The Essential Public Expert Formula
Challenge audience faces ✕ expertise-driven POV ✕ application designed for use. Stir; pour over audience; enjoy the impact.
What do Peter Hotez, Fenaba Addo, Jean Twenge and Ray Rast have in common?
They're all outstanding researchers who are also outstanding public experts. That's in large part because, despite their vast differences in tone, audiences, expertise and methods of delivering that expertise publicly, none of them simply communicates their research and leaves it at that.
Instead, they go beyond research communications with three elements essential to all effective public experts:
They address a specific audience or specific audience challenge in mind;
They address that challenge or question with an expert's POV—rooted in the research but also in their own expert reading of the challenge's context (political, social, economic, cultural);
That application of POV to challenge or question is always designed to be of use to the audience—an insight, reframing or solution that improves or at least enriches the audience's lives and work.
For non-researchers, these elements and their combination into content of high value to an audience might seem obvious. But incorporating these three elements into their public work is routinely the hardest step for researchers to learn and habituate.
Indeed, what sets effective public experts from the crowd is how relentlessly their public work is driven by this formula (Audience ✕ Challenge or Question ✕ Expert POV ✕ Application for Use).
Great public experts don't wait to be presented with the challenge or asked the question. They already know the audience well enough to anticipate the questions that need asking—or they're plugged into the audience enough to hear those questions bubble up, before they reach a crescendo, so they can bring them into consciousness.
Last week I described four public expert archetypes—four distinct pathways (The Translator, The Explainer, The Advisor and The Advocate) that researchers who take their expertise public follow time and again.
The Explainer, The Advisor and The Advocate are very different pathways—again, in tone, content frequency, intended change in the audience and dozens of other ways. (Look here next week for the first of a series of in-depth descriptions of each of these archetypes. I'll also be rolling out a quick archetype assessment before the middle of the year, so any researcher can discover which archetype fits them best—and where they should then go next with their public work.)
But The Explainer, The Advisor and The Advocate all are rooted in what I'll call the Essential Public Expert Formula. And that rooting makes them fundamentally different from The Translator, the classic science/research communicator role, which too often fails to speak to specific audiences, specific challenges or questions, and in ways that are easily useful.
Which brings me to the first law of public experts. Advocate, Advisor, Explainer—regardless of which archetype you are, your first job as one of these public experts will be to move beyond Translation to providing expertise specifically designed to help. It's hard to do. But it's even harder to fake.