How Some Scientists Became Great Public Speakers in 24 Hours

To make more researchers better public experts, make the incentives worth the trouble.

Daniel Friedman, “Self in the Sea”/CC BY-NC 2.0

Everyone knows that most researchers are bad at communications — especially research communicators, who tell us this all the time. And by “this,” what everyone means is that most researchers are not naturally good at communications and need tons of training and encouragement to short-rope them into even small improvements.

But what if everyone is wrong? By which I mean: Most researchers — even the ones we evaluate as bad at communications — can be really good at communications if the stakes for being good are high enough and clear enough. Which those stakes are not in many research settings today.

Years ago I was director of the science communications shop at The Nature Conservancy (TNC), one of the largest non-profit environmental organizations in the United States. To be one of the largest non-profits at anything means you have to raise lots of money all the time — the kind of money that would make most political campaigns look like neighborhood lemonade stands. And because some very wealthy donors to TNC loved science (or, at least, talking with scientists) at the time, the TNC science unit was on the organization’s fundraising front lines. One of our big donor cultivation events happened twice a year — a day-long series of talks given by a handful of scientists for the TNC board of directors as well as its executive team. The event was called Science Council, and I dreaded it.

It was my job to get those scientists ready to deliver great, accessible, memorable talks about some aspect of their work and challenges. I learned quickly that most scientists hate preparing for talks. For many, it’s a badge of honor to prep as little as possible for any talk. True to form, most of the scientists ignored my offers to go over their talks with them in the weeks leading up to Science Council.

Knowing this would happen, my supervisor and I would force them to fly in a day before the event to deliver a practice version of their talk, at which I could finally give them feedback and start to worry about just how bad the talks were. Typically, one (or none) would be in decent shape. Others were bad, but I could see a path to improvement — if we’d had a week and several machetes. The rest seemed hopeless.

Never Bring a Science Talk to Science Council

Jargon, the primary target of so many critics of scientist-communicators, was the least of the problems we faced. And, in a way, the scientists’ lack of preparation wasn’t the biggest problem, either. The biggest problem was that the scientists had come to the event with science talks — like the ones they gave all the time to their colleagues. And, with 24 hours to go, they were learning belatedly that a science talk was precisely the wrong kind of talk for Science Council.

The donors weren’t scientists — they were generalists (some smart, some off the deep end) who wanted to learn things and be convinced and entertained and humored. That meant we needed narrative talks — but a science talk has little sense of narrative, much less drama. We also needed talks that connected with their audience — but a science talk focuses on what researchers care about, not what matters to sympathetic generalists. And we needed talks with clear, commanding visuals, not 15 graphics and notes per slide.

After each of the scientists finished their practice run, I would often recommend a couple of huge structural changes for them to make to their talks along with dozens of little tweaks to their slides. As I ran through the changes, I would see the same look (disbelief shading into horror) spread across each of their faces. They were only now coming to grips with whom they’d be talking with (non-scientists with power over their futures) and what was at stake (in many cases, their future funding). And now they had to do something overnight — create a compelling talk for non-scientists — that they had never been trained to do and that their jobs might depend on. My job, too. After the last practice run I would go straight to the hotel bar and drink Manhattan after Manhattan, convinced that this Science Council was, at last, the Science Council that would get me fired.

But I was always wrong. I never got fired, because the talks always turned out great.

We’d begin at noon the next day and the first scientist would get up and crush it. And then the next one would crush it, and the next one, and the one after that. Almost everyone who was so bad the day before was today at least really good and often great. It was gratifying (because everyone had taken my advice) and also amazing, because it wasn’t just that they had taken my advice. They had often transformed their deliveries, their stories, their very modes of communication in ways we hadn’t discussed and I would have never thought possible based on their shambolic dry runs the previous day. After each Science Council I would get a lot of credit for what had happened. But it was the scientists who — somehow — had made imaginably huge shifts. They’d done the hard work of moving from expert to public expert, overnight — work that often takes years to pull off.

What Drives Such Miraculous, Mysterious Transformations?

When I’ve told this story to colleagues and clients, I’ve always focused on these miraculous overnight transformations — for me, akin to blind people suddenly gaining sight. That’s because such transformations go against everything research communicators know and believe about how challenging training scientists to communicate with non-scientists can be. Science Council proved the opposite, I’ve argued: Many more scientists than we thought are really able to make rapid gains in communications facility — if you give them the right incentives, the right advice, and also put the right amount of pressure on them.

I also know the opposite is true: That if you don’t create an ecosystem that incentivizes — and, yes, pushes — the importance of being a public expert, the only public experts you’ll have in your organization or division will be there by accident.

Because, with very few exceptions, all of the scientists who presented at Science Council turned right around after their Science Council experiences and forgot about being public experts and went back to being just experts. The point of Science Council for them was to secure or attract funding and go back to work. The 24-hour breakthrough they’d made to public expert was necessary to the mission — and discardable once the mission was completed. They had no incentive to build on that breakthrough after the event (and, in fact, some confidence going forward that they could pull off another miracle transformation to public expert whenever they needed to.) If they failed to grow as public experts, no adverse outcome would befall them. And the organization had no real — read, “material, donor-driven” — incentive to support those scientists should they wanted to have developed their public expert muscles. With Science Council, we created an instant ecosystem to rapidly grow public expertise — and then shut it down as soon as the meeting was over.

What if everyone is totally wrong in thinking that only a tiny percentage of researchers could be competent public experts? What if “lack of aptitude” for communications and “lack of time” for becoming a public expert were nothing more than “lack of incentive” and “lack of support” and “lack of ecosystem”?

I’m not sure I believe those hypotheticals 100%. But I know I couldn’t believe what I saw happen twice a year at every Science Council, either.