“No matter what job you have in life, your success will be determined 5 percent by your academic credentials, 15 percent by your professional experiences and 80 percent by your communication skills” – Stephen Wang
Unless one were to be living under the rock, it would have been very hard to have missed hearing from Dr. Anthony Fauci – director of the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Disease, who has become the lead spokesperson of the US Coronavirus task force.
Apart from the mammoth task of finding the solution for the current pandemic, scientists across also face another challenge –
‘How to Make Complex Ideas Easy to Understand for Everyone’?
Communicating right, especially expert information is a highly relevant skill across all jobs. More so in technology. I have seen data scientists face a ‘ok, well… so what‘ quite often.
According to Dr. Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, his “enduring gift to society” is his ability to make complicated information easy for everyone to understand, from fourth graders to virologists. [1]
What Fauci is doing is taking science communication to a whole new level, experts say. [5]
Here are 7 communication lessons we could all learn from him on how to present complex information
Lesson 1: Translate scientific jargon
Follow up scientific knowledge with what it implies to the audience
Example – According to Fauci, the international study shows that patients on remdesivir have a ‘faster time to recovery’ than those on a placebo.
What does that mean? “It means the ability to be discharged [from a hospital],” according to Fauci. [1]
Lesson 2 : Read the room
Get to know the audience – who are they and what is important to them. Period. It is more about the audience than the presenter.
Lesson 3: Choose the ‘one thing’ you want to leave them with
I have been here. When you have done multiple things and want to ensure you show everything you end up showing nothing at all. Do not have a ‘spaghetti bowl’ of information.
Ask the question – ‘If the audience will remember one thing from the discussion what is that’
Lesson 4 : Establish Credibility
“There is no question Dr. Fauci knows A.LOT. But what makes him even more credible is that he also admits the things he does NOT know.” [4]
Lesson 5: Emphasize the big picture
I have learnt this the hard way. We tend to set the context before getting to the conclusion. People want to understand the headline before getting into the details. An effective science communicator cuts through the clutter to extract a short summary of the research.
Faucci summarized the study by saying, “It proves that a drug can block this virus.” [1]
Lesson 6 : Put numbers into perspective
There have been a lot of times when data scientists could talk the model performance or the AUC score. What the numbers mean to the business is what is relevant though.
According to the study’s preliminary results, patients who received remdesivir had a 31% faster time to recovery. Fauci acknowledged that, to the average person, 31% doesn’t seem “like a knockout.” But it is significant, he emphasized. [1]
Lesson 7 : Focus and consistency of the message
Identify the message and be disciplined to stick to that. “Dr. Fauci’s ability to stay on message is expert level. It doesn’t matter what news he is delivering that day or what question he is asked, Dr. Fauci sticks to the following four points”: [4]
- Current data shows X
- The models are telling us X
- This is what we don’t know and/or need to find out
- The public should do X
If there’s something that other scientists need to take from this, it’s that when you’re talking to a broader audience, you don’t need to talk like a scientist — you need to talk like a human [5]
Scientific discoveries don’t advance on their own. They need skilled communicators to translate the data into everyday language.
Storytelling expert information and distilling it down to what matters is a key skill.
And ‘Anthony Fauci is a role model for how to do it.’ [1]