So that's the first region. It's about efficiency. The second reason, to my mind, is it's about effectiveness. The document does its job better in the sense that documents are written for a purpose. The purpose is more likely to be achieved if the readers of the document can understand it and know what they're meant to do, or can make an informed decision about whether to do that or not. So there's these two reasons of efficiency and effectiveness. There's a third reason of democracy. There's a wonderful quote The citizens deserve to be able to understand what government is doing in their name. That's a quote from Omar, who was the first attorney general in the South African government when Nelson Mandela was resident in South Africa. It is essential to democracy that documents be clear. There's a fourth reason, which I think is really important for much smaller organizations than countries. And it's that the documents an organization writes form the voice of the organization's brand. You know, every time we speak, we think about who we're speaking to and why we're speaking to them. We adjust our voice to reflect that organizations should do that, too. They often don't. People at work just use the same voice, regardless of who they're writing to and why they're writing to them. And the brand thing is, is how we feel inside about an organization when we think about it. So the voice of the brand organizations make all sorts of claims about being with integrity or being open, or being transparent, or being customer focused or being whatever it is. There's all sorts of brand values that organizations have. And if we measure an Organization's documents against those brand values. It's the documents that fall up short. So many documents from organizations that make these great big claims about themselves, and in many aspects of their operations, they are living up to their brand values. But so many of them in their documents, they don't. So efficiency, save money effectiveness, do a better job if democracy empowering people to make informed, confident decisions. And then this one about organizations documents ringing true in the moment of truth when they're read.

Bob  Fabulous, sincere. Did you want to add anything to that for me?

Cinzia  Poor patient outcomes is a direct result of poor communication. There are incidents happening in hospitals every day because of poor communication. Patients lives are put at risk. So yes, it is about patients being able to make an informed decision and understand what's going on in their lives. But there's some significant risks when we talk about health and communication in health and people reading, communication, health How sometimes are very stressed. You know, they've just been diagnosed with something or they're going through a really tough time, mental health issues, whatever it might be. And we really need to think about the audience that we're writing to and understand that while we might want to give them lots of information to cover ourselves legally, probably better to do it slowly and clearly, using an appropriate tone and just bearing in mind what they're going through.

Bob  Thank you. You earlier identified the work that you did at enliven with culturally, linguistically diverse groups who I assume have health literacy challenges, legal literacy challenges, for that matter, in that setting. How important was the process of testing, and what was your philosophy of testing?

Cinzia  So testing is vital, but you have to start before you even put pen to paper. So if you're writing about something, if you're writing about suicide prevention as an example, you need to speak to communities about how they view suicide, what their views are, because you can't write something that's going to alienate them straight away if they're a cultural, religious or whatever barriers to them reading your document, you need to understand that upfront and how we should best talk about these things. So you start by engaging communities early on, and then you do your first draft, preferably with people from their communities. But if you can't, you know, just use your plain language experts and write your first draft. And then we used to test it in two ways. We would test it first for its cultural appropriateness, I suppose, making sure it wasn't offensive and that it actually resonates with that community. I'll give you an example. In the Covid work that we did, one of the public health orders that came out was that if you got Covid, you need to isolate yourself in a bedroom, isolate yourself from the rest of the family until your symptoms have gone five days, whatever. Many of these communities were living three generations in one house that had one bathroom. So that information just wasn't appropriate for them. So we changed that information to making sure that you disinfect everything after you go to the bathroom and just putting in measures to protect them that way. So that's where you need to really talk to the communities and make sure what you're writing makes sense to them. And we had the most beautiful community champion network. It's still going. I believe in live. And there was about one hundred and fifty different champions in that network that would then take the documents out to their communities and test it, and that was absolutely vital part of it as well, just to make sure they could find the information they wanted and they could understand it. They did write a clarity article about this as well, because we won the Clean Christine Award in twenty twenty one, I believe it was. And there is an article in the Clarity Journal that talks about this.

Bob  I want to shift the focus a bit to the personal. How did the two of you first meet.

Christopher  When Cinzia won the award, you just mentioned the Christine Mowatt Award, which is appointed by an international organization called plane. By the way, if you're interested in plain language, I really encourage you to join PLAIN and really encourage you to join clarity And the president of PLAIN migrated from Norway. Asked me because I was local in Melbourne and I've known her for several years. She asked me to present the award on her behalf at Cinzia's office. It was quite funny because it was during Covid and I turned up and it was just Cinzia and Rob McIndoe. The two senior people were there and none of the staff were there because of Covid. But I stood and delivered their speech as though I was talking to people in the room and congratulating them on the work that they'd all done. It was quite fun. That's how we met. And I said to Cinzia, clearly, you're interested in plain language and clearly you're good at it. You've just won the most prestigious plain language award in the world. Congratulations. I really encourage you to get involved in the ISO project, the International Organization for standardization project to develop a plain language standard. I was the convenor of the working group that developed that. So I said to her, apply through Standards Australia. It'd be great to have you involved.

