The room before the room

As Head of Relations for the LSE Grimshaw Club for International Relations, my job was easy to describe and harder to do: get students into the rooms where international relations actually happens. Over the year that meant more than fifteen embassy visits and conversations with people whose work most of us had only read about.

I expected to learn about foreign policy, and I did, a little. Mostly I learned about the room before the room.

The unglamorous half

Every visit began weeks earlier, with an email that had to earn a reply. Embassies get far more requests than they could ever accept, and a polite general interest in “international affairs” isn’t a reason to say yes. The requests that worked were specific. Who is coming. Why this mission, and not another. What the students already know, and what they hope to ask.

Then came the bits nobody photographs. Names sent ahead, in the right format, by the right date. Timings agreed and agreed again. A briefing for the group, so that an hour of someone’s time was not spent on questions a search engine could answer.

You won’t find any of that in a textbook chapter on diplomacy. In practice, though, it was the whole job: working out what the other side needs before you ask for what you want.

What I noticed in the room

The conversations I remember best were the ones that turned into exchanges. The questions went both ways, and the answers were more careful, and more honest, than anything I’d read in a briefing paper.

I also noticed how much a country says through hospitality. The welcome at the door, the tea, the books left out on a side table. Above all, the time someone was willing to give a group of students who could offer them nothing back.

Soft power is a slightly cold phrase for something that is, close up, mostly courtesy.

Why it still matters to me

Much of my work now is in international investment and stakeholder engagement, with Invest Telangana. The skills are almost exactly the same. A good investor conversation, like a good embassy visit, is mostly decided before it starts. A few habits from those student years have stuck:

1. Be specific. A clear request is a courtesy. It shows you’ve done your thinking, so the other side doesn’t have to do it for you.
2. Prepare the people, not just the agenda. The briefing for the students mattered as much as the letter to the embassy.
3. Follow up properly. A note that remembers something particular from the conversation gets kept. A generic one is forgotten by lunch.

We tend to picture diplomacy as the handshake and the photograph. Most of it is the email before and the note after. The room matters. The room before the room matters more.

K.