The biggest mistake a scientist can make when communicating their innovation is to use their…
Scientists learn to communicate precisely and sceptically about their work.
Scientists learn to communicate precisely and sceptically about their work.
But this is ineffective to build momentum behind the work with the people that might (or might not) support it.
It leaves the listener with doubt and confusion
The scientific method presents a hypothesis and tests it through experimentation, looking for ways that the hypothesis could be wrong. Peer reviewed papers challenge it further, bringing the experience of a global community to the task of challenging the idea.
To an entrepreneur, this process can appear brutal. But it is the proven way to discover new knowledge and invent the world around us.
When using the same mode to build momentum around an idea, the following challenges unfold.
• It is too complicated, no one understands the words being used.
• It is often verbose and hard to follow. Dare I say, boring.
• It captures all the doubt that needs to yet be investigated.
• It resists describing the future to stay focused on what can be proven today
Communicating the value of something is a different mode to communicating evidence to peers
The other reason to communicate our science is to build momentum behind it so that others support it. These people probably are not scientists and are very unlikely to be from the same field if they are.
They are people that administrate grants, investors, administrators in a university, companies that may want to fund and adopt the work, ministers, the general public who want the science to exist in their world.
They need to be left with the big idea and an answer to the question:
“So what?”
For an idea to be infectious, other people need to spread it
The simplest way I think about this is to ask myself how will this idea reach as many people as possible?
The answer to this is not to book appointments with each person on earth and spend time walking them through my idea.
I think about how I can capture the idea and why it is valuable into the simplest container so that others can spread it for me.
This probably means ‘dumbing down the idea’, making a claim about what might happen in the future if we are right and designing in some emotional aspect to make people want to spread it.
It will go against the grain for most scientists at first.
It will feel like hype.
But we are not in the lab right now. We are on the stage of the world, beginning a movement.
This post was created with Typeshare