Bob  I'm keen to hear more about your respective roles at international levels. But just before I walk away from that personal discussion, at what point did you realize that you worked well together?

Christopher  I've got part of the answer to that. Since you wrote a guide to how to write case studies about the standard, and she wrote a case study as a demonstration model, and she had done these drafts and wanted me to review them. And I was kind of dreading having to do with it. I was a week late, and Sarah had nagged me and I opened up these documents. And I don't know, Bob, maybe I changed a word. Maybe not. They were just terrific documents. And I thought, wow, not only is this person great fun to work with, but also the quality of her work is just extraordinary. And when I had my next big project, I knew I wanted her involved.

Bob  And.

Cinzia  Probably when I started working on the committees with Christopher, he was convener of the ISO working Group eleven that was responsible for developing the standard. And he was also the chair of the Standards Australia Working Group. And so I started working with him on those two.

Christopher  And the International Language federations. Localization.

Cinzia  Localization committee that Gael Spivak chairs. And I just responded well to. His style, I guess because he's very inclusive and very, very easy to work with.

Bob  He's a high risk himself.

Cinzia  I like that about him.

Bob  Definitely. We're going to be spending a bit of time talking about In-Game Learning and The Plain Game. But just one preliminary question for you, Cinzia, about it. When Christopher first described his vision, what were your thoughts?

Cinzia  So we were in Washington at the time, and everyone was a bit jet lagged. And he was telling us his idea over lunch. It was just so different. I had never even considered that you could deliver training as an online game. Most of my history has been working with massive pharmaceutical industries, health services, where you have to go through so much online training every year, never mind your first induction, but just to keep up the training. And they're boring. They are really boring. But I've never thought that there could be a way they could be delivered better. And Christopher's idea just resonated with me and I thought, wow, I want to get plain language out there out to the masses. And I just thought that was a fantastic, affordable way to get fun training out there. That's just so different to what's currently on offer. So I jumped at it.

Christopher  We're on our way, funnily enough, to Anita Cheek's eightieth birthday, the mentor that each of us mentioned before. We came back a few weeks later and made his email and just said, when are we going to meet about the game? I remember the moment of taking a big gulp and thinking, okay, we're going to do this. And knowing that I was doomed to several years of very, very, very hard work. Yeah.

Bob  Just looking broadly at your careers to date, and I know there's a lot ahead of you. What are the biggest changes you've seen in the world of plain language?

Christopher  I first got into plain language in nineteen ninety, ninety one and ninety two at the Law Reform Commission of Victoria. And in those days the legal profession argued vociferously, to use a big, long word, argued aggressively, confidently that it couldn't be done, which is what I was saying as a representative of the legal profession when I was at the Law Reform Commission. And you know, Bobby, you and I have run the plain language training course, which we've converted into the game. It's our course. And thirty years ago, when you ran the course, you would have furious debate in the course with people who'd been sent there by their organisation, often the government department or a financial services organisation or a law firm, and they would be arguing that it couldn't be done. And we have an exercise on the course that actually triggers that discussion. And sometimes there would be no debate. It would all be fine, but sometimes it was really serious and unpleasant. So this opposition to plain language, particularly from the legal profession, it used to be on the course, but it also used to be in the media. There would be articles and quotes from senior lawyers. When the Law Reform Commission produced its reports. There were lots of quotes from lawyers saying it can't be done from judges and all sorts of people which now look chronically out of date and wrong. That's life, you know? So that's the two big changes for me.

Cinzia  And I'll focus in on health because that's where I've worked. Health literacy has become a really important priority for health services. It's also a part that is assessed when a health service is accredited now. So they have to do something in that space. They can't do something tokenistic. I've found that while in more recent years working with clinicians to write plain language documents, I used to get a lot of opposition initially with wanting to change words and things, whereas the most recent one I did, which was about primary aldosteronism, I actually found the clinicians were trying to come up with easier ways of saying things than I was putting in their heads, and I found that absolutely delightful. But I think the biggest change I've seen has probably been because of the ISO's plain language standard. In recent years, it's legitimized all of these efforts. The most recent conference I went to, and Christopher's been going to plain language conferences for many more years than I have. But this most recent one, every presenter was talking about the ISO plain language standard and how they've implemented it and what successes they've had. So I think that has been a huge shift.

Christopher  That was incredibly satisfying at the conference in Brussels twenty twenty five. It was incredibly satisfying. How many speakers making this up? But let's say thirty percent of them mentioned the standard in the title of their paper, but eighty or ninety percent of the ones I went to and I spoke to other people who went to other ones, referenced the standard in one way or another. I mean, that was just incredibly uplifting.

