To Become a Public Expert, You Need an Ecosystem
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 they have an ecosystem that nurtures and demands it.
An Amazing Story That Kept Happening Again and Again
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.
RELATED
The UCLA climate scientist on the two types of hate mail he gets, how he got an academic position with science communications built into it and why your scientific domain is larger than you think.
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.
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.
RELATED
Why Does So Much Research Organization Content Suck?
The research organization as bad date (and one fix to the problem)
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 Drove 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 skills—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.
How to Start Building Your Own Public Expertise Ecosystem
Now, that Science Council ecosystem—the dynamics in that room—were unique.
But when I started to look at the experts my clients wanted to be like—especially ones 45 and under—I started to see that many had created something like that room for themselves, in public. They’d jerry-rigged social media and personal publishing platforms to create their own feedback structures—their own ecosystems—to help them build their ideas and public expertise.
Experts like Tressie McMillian Cottom, Natalia Petrzela, Ethan Mollick, Kareem Carr, Brad DeLong and Emily Oster. These are all people I would comfortably label as public experts. When we look at their public scholarship or public activities as experts, we see a mix of platforms that emphasize the interactive.
Each of them has taken an interactive platform or platforms—Twitter, Substack, TikTok, Slack —and turned it into the kind of ecosystem I’m talking about. They test ideas, they test POVs, they get feedback, they get challenged, they get pulled into dialogue with other experts and non-experts. And it isn’t a coincidence that experts with these ecosystems are some of the most prolific producers of thought leadership as well.
What are these experts doing? I call it working in semi-public. Others call it working with the garage door open.
Because we have such a robust set of interactive platforms, social (Twitter, TikTok) and publishing (Substack), working in semi-public is now becoming the dominant way public experts get feedback on their ideas, solutions and content for non-experts. This is the core of the public expert ecosystem.
What’s a semi-public?
It’s the small public community that has gathered around that single platform where the researcher is articulating their ideas and opinions.
Semi-public is a community with you—the researcher—at the center.
The community gives you feedback. It deepens your thinking and the utility of your applied expertise.
It gives you ambassadors—disseminators—for those ideas and applied expertise.
And it gives you a sense of responsibility to keep sharing and developing your insights – to keep the group going.
It's the best machine I know of for creating and accelerating all the elements of effective thought leadership and personal branding, including:
strong points-of-view;
more frequent content;
a “totem”—the intellectual and emotional hook that will interest and motivate other people to consider adopting the idea,” like “poverty by America”;
Which role are they occupying in public at any given moment? (researcher talking to the public, talking to researchers, member of public talking to researchers or the public).
It forces you to shift your thought leadership model away from being an infrequent publisher -- what do I have to say to the community—to a constant conversant—what can the community and I talk about together? And, eventually, create together?
Why else is this model important?
In a Low-Trust Society, We Need Public Experts
Marc Andreessen, famous venture capitalist, told Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler last year that a friend “in the scientific research world” told him 90% of research is bad to begin with.
In the interview, When Kessler said “studies show” are the two most dangerous words in the English language, Andreessen sees and raises him: “The corollary is ‘experts say,’” he replied.
We live in a low-trust society. Truth is crowd-sourced. Andreessen believes instead in Sturgeon’s law. Named after the 20th century science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who was apparently rather touchy about sci-fi’s mediocre reputation among the masses. Of course 90% of sci fi is crap, said Sturgeon—because “90% of everything is crap.” (That’s the law.)
In his essay “The First Thing a Technical Speaker Needs,” software engineer Kent Beck drops this quiet bombshell of a line: As a presenter, it's more important to be trustworthy than an expert.
Which means that there is a quality of trustworthiness beyond expertise that experts in public should be reaching for.
Most experts—even those who know better—bristle at this formulation. Isn’t being an expert already the highest form of trustworthiness?
My response: The future of expertise is not more expertise done more expertly, if you will. By piling more and more markers of expertise upon it.
Here’s a very crude 2x2 that tries to map where public experts fit into the low-trust society we live in today.
On the x-axis, research credibility – how respected are you as a researcher, how respected is your research. On the y-axis, trustworthiness – a combination of your ability to translate your expertise, how much the audience cares about what you’re talking about, and your credibility with the community you’re in conversation with.
What I’m trying to illustrate here is what Beck is getting at: In a low-trust society, trustworthiness isn’t automatically conferred on research credibility. It’s a separate quality that you have to cultivate along at least three fronts. Experts only have high research credibility but low trustworthiness in this new definition. Expert communicators can have high trustworthiness but have no research credibility. Public experts have both. That's why they're special.
The future of expertise is about increasing both your research credibility and your trustworthiness. In a low-trust society, expertise will not penetrate easily without trustworthiness. Just expertise leaves you in the expert quadrant.
If you want your work to matter to non-specialists, you generally don't need more expertise. You need to become a public expert.
And Science Council clued me in—and my practice has continued to teach me—that creating public experts isn't primarily a problem of training. Although training is very helpful.
It's a problem of incentives and systems and momentum. Of ecosystem.
Without an Ecosystem, There’s No Public Expert
True story: A well-known, must-read climate journalist quit their job last year to join an NGO and start a newsletter—and the newsletter is boring.
“Their stuff used to be so good,” a colleague said to me. “Now it’s dull. Terrible. What am I missing?”
RELATED
Flywheels, Forcing Functions & Painted Pictures
How experts make doing content for the public cost them less.
It’s what the journalist is missing. Their missing their ecosystem.
Behind most journalists these days are editors, the competition, and probably a metrics-first culture. The ecosystem of journalism drives journalists to pursue the next scoop, and the next and the next. To be maximally interesting.
NGOs have an ecosystem, too—one very different from journalism. Competitive content has an edge, and edges are sharp. Eventually those edges cut someone that someone inside the NGO doesn’t want cut. Better to dull the edge in the first place. To be maximally collegial.
Here’s the lesson: For non-profits and research-driven organizations (and researchers) who want to do great content—great content needs more than just great ideas and hooks. It needs an ecosystem that nurtures and demands it.
Within organizations, great content needs explicit metrics, incentives, minimum resource investments that the organization endorses and defends, a culture in which research leaders collaborate and compete to produce it, and leadership that lionizes and promotes it.
For academic researchers working “alone,” all of the above, plus alternative career paths that prioritizes public engagement.
Without the public expert’s ecosystem, there is no public expert.
Because of my Science Council experience–and my subsequent work developing researchers into public experts—I now know that far more than just a tiny percentage of researchers can be competent public experts. And that “lack of aptitude” for communications and “lack of time” for becoming a public expert are often nothing more than “lack of incentive” and “lack of support” and “lack of ecosystem”
It might be hard to believe, especially for conventional research communicators.
But I know I couldn’t believe what I saw happen twice a year at every Science Council, either. +