Lines to Take (and ABC)
Consolidate messages into two or three core lines, map every awkward question back to one of them, and practise the redirect until it feels natural.
When you're facing a media team, an interview panel, or a difficult conversation at home, the challenge is the same: you have a message, and the other person has questions that pull you away from it. Lines to Take gives you a structure for staying on message without sounding evasive. ABC gives you the technique for redirecting hostile questions back to your lines.
The combination is simple enough to learn in half an hour and robust enough to use under real pressure — which is itself a clue to why it works.
Setup
Pick a topic with both good and bad aspects. A real situation works best — something you might actually have to explain or defend — but an invented scenario is fine for practice.
Build your lines (15 mins):
- List every positive thing you can say about the topic.
- List every negative — the awkward questions, the weak points, the things you'd rather not be asked.
- Consolidate the positives into two or three core messages. These are your lines to take. Each should be a short, memorable sentence that captures something genuinely true.
- Map every negative to a line. For each awkward question, identify which line to take you'd pivot towards.
Practise the redirect (15–30 mins):
Work in pairs. One person asks hostile questions drawn from the negatives list. The other responds using ABC:
- Acknowledge — respond to the question just enough that the questioner feels heard. This buys you a moment to find your bridge. ("That's an important concern, and...")
- Bridge — move from the question to your line. The bridge is the pivot: a phrase that connects the question's territory to yours. ("...what I think is really at stake here is...")
- Communicate — deliver your line to take, supported by evidence from your positives list.
Swap roles. Then try it with questions you didn't prepare for — the test is whether you can bridge to a line under surprise.
If working solo, write out ABC responses to each negative. Read them aloud. Notice which bridges feel forced and rework them.
Questions
- Why is it easier to remember three lines than twelve separate talking points? What happens to retrieval under pressure when you have too many messages competing?
- When someone uses ABC on you, do you notice the bridge? What makes some bridges invisible and others obvious?
- Why does Acknowledge work? What expectation does it satisfy in the questioner's mind, and what happens if you skip it?
- When does this technique fail — when does the listener's brain catch the redirect and push back?
Guidance
The reason two or three lines work better than a dozen talking points is chunking. Under pressure — time limits, hostile questioners, cameras — retrieval from memory competes for the same limited capacity as everything else you're tracking. Twelve scattered points exceed working memory's reach. Three coherent chunks don't. Mapping the negatives to the same three chunks means the awkward question itself becomes a retrieval cue for your prepared response, rather than a disruption that sends you searching.
Guidance
ABC works on the listener because of how the prediction engine processes conversation. When someone asks a question, their brain opens a prediction — a slot shaped like "the answer." Acknowledge fills just enough of that slot that the prediction engine registers "they're responding to my question" and relaxes its monitoring. Bridge redirects before the mismatch is detected. Communicate fills the slot with your message, landing in the space the listener's brain had already opened for "the answer." The whole sequence exploits the prediction engine's preference for pattern completion over pattern verification.
Guidance
The redirect succeeds because challenging it is effortful. The listener's lazy controller would need to interrupt, rewind, and say "wait — that didn't actually answer my question." That requires conflict detection, inhibition of the current conversational flow, and re-assertion of the original question. Most of the time, the lazy controller calculates that this isn't worth the cost — especially in public settings where challenging the speaker also has social cost. The technique fails when the listener's lazy controller is already engaged (a prepared journalist, a sceptical panel member) or when the bridge is so clumsy that the prediction-error spike is large enough to force engagement.
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Guidance
Brains link features into meaningful chunks; attention binds chunks into goal‑directed episodes---fast to use, hard to see past.
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The reason two or three lines work better than a dozen talking points is chunking. Under pressure — time limits, hostile questioners, cameras — retrieval from memory competes for the same limited capacity as everything else you're tracking. Twelve scattered points exceed working memory's reach. Three coherent chunks don't. Mapping the negatives to the same three chunks means the awkward question itself becomes a retrieval cue for your prepared response, rather than a disruption that sends you searching.
02.
Guidance
The brain predicts what should happen next---in the world and in the body. When predictions fail, you feel something, attention pivots, and behaviour updates.
+
ABC works on the listener because of how the prediction engine processes conversation. When someone asks a question, their brain opens a prediction — a slot shaped like "the answer." Acknowledge fills just enough of that slot that the prediction engine registers "they're responding to my question" and relaxes its monitoring. Bridge redirects before the mismatch is detected. Communicate fills the slot with your message, landing in the space the listener's brain had already opened for "the answer." The whole sequence exploits the prediction engine's preference for pattern completion over pattern verification.
03.
Guidance
+
The redirect succeeds because challenging it is effortful. The listener's lazy controller would need to interrupt, rewind, and say "wait — that didn't actually answer my question." That requires conflict detection, inhibition of the current conversational flow, and re-assertion of the original question. Most of the time, the lazy controller calculates that this isn't worth the cost — especially in public settings where challenging the speaker also has social cost. The technique fails when the listener's lazy controller is already engaged (a prepared journalist, a sceptical panel member) or when the bridge is so clumsy that the prediction-error spike is large enough to force engagement.