Bob  Let's talk about that standard. But before we do, perhaps could one of you please set the scene by describing briefly who in the world who've come together to help make this standard come into existence?

Christopher  Okay, so there are three plain language organizations internationally. I mentioned two already clarity, which has a focus a bit on legal things, but it's open to everybody. And its journal and its conferences cover lots of other topics as well. It's international plain, which is international and is interested in everything in the plain language world. There's a third organization, which is in the Americas, mainly in North America, called the center for Plain Language. And it does everything, but it has a bit of a focus on government. So in two thousand and seven, at a conference in Amsterdam, I was president of clarity. At the time, the three organizations discussed forming what is now called the International Plain Language Federation, which, by the way, is on the board of. They've formed the International Plain Language Federation to work on a series of projects that the three organizations thought would be best done by the organizations cooperating, rather than by the organizations acting individually or in another way.

Bob  You had a particular role that the Federation appointed you to undertake.

Christopher  I did both. Yeah. First project at the Federation did was come up with a definition of plain language, which has stood the test of time and is now available in more than twenty six languages. Once it had done that and it was the chair of the Federation at the time, and Eamonn Moran, who was a friend of mine here in Melbourne, also a legend in the plain language world. He was the president of clarity, and the two of them asked me to form a committee to develop a plain language standard. I should say that one of the first things the Federation did back in twenty ten was write an options paper about the various things that the plain language world should do. So the first one was the definition. One was continued research on plain language. One was develop a standard on plain language. Another one was form the international organisation to help make all this happen. And there were a few other things as well certification for practitioners. So you can get certified as a plain language practitioner, or your document can be certified as being in plain language. And it's a bit hard to do certification if you don't have some sort of standard to measure the document or the people or the organization or anything else against. And it's a bit hard to have a standard if you don't have a definition of the objective that you're seeking to reach. So the Federation did the definition and it's working now on the certification. She is heavily involved in that. But yeah, I was appointed to this committee to try and make a standard happen.

Bob  And it happened.

Christopher  Yeah it happened. It's a beautiful story. I wrote it at length. It's on LinkedIn. It's far and away the most popular posts I've ever written. It's fifteen thousand glorious words. It's a fifteen thousand, six thousand. Sorry, I got carried away. I think it's only about six.

Bob  four thousand rather good ones.

Christopher  Exactly. Yeah. And of course some dross as well. I was asked by the National Plain Language Organisation to write the history of the standard. It's a very personal history, I have to say it. Thanks. I reckon eighty people who were prominently active in it, but it also thanks everybody who contributed to the discussion. A lot of the people who had to do that had to learn English first, so I thanked them for learning English. Everyone who organized the conference or volunteered at a conference or trained to a conference, all these people contributed to the journey. And what happened was I cold called Standards Australia one day and this guy said, oh yeah, I'm happy to meet you there in Sydney. I live in Melbourne. So I went up to Sydney and I came and met him, and he spent forty minutes telling me it was impossible and too hard, and it takes too long and you'll never get to do it. And anyway, after the forty minutes, he sort of asked me what I'd done and I explained I'd been involved in the Federation, I'd had an internet business and I'd sold. And I also told him that I'd kayaked. It was a couple of months later, after I'd just done this kayak, the double sea kayak from Melbourne in Victoria to Tasmania across Bass Strait, which is a very wild, tossing bit of ocean. When I said that, he looked at me and he went, oh, you'll be fine then. Just fill in this form. We'll make it happen. Quite extraordinary really. And the people at Standards Australia were spectacularly helpful. There's a person, they're not there anymore, but Nedra Mudra, who rang me one day, I sort of sent the draft forms in, and a whole lot of people contributed this and that. And Joe Kimball and Karen Schreiber and David Lipscomb and so many people filling in these forms. I sent them in sort of saying, are we on the right track? And Nedra rang me the next day or a couple of days later, and she said, yeah, that's all fine. If you send that in, I think I can get it on the agenda for a committee next week. Standards Australia will appoint you as its representative to go to the annual meeting of the relevant Technical committee. Technical Committee thirty seven in Ottawa in June. You'll have to pay your own airfare, but we will appoint you to make the pitch on Standards Australia's behalf, and they appointed Annetta Cheek to go along and support me, which of course she did. And yeah, we went and we pitched it. And then there's a three month voting process and all the national standards bodies involved in the relevant technical committee. Maybe they didn't all vote yes, but enough of them did. And then work began. It really was extremely rewarding and satisfying and a wonderful team effort.

Bob  And just quietly sincere is not the only one of my two guests today who has received an award for their efforts. What happened Christopher?

Christopher  I've received two awards, actually well.

