Updated
A message grid is three columns of prepared points with one word headings. A three part answer is a short response to the question followed by up to three points pulled from that grid. Together they mean every answer you give is complete, on message, and hard to misquote.
The problem the grid solves
Most spokespeople walk into an interview holding a list. Twelve points, maybe twenty five, printed out and read in the car. Under pressure, a list does not work. You cannot scan twenty five items while someone is asking you a question you did not expect, so people default to whatever they happen to remember, which is usually whatever they read last.
The grid replaces the list with something you can hold in your head.
Seven minutes, a sheet of paper, three columns
Set a timer for seven minutes and write out everything you wish you could say in this interview. Do not organize it. Do not judge it. Just empty your head onto the page.
Then take that page, turn it sideways, and draw a grid. Sort everything you wrote into three columns, and give each column a one word heading.
The headings can be anything you like. They only have to work for you, because their only job is to let you mentally open that column mid answer and pull something out. If you can remember three words, you have a road map for every answer in the interview.
Three is not a style preference. It is roughly what a person can hold while being asked hard questions in real time. Anything that will not fit into three groups is usually detail, not message.
One column should be a call to action
The third column is where the magic happens, and it is the one almost everybody leaves out.
If the goal of the interview is to create something, you have to say what you want people to do. Not vaguely. Specifically. Ask yourself this one question. Go take one action today. Try this one thing. Those are all calls to action, and each one gives a listener somewhere to put the energy your interview just created.
Write several versions so you are not repeating the same sentence in every answer. And note that a good call to action does not have to point at you. Ask people to do the useful thing, and the ones who act tend to find their way back to you anyway.
The answer system
Here is how any question gets handled. You wrap it up with a short answer. Once you have done that, you have complete control.
This is the part people miss: the short answer is what stops you from sounding evasive. You are not dodging. You dealt with the question. Now the floor is yours, and you can move to something from one of your three message categories.
Do it well and you get a three part answer every time: the short answer, then a point, then another point.
When every answer stands on its own, it helps you when you are being quoted, and it helps you when someone tunes into a live program and only hears one answer.
Two destinations, and only one of them is good
If the interview were a road, there are two places to go. There is the land of everything you know, which is enormous and where nothing lands. And there is message point island, where there are only three trees, exactly like the three categories in your grid.
Anything that is not in one of those three categories is literally off message. That is a test you can run in half a second while you are talking.
What about the basic questions?
Every spokesperson knows a handful of questions are coming. How did this start. How many people does it affect. What is the timeline. Those feel like throwaway questions, and most people answer them as throwaways.
Do not. Take the answers to those basic questions and put them in the grid. Once the predictable questions live inside your three columns, they stop being filler and start delivering message. Then pepper them with sound bites so they are worth quoting.
The one that saves you
Anything that comes out of your mouth is something you can be quoted on, and that cuts both ways. So do not repeat the negative.
If a reporter says, isn't it true that your company isn't cutting edge, the trap is answering with a lot of people might think we're not cutting edge. That sentence now exists in your voice. Go with the second half instead: here is what our company is all about. Same question, none of their language. There is a full breakdown of that habit here.
Where to go from here
The grid takes seven minutes to build and it is the single highest return thing you can do before an interview. If you want it built with your team against the questions they are actually being asked, get a quick quote. For the shorter version of the whole system, read your media training refresher in five minutes.