The TALK framework model

The TALK framework teaches influencing in conflict the way that it was practiced in Ancient Egypt and Rome, in the Middle Ages, during the first two World Wars, during the First Cold War, and how it is practiced in reality in today’s Second Cold War, the amorphous online, cultural war of ideas fought between as well as within the West and Russia, China and their allies. This entails understanding our target at depth, identifying something that we can use in their culture or attitudes in order to move towards our objective, creating a message that we think will work and deploying it, then reviewing how it worked or how it didn’t, adjusting and starting again. 

We also need to use the TALK model to red-team and stress test our own cultures – what levers are Russia and China pulling on as we speak?

The twelve factors detailed in the tree image below are factors that keep cropping up in historic and current influence operations. We need to be continually mindful of these factors as we collect information on a culture, be they group norms or historical triumphs, gender roles or cravings for status. 

Click on each factor in the tree below for an introduction to the idea it encapsulates.