Christopher  Which I'm incredibly chuffed about. The three plain language organisations are already playing in the centre for my work on the standard, pointed at a conference in Argentina, gave me what they called the Above and Beyond award for my services in relation to the standard, which I was incredibly touched by. I haven't really won any other awards in my life, and you know, I've got it sitting on a bookshelf just near my front door at home. Nobody else is ever going to see it. When I walk through the front door, I often look up at it. And then technical committee ISO gave me an award for my innovative leadership, which sits beside the one from the three point language federations.

Bob  Well deserved, well deserved. Christopher mentioned Cinzia about your artful work. Could you tell us a little about your international work and in particular part for what it is, where it's heading, why it matters.

Cinzia  Sure. So my international work, as Christopher said, I'm on the International Plain Language Federation Board just recently appointed, and I'm also on the Planning board as well. And I sit on the ISO working Group eleven committee. Now, the standard that Christopher refers to is part one. It is a guidance standard in plain language. It tells organizations what they should do if they want to implement plain language. Then there's a part two, which is a legal guidance standard, and part three, which is a science guidance standard. And then we are currently working on what is called part four. And that is our first requirement standard. A requirement standard tells organizations what they shall do, particularly if they want to be certified. So part four will allow organizations to be certified in plain language. So banks, hospitals, legal companies, they can all be certified for their efforts in plain language. So I'm on the drafting committee for that. The ISO processes are very long and very consultative, which is fantastic. There are multiple rounds of consultation. So you know that when you've actually created the standard at the end. Multiple countries have had input. I think we received over two hundred comments in the first round, close to two hundred comments in the second round. We're about to go through our third round and you have to respond to every single comment. Either accept it or reject it, but you have to give a reason and you amend the draft every time. So we're really excited about that, and we're hoping that part four will be released early next year, early in twenty twenty seven, and that from then organizations should be able to be certified. It's fantastic for the plain language world to be able to get that one out there.

Bob  Why would an organization want to be certified?

Cinzia  It shows their customers that they're serious about their communication, that they can be trusted. As Christopher was talking about the voice of the brand to be certified against an ISO standard talks about the quality of the work that you do. There are multiple ISO standards out there that many organizations are certified against. ISO nine thousand and one is one particular standard. It's a quality management standard. People want to be certified against these ISO standards, because it shows the rest of the world that they're using best practice.

Bob  You mentioned that parts one to three are discretionary, but if one goes down the part four road, it's not. If they do embrace part four and obtain certification, does that have a de facto impact on parts one or two or three? Does that also become, in effect, mandatory for those organizations?

Cinzia  Essentially, part four is turning part one into requirements. Because part four is based on part one, it is looking at everything we say you should do in part one. And we're saying that you really must do it if you want to be certified. So it does turn part one almost into a requirement standard. But of course an organization can still choose to be certified, but it's a mandatory standard. You don't have to be certified against part four organizations in countries where there is plain language legislation, that might be a good way for them to show that they are complying with that legislation. Parts two and parts three for legal writing and science communication. They're different in that they kind of show you how you can apply part one. But in those settings.

Bob  I don't participate at your level. So I don't have any insights on this, but I imagine that there are lots of challenges trying to reach agreement, but also some enormously rewarding and stimulating moments. What are the challenges you've encountered and what are the joys? I'll ask both of you that.

Cinzia  On the drafting committee. The joys really are that you get such diverse perspectives. And because things are done differently in different countries. So we can always look at things with tunnel vision, with, you know, what we know, being able to get expert opinion across such a diverse range of people and across multiple countries for me has been absolutely Fascinating and has expanded my knowledge hugely. So working on part four has been absolutely brilliant because we have, I think it's seven committee members, each from different countries and each with their own perspective. It enriches whatever we're doing. It's been brilliant. The bits that aren't so good are that they're generally at eleven p m in Australia, because everybody else in the committee or working group or drafting committee lives on the other side of the world. So we always get the eleven p m slot, but I'm okay with that.

Christopher  ** **I hundred percent agree with Cinzia, as I so often do. Um, it's the community of people from the plain language world, but also people from the ISO world. But the central idea of international experts gathering to reach consensus to produce a standard that will work as broadly as possible. That idea is really good and you see it really work. Cinzia mentioned how hard the work is on part one. At one stage, the drafting committee had more than five hundred comments that they had to review. Some of them were the same, but they met fifteen times in thirty days for two hours. I mean, imagine finding fifteen to our meeting slots in your diary with people all over the world in the next thirty days. I mean, that's a task in itself. But they met and they grinded through these comments. And when the comments are responded to, this is the ISO requirement. The drafting committee has to give a reason for its response. It can't just say reject it. It has to say reject it because blah blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah. Or accept it partially. We made this change or accept it completely. We made another change. So the rigor of the thinking that goes into it is just a terrific thing to be involved in.

