How Should Scientists 'Engage With the Public'?

Hint: Turn up the thermostat.

Credit: Alf Altendorf/Flickr through Creative Commons license

You, Scientist, and you, Researcher, might (like many of your colleagues) have trouble “engaging with the public,” that clinical phrase that sounds more like a war maneuver than a conversation.

Here is where most communications people will tell you to improve your communications skills, through training. But when I work with a client who has trouble “engaging with the public,” I almost always find something more fundamental: They misunderstand what drives “engagement” in the first place.

Too many scientists and researchers think public engagement is like science and research—and it isn’t. It isn’t about the weight of your evidence or the logic of your case.

And public engagement isn’t like a TED talk, either. It isn’t about charisma, and it isn’t about how good a story you can tell. It isn’t even about the moral force of your argument.

No. Engagement with the public is 90% about the temperature of the room.

‘The Room is Always Cold on X’

Is the room warm toward you even before you engage with it? Does the room—figuratively or virtually—know you? Do they trust you—or do you at least code as trustworthy to them? (Hint: Trustworthy isn’t necessarily “expert.”) Has someone the room knows and trusts at least vouched for you?

If the room isn’t warm before you walk in, you’re walking into an icebox. And you face a difficult slog just to get the temperature of the room up to room temperature.

Understanding this usually takes a while—but when it hits you, it tends to stick. For instance: David Heinemeier Hansson (known colloquially as DHH), co-owner of the software firm 37Signals, chronic purveyor of controversial positions and not the cuddliest teddy bear in the Internet playpen, uses his latest newsletter to thank the hosts of a popular software engineering stream on which he was a guest, crediting them for his warm reception from the audience, for “signalling to their audience that who they were about to hear [from] would be worth listening to with an open mind…”

Because, as DHH went on to note, cold rooms are hostile rooms, “and the room is always cold on X or in a one-off blog post”:

I've been making many of my main arguments for years. Some for decades, even. And I know that many in that stream had probably heard some of them before, and dismissed them out of hand, because we hadn't established a rapport that would warrant an open mind. 

That's where writing just can't compete with a podcast or a stream. Putting a face, a voice, and a vibe to the argument absolutely changes its tone, and in turn, the emotions it evokes. And that's what most people go off on. Those emotions.

I sometimes do struggle with that. Thinking that the strength of an argument should be gauged purely by its logic or at least its rhetoric. But I've really come to appreciate the value of set and setting. Of a warm introduction. Of establishing a rapport.

DHH isn’t a researcher, but you can see the application. Of course, most communications people  will take this concept of the warm room and say, of course! make more friends and build a bigger network and do more press outreach! so you can have warm introductions in already warm and successful rooms like DHH had!

I have nothing against any of that. God speed. It’s not going to hurt, unless you’re an introvert.

But I want you, the public expert, to do the following first, do something more reliable and organic and durable and yours:

I want you to create the room that is always warm toward you.

Because, in the post-media age, you the public expert can’t just rely on other people’s rooms. You can’t rely on the sporadic invitations of media and colleagues. You have too much to say about too much and with too much urgency to wait to be picked.

And you have a community waiting to gather around that expertise and intelligence. They just don’t know it yet.

Create a Warm Room of Your Own

You create your warm room on a platform that is yours, that can attract the community, where they can subscribe to everything you publish and post and share it with others, where your audience can converse with you and teach you as much as you teach them, where you can revise your positions and that’s an accepted part of the culture, where you can probe where the bleeding edge because no one here is a stranger, and where your influence grows fungally, without you even knowing it.

Shawn Willsey has YouTube.  Natalia Petrzela has PastPresent. Jeff Selingo has LinkedIn. Kizzmekia Corbett has X.

It’s great and gratifying to get a warm introduction to someone else’s room—it can build your audience, it’s important validation, it’s just a nice human experience.

But to grow your impact consistently, every public expert today should have that on tap, all the time. Should have a homebase, a city-state, a warm room of their own.