Conversation 101 for Experts, or the Multi-Stage Consent-Based Approach to Messaging
Because most people aren't reporters paid to be interested in your work.
Instead of talking at people about your work, how should you the researcher discover what aspect or angle or consequence of your work people who aren’t researchers might find interesting and useful? Because interesting and useful isn’t just a prerequisite for translating what you know into impactful information. It’s just standard issue for having a non-uncomfortable conversation.
Jon Fisher, senior conservation science officer at The Pew Charitable Trusts—who attended the science communications workshops with the speed-dating message box exercise I wrote about on Tuesday—sent the following reply to my piece that reveals how foundational conversation must be to your approach if you want to be an effective public expert:
This was interesting to read, b/c I actually found that exercise so helpful. One reason why is that if you time fun/healthy conversations like at a party, 2 minutes is an eternity. 30 seconds is a reasonable length, but is long as hell for an opener. So I actually went further and had a multi-stage consent-based approach to “what do you do” that worked in social situations as well as at work. So I had my 1-2 sentence version (15 seconds I think), if they said “oh that’s interesting” or “what does mean” I had the longer 30 second version. And then if they were still interested I had the 2 min version to flesh it out and make it more compelling. But bowling into 2 minutes w/o the active consent of the listener that the general topic is of interest feels like an unsolicited sales pitch. And those work sometimes, but more often than not they send the signal “I don’t value your time or care what you think, I just want you to do something”
So three cheers for interesting and useful! But I am suspicious you will know what your audience finds interesting and useful if your opening salvo is 2 minutes or longer, vs. dropping nuggets and asking for a reaction to help you shape what you say to match their revealed interests / needs.
Jon took what the exercise gave him and—because IRL isn’t usually a media interview where you can touch on all sides of a message box—he reversed its chronology to fit the dynamics of real life encounters.
The key phrase (which I really like) is “a multi-stage consent-based approach.” Your interlocutors’ questions (e.g., “Tell me more about that—because I’ve always heard x about y”) signal their consent at each stage for you to go deeper; those questions also clue you in to what they’ll find interesting and useful and why (which guides you in shaping how you talk about what comes next).
If “a multi-stage consent-based approach” seems artificial — well, what is a good conversation, if not two or more people responding sensitively to questions and cues from each other? As Jon said, plowing ahead without the active consent of the listener “feels like an unsolicited sales pitch.” The message box teaches you to respond to people (media) who are being paid to ask you questions. But your job as a public expert is also to elicit questions and interest, not just respond and pivot.
Not every genre public that experts use (the keynote, for instance) is an actual conversation. But increasingly, what separates public experts from science communicators is the public experts’ commitment and availability to conversation—in social, in the comments, in Q&As and AMAs, on live streams, on podcasts. It’s what made—despite his very defensible reasons for doing so—Peter Hotez’s refusal to come on to Joe Rogan’s podcast and debate RFK Jr. so jarring for many. (It’s interesting that Hotez is pulling his public engagement back into what I would call non-conversational vehicles such as books and written opinion pieces, as well as media and podcast interviews. Science communicators still cling to their messaging—to what they want us to know—and the opportunities that allow them to unfurl it.)
We expect commitment to conversation now from public experts—because if we don’t know you, conversation is the first step to our trusting you. And because in the wake of the public health communications missteps of COVID, many have come to see science communication as soft aggression masked as education or urgent truth.