Cinzia  I'd have to say, Bobby, I would recommend volunteering in the international plain language community to anyone. It is hard work. There's lots that needs to be done. But the community, as I said, are just amazing. It's the best thing I've ever done.

Christopher  When the ISO Technical Committee thirty seven working Group eleven was meeting for the first time in real life, we organized a dinner for everyone on the working group one night, and somebody from one of the national standards bodies emailed her colleagues and said, hey, if you're free to come to the dinner on Tuesday night of working Group eleven, you should come along. This is the best bunch of people I've ever met. And to my mind, that is an accurate representation of the positive, friendly, inclusive, intelligent, trying to make the world a better place and think it all through. People who are involved, it's just a wonderful thing.

Cinzia  That's why we work with so many of them. Yeah, exactly.

Bob  A beautiful transition In-Game Learning. Tell me. I think I'll go to Christopher on this one about the birth of in-game learning and The Plain Game.

Christopher  So there was the course that I've been running for a while. You've been running in various other people running between us. We've run it for like twenty five thousand people over thirty years. We've evolved it and evolved it and evolved it, but it's pretty refined now. And I'd always been wanting to put it online. And in two thousand, I had an idea for an internet business called Clear Docs selling document packages online to set up companies and trusts and other legal document packages. And I sold that in twenty eleven. And I had a few years off. And then I worked on the standard, which took quite a few years. And then I was looking for another project, really, my brain wanted to do something, and I've always been willing to put the course online, and I wasn't sure how, and I didn't want it to be boring because so much online training is boring. And my son William has a PhD in video games, and we had a family lunch and I was chatting to him and I said, oh, do you think we could put the course online as a game? And he said, oh yeah, we could do that a game. Do one, two, three, four, five. And I went, well, I reckon I can do one, two and three and you know, four will work out a way. And I don't know what to do about five. But I guess we'll cover that later. I started to think about it, think about actually doing it properly. And then this is really quite strange. It's not without precedent though. I had a bit of a cold. I was flat on the couch for a couple of days, not doing much, and in the middle of the night I was wide awake, having what can only be described as a fever dream. I suddenly saw how to do it. I saw how to make it fun. I came up with a few jokes that actually made me laugh out loud in my fevered state. And then the next morning I went to and I thought, this could just be nonsense. I was really sick last night and I went and read it and I thought, oh, I think it's good. So over the next week I fleshed it out, still handwriting and adding other pages and all of that. And then after about a week, I read it out to my wife, the wonderful Kim said, you know, let me know what you think. Kim has a master of arts in documentary filmmaking from the Australian Film Television Radio School. She also has a law degree. She used to be a lawyer, so she's sort of across these sorts of things. And I read out these sort of how many pages it was, and I got to the end and she said, I think it's a really good idea. I think you should do it. And I went, okay, then I will. So I started to write it up and I went off to America on the way to a party with the lunch we talked about, and I didn't know if it was still a secret. I didn't know if it was something I wasn't yet ready to talk about. But somebody said, oh, what are you doing? Because I was just resigning from a working Group eleven convening role. And then I just heard myself launch into this description of what I wanted to do over the next three days. It was a big topic of conversation and we thought through a lot of things. And here we are.

Cinzia  two years later.

Christopher  Within a couple of weeks.

Bob  ** **I'm conscious that we haven't yet enlightened our audience on what the it is in this discussion. Let's talk about The Plain Game. Cinzia.

Cinzia  Okay, The Plain Game is a fun and engaging online game. There's a cast of colourful characters that work in an office. Each one has their own persona. We're kind of based it on, I suppose, personas that people might identify with in their own office. There's the koala that is lazy. Nobody quite knows how much work he's doing, but everybody loves him. You've got the person that's been there the longest who is really wise. That's our owl. Of course you've got the duck. Who is the person who's always saying, why are we changing this? That'll never work. We call him The Reluctant Duck and various other characters in the office. There are some very funny videos where a communication issue is posed to this team. They all work together in this office and there's a communication crisis. So you watch the video, you learn a bit. Sometimes they consult the plain language expert, which is an avatar of our Christopher, who comes in on a teams meeting and talks to them. So it's worth watching the videos to see if Christopher's avatar. So anyway, the characters learn a little bit about the solution to the issue that has been raised, and then you go and read some educational material. It's not a lot of reading, and then you start doing some quizzes. That's the real game element. You start doing some quizzes that help you solve the problem that was posed in the video. And they're fun, different, you know, bubble pops and matching quizzes and that kind of thing. And that's the game at the moment. We are actually also working on a fourth component to our game, which will allow people to practice what they've learned. So as you learn each topic, you watch a video, you read the educational material, you play the game, and then you practice your writing. We're nearly there with that. So the game includes not only learning the content and learning it in a fun, engaging way that helps learning stick, but it also allows you to apply your learning by doing the practice rewrites. So it's very different to most online training courses. And we made sure that it aligns beautifully with the ISO standard and covers all the stuff that yourself and Christopher have done on the course as well.

Christopher  That point is really worth emphasizing. It's a game, but actually it's workplace training. It's specifically carefully designed to be a thing for organizations to have their staff do to help them improve the clarity of their writing, help them to write in plain language.

Bob  In these interviews, I tend to ask at least one or two devil's advocate questions a game. We're not here to play, games. We're here to make money or make money for our shareholders or to discharge our obligations. This is beneath us. Respond.

Christopher  Some people will think that other people will think online learning is so incredibly dull. Nobody does it. They don't learn anything. They often cheat. So there's an awful lot of online learning happening that's completely ineffective. And we're saying we need to engage the imagination. Humans learn best when their imagination is engaged.

Bob  I imagine there is a plan B available to some people. They can bypass the gamey bits and go to the what they perceive to be the core.

Christopher  Yeah, they can go straight through the educational material, the stuff that Cinzia mentioned that they read and do the quizzes, they don't have to watch the videos.

Cinzia  While I was attending a conference in London, we had a senior executive approach us from one of the big banks in London, and he said, I love it. I absolutely love it. How do I get this past the rest of my senior execs? How do I get this through? Because it's a game. And we were like, well, you love it. Why are you assuming that nobody else will love it? It's a great way to learn. So I think assuming that just because people in organizations are not open to this fun element. I've worked in organizations, as I've said before, where training is hugely boring and it's a massive online training program. And I've sat with learning and development directors, and they've said to me, the biggest bane of their existence is that staff keep complaining about how boring the training is. They have to do it. They want the staff to do it. Staff are finding it boring and they're not retaining the information. They are finding ways to be able to just answer the multiple choice and get through it as quickly as possible, so that's a useless use of their time.

Bob  Gaming. Gamification. Could someone please explain the difference to me?

Christopher  So there's gamification. Classic example is Duolingo, where you get a set of days that you've gone to Duolingo, and a little owl looks very happy. And if you don't go for a few days, the owl looks very sick. That actually doesn't help you learn. Sure, it might motivate you to go and try to learn, but doesn't actually help you learn. Whereas in our game, the characters have a problem and you have to help them solve their problem. So the learning actually happens because of the game. It's not just, here's a bit of gamification to try and kind of keep you thinking. Maybe you will try to learn. It's here while you're doing your learning, you're playing a game. Your imagination is engaged by the characters in the game, by the things you're trying to achieve. And that makes it so much more likely that the learning will stick. Because humans learn best when their imaginations are engaged, because play is the brain's favourite way to learn.

Bob  I asked one of my first devil's advocate questions a few minutes ago. Here's my second one. If you get over the line on games, what about the people in management who hold the purse strings, who say, why do we need to upskill our people on writing? Isn't that what generative AI will do for us forever and ever? Amen.

Cinzia  So undoubtedly it is helping people improve their writing. There are some people who. Writing is not one of their greatest skills and AI does improve their writing. What we need to remember, though, is that plain language is about so much more than just words. In fact, Gael Spivak and her committee did a little bit of a study, and they looked at the terms in the ISO standard and the words in the ISO standard that related to words and sentences and language, and it was only seven percent of the standard.

Christopher  They did the maths on two aspects of the standard. They counted the number of words that dealt with each topic, and only seven percent of the words deal with words and sentences, and they counted the ideas in the standard. And by coincidence, only seven percent of the ideas in the standard are about words and sentences. The rest are about ordering of ideas, about headings, about graphics, about design, about evaluating the document, about thinking about who you're writing to and why you're writing to them. Really worth emphasizing.

Bob  So, as he says, you need to know what good looks like. But there's a second issue. The issue of cognitive outsourcing, the process of writing, is the process by which we organize our own thoughts, rather than subcontract that to technology. And they are not our thoughts, and we haven't acquired them because they're not things we've gone through the sweat and toil of acquisition.

Cinzia  Absolutely agree with you one hundred percent.

Christopher  We work out what we think by writing. There's research about that. It's the creative process of writing that helps our brain work out what it thinks. And if we abdicate that to the AI and we don't really think we just get something back from AI and we go, oh, that looks pretty good. And it sounds okay. Yeah. That'll do.

Bob  Yep, yep. What have been the biggest challenges in getting the game off the ground?

Christopher  Well, the easiest bit has been getting absolutely fabulous people to contribute. It's just been wonderful how many people have said yes. It's been really encouraging. The hardest bit, I think it's been coming up with the model that we think works. You know, it had to be something that we could sit in a meeting with the head of a large law firm, head of a health practice, head of a financial services organisation, head of a government department. And we can say there's a game set in an office with typical office characters who have communication problems. You know, when I say that just like that now, I think, why on earth did that take so long to come up with? It's obvious that that's probably a good idea, but the fact is, it did take a long time to come up. And two of our authors in Canada, Kate Sparks and Paula Chacos, they came up with that. And once they'd written a couple of scripts with these characters in it and we could see where they're going, we could see that that was working. We could see that this was a model that we thought would work. I think that was the hardest thing coming up with the model.

Bob  In game learnings, vision goes beyond just The Plain Game. Is there a future that you have in mind for other games?

Cinzia  Oh we do. We have a few games that we are considering and scoping at the moment. The interesting thing was, when we were at the London conference, a lot of people were very, very interested in using our platform for their own training programmes. But we are all plain language advocates and we are passionate about plain language. Of course, plain language was going to be our first game and we are translating it into Spanish and launching a Spanish game later this year, so that's our first priority.

Bob  Let's look ahead. What excites you most about the future of communication and learning?

Christopher  I think what excites me most about the future of communication is the increasing use of graphics. Moving away from just headings and paragraphs and words and sentences. I mean, I think that's happening. I think it's got a long way to go. When I used to run the training course years ago, there would be people who would write a long letter, which really should just have been a checklist. There were people who write a long letter that really should have been a flowchart. I used to point this out to them that it's a very basic thing. And I'm sort of the flip side of that, Bob, is I think lots of reports and brochures and things these days are over designed. I think there's too many photos or the captions to the photo don't tell you why the photo is relevant and interesting and useful, or there's too many icons and graphic devices all over. And I go, well, I'm not really sure what that's actually adding. They want lots of things that look exciting and interesting. And actually, to my mind at least, it just becomes a bit of a mess.

Cinzia  I was just going to say, the good news is that there is another part to the ISO plain language standard, which is part five, which is going to be on document design. And I encourage people to keep an eye out for that. Also, if they want to go along to the International Plain Language Federation's website, there is a document there, pattern library that people can download because the standard will be based on that. So encourage people to go and have a look at that and get some tips on how to design their documents better.

Bob  What advice would you give someone entering the plain language profession today.

Cinzia  I would, and I've said this before, the advice I would give them is if they're already skilled in plain language, my advice would be to get out there in the plain language community and volunteer. Without a doubt, that's where I have learned more than anywhere else from. So many people.

Christopher  Go to the conferences, volunteer to be on the committees. You meet the best people. You have the most interesting conversations, you get to know them, and you have this really interesting conversation that's actually often more interesting than some of the sessions at the conference, but it's informed by people who've been to several conferences and lots of presentations that are thinking something through. I agree completely.

Cinzia  And often there's one plain language person in an organization, it can be quite lonely. So in volunteering internationally or even at like the Standards Australia level or whatever country you might be in, it helps you find your people. It helps you build those cases for plain language that you can take back to your organization. And it just to me, it's been invaluable.

Christopher  Adding to that, the issues are the same. Everybody says this. Oh, you grapple with that too. They say, how do you deal with this? You say, oh, I don't know. This is what I do, but I don't know if it really works. So you have these really interesting conversations. It's in different languages, the issues people face in all the different languages. How do you get past the lawyers is always a question. How do you convince management that this is worth it? Because it clearly is, but management doesn't recognize that it is. So you're having these conversations, getting your energy back, getting informed with ideas. I would be on the training course and people would ask a question, and I would have an answer to the question just because of something that I heard at a conference, either in a formal session or sitting in a cage talking to someone at morning tea.

Bob  You've identified several pressure points where there's pushback from management or the legal team. If you could change one thing about how organizations communicate tomorrow, what would it be?

Christopher  I would say he's wearing much, much less about your purpose for writing and think much, much more about your readers purpose for reading. What is it that brings the reader to the document? You know that the document matters to the reader. It didn't matter. They wouldn't be reading it. That's as true as any thought ever been, I reckon.

Bob  But I ask you to expand on that from this perspective. You and I both do training with lawyers, and lawyers will sometimes take the position. And I guess it's not the only one, but it's just top of my head that I frankly don't care what this reader does or feels or thinks. There's a whole alternative agenda that is driving what I'm writing, how I'm writing it, and why. What do you say to that argument?

Christopher  So those lawyers are probably thinking that they're writing for the judge. So at the end of the day, the judge finds for their client. Fair enough too. But so few documents end up in front of judges, so few documents that lawyers write ever even get to court or even get into a dispute. In fact, these documents have one word. Other lives. An insurance policy is, for many people, a manual. It tells them what to do in a situation. People working in the insurance company. Should we pay this claim? How much should the premium be? Someone reading the insurance policy at home. Should we make a claim? Is there an exclusion which means it's not covered? And all those people matter so much more than the jugular. Except totally. Sometimes the judge matters enormously. My mother was a judge. Judges are important. But if you get it right for those people, you're much more likely to get it right for the judge as well. So I think people who run those sorts of arguments are mounting a false gold. They're kidding themselves. Sure, they've got to get it right for the judge, but if they get it right for all of the other readers of the document, it will also be right for the judge.

Cinzia  How can I top that? The work we did at enliven was all about the reader. So I absolutely agree with Christopher. It is about your audience. For me, I would just add one thing to not undervalue testing your documents with your reader. You learn a lot from doing that.

Christopher  It's also humiliating. They make suggestions about how much better the document could be, and you're supposed to be the expert. It's a healthy, humiliating, but it's humiliating.

Bob  Let's say an organization hears this and says, that's a great idea. Let's do some testing. What does that beast look like? How long does it take? What does it cost and what are the variables?

Cinzia  It doesn't have to cost much at all. If you're writing a document for young people, just find some young people, you know, your children's or nephews, friends or whatever. You know, you don't have to go through a formal process and interview them and ask them what they learned from that document. Could they find this information? How quickly could they find this information? You can do it really easily and really cheaply. We did it formerly because we wanted to engage with one hundred and fifty different cultural groups, and we paid them for their time. And we think that that's a valuable thing to do. Include it in your budgets. If you are a plain language practitioner, you are out there with an organization. Talk to them about testing the document because believe me, you get so much back. Your document is improved so much when you do test with your audience, but it is always about the audience, same as Christopher's. It's about the audience. Stop writing for yourself.

Bob  Some final quick fire questions. Favorite book?

Cinzia  My brilliant friend Max Beerbohm's.

Christopher  Zuleika Dobson. Pretty obscure but brilliant. Written in the late eighteen nineties.

Bob  A communications pet peeve icons.

Christopher  I am anti pet peeves. None of us should have a pet peeve. Pet peeves impede our judgment because we get uptight about the page. So I try to rise above the pet peeve and not have any ice.

Cinzia  Below I say I hate.

Bob  Yes, I like it when Christopher goes high and I go low.

Cinzia  We go low. Yeah, we're. We're happy to go.

Bob  Yeah. Coffee or tea while working.

Christopher  Coffee or tea while working. But one coffee early in the morning.

Bob  One thing people misunderstand about plain language usual.

Cinzia  It's that whole concept that plain language has done something.

Christopher  Now all. It's just about words and sentences. And as we've said, it's about so much more.

Bob  In defense of the people who argue about the dumbing down. The marketing department of the plain language world is not doing itself no favors by using the adjective plain.

Christopher  The plain language thing is a ridiculous name, but it's been around a long time. Yeah. And what do you replace it with? Clear communication. The radio sounds clear. The reader friendly writing. User friendly writing? Who knows? Yeah, but yeah, I agree. It's a silly name. It's been around long before my time.

Bob  Other than me, a person you'd love to have dinner with?

Cinzia  Yeah, I would have said you, Bobby.

Bob  Well, you're only human.

Christopher  But for me, it's, you know, my family, my grandchildren, your children, my wife, my parents, they're not around anymore. I'd like to have dinner with my parents again.

Cinzia  Yeah. For sure. Family.

Bob  If you weren't doing this work, what do you think you would be doing?

Cinzia  I dabble a little bit in some other work already. I'm a birth doula, so I help women give birth and understand the health system and understand the options available to them and have the birth that they would like.

Christopher  I think I'd be retired, Bob, exploring carpentry and gardening and cutting firewood and watching the seasons come and go and the waves rolling in and things like that.

Cinzia  With your slippers on, with your life.

Christopher  Not with my boots on.

Bob  If I could continue with the doula image. You have been incredible in your efforts to conceive and now deliver The Plain Game. But what you have done has been, I'll use a cliche, nothing short of amazing. Immense series of skills and effort and time, and this conversation has reminded me that I should be in awe of your respective CVS. You're both amazing.

Cinzia  ** **So thank you. Thank you.

Bob  Thank you for your time. Thank you for joining us on top of their game. It's been great speaking with you in this setting, though I suspect just quietly, we'll speak again.

Christopher  Really?

Cinzia  ** **Come on.

Bob  Thank you.

Christopher  Thank you Bob.

Bob  Clearly, it's been an exciting and very demanding journey so far for the In-Game Learning team, but it's been super gratifying to come out the other end with a training tool that breaks the mold of the business as usual model and which is fun. For more about Cinzia, Christopher and the Plain Game, see our show notes. Top of their game has been brought to you by In-Game Learning, the most fun you'll ever learn. And by its launch product — we've heard a bit about that — The Plain Game. Because plain language training helps you get to the top of your game. Visit ingamelearning.com and see just how much fun online plain language training can be. Today's episode has been produced and edited by Daniel Vessel. If you enjoyed today's episode, share it with a colleague or leave us a review. Or both. I'm Bob Milstein, and until next time. Go forth and clarify.