Alan Barker

Don’t fake it: five steps to beat imposter syndrome in science communication

Image: Sketchplanations

Does this image ring any bells?

If so, welcome to the club. You, too, may be experiencing imposter syndrome, a key barrier to effective science communication.

And, if so, you’re in very good company.

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On 1 October 1861 – two years after he published On the Origin of Species, and by now world-famous – Charles Darwin wrote in a letter to his friend, Charles Lyell:  

 

 

But I am very poorly today + very stupid + hate everybody + everything. One lives only to make blunders. — I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids & today I hate them worse than everything so farewell & in a sweet frame of mind, I am | Ever yours | C. Darwin.

 

 

Darwin displays three qualities that are regularly associated with imposter syndrome.   

• A feeling of never being competent or knowledgeable enough
• Consistent critical self-talk
• An excessive focus on failures and mistakes

But his letter lacks one element essential to imposterism, which didn’t appear until 1978.

In that year, two psychologists – Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes – published a paper entitled The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women. The 150-plus women they studied all reported symptoms similar to Darwin’s, with one crucial addition.

They said that they felt like frauds.

According to Clance and Imes, they were particularly prone to “an internal experience of intellectual phoniness” and lived in perpetual fear that “some significant person will discover that they are indeed intellectual impostors.”

 

Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes

image via https://blog.10minuteschool.com/fighting-the-impostor-syndrome/

By 1982, a journalist in Vogue was referring to “the ‘impostor’ syndrome” – a phrase Clance and Imes disliked and never used. In 2011, Valerie Young published her bestseller, The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women; since then, the topic has generated over 3,500 papers and a heap of self-help books.

(Incidentally, ‘impostor’ and ‘imposter’ seem to be more or less interchangeable spellings. If you’re interested, check out this article. I shall continue to favour ‘imposter’ in this post, except when I quote other writers.)

Whatever it is – phenomenon or syndrome – imposterism seems to be widespread. One much-repeated statistic, apparently originating in a 2007 article by John Gravois, suggests that 70% of us – men and women – experience imposter syndrome at some point. I took the Clance Test while researching this post. I scored 61 out of 100, indicating that I ‘frequently have Impostor feelings’. Which seems reasonable.

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According to Sandeep Ravindram, imposterism “seems especially common in competitive and creative fields, and those where evaluations are subjective. […] The feeling of being a fraud is also common in fast-changing fields such as technology or medicine.”

What about academia? As May Merino points out in a revealing post for The Oxford Scientist, measures of success in the post-grad, post-doc arena are much more nuanced than in undergraduate education, where grades and test scores offer seemingly clearer metrics of achievement. “The shift to being surrounded by scientists at the top of their game can be a challenging one,” Merino continues, and can “even evoke feelings of not deserving a seat at their table.”

Imposterism also thrives on feelings of isolation. After all, as Merino says, “every researcher’s path is unique.” The problems you face on that path – failed experiments, ambiguous survey results – “will not,” she says, “exactly mirror those that others face.” When things go wrong, you may feel trapped, ashamed as much by the sense of failure as by the prospect of giving it all up.

image by jcomp on Freepik

All of these feelings might be amplified in a competitive, ‘publish or perish’ culture, dominated by grant applications, citation scores and high impact factors. Heaven forbid that your peers might engage in back-biting or bullying to promote their own research…

In a recent article, Kate Munley writes: "the prevalence of imposter syndrome may be grossly underestimated in academia, particularly because mental health is considered a social stigma in higher education."

Now put science communication into the mix.

Is it possible that, in a research-intensive environment, showing an interest in public understanding of science might mark you out as a not-entirely serious researcher? That getting involved in science outreach or science engagement makes you feel somehow unworthy to be a scientist?

Well: I’ll assume that you’re willing to counter such negative thoughts. After all, you’re planning to make a presentation. Good for you. So: what to do?

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Let’s focus, just for now, on the presentation itself.

1. Observe your feelings.

Whatever they are, those feelings are not you. They’ve appeared from somewhere else and have chosen to visit. Bid them welcome.

It’s not so easy to view these thoughts objectively if you’re nervous. So take a few moments to breathe deeply – 7-11 breathing is a great technique here – and then let these feelings in through the door.

Write a few calling cards for them: one card for each feeling. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Who do you think you are?” “They'll find you out." (Use the word ‘you’ – not ‘I’.) There they are, sitting on the desk in front of you. Don’t tear them up. Take a look. Say ‘hi’. And be kind to them.

image via Redbubble

2. Ask yourself what you can learn.

These feelings are a sign that you’re challenging yourself to do something new. You’re stretching yourself, taking a risk, stepping outside your comfort zone. And that’s good. Who wants to do the same thing day in, day out, for the rest of their life?

Nerves are a sign that you care. That you want to do a good job in this presentation.

So, what can you learn from the experience? How can you use it to become a better speaker, to explain your ideas more clearly, to construct more effective arguments?

Set some clear goals for yourself. And then think about what you can do to achieve them.

3. Focus on your audience.

Next, set some goals for the presentation itself.

I’ll guess that your focus so far has been almost entirely on your material. You’ve spent hours on the slides. You’ve tried your utmost to cover every base, every angle. You feel that you need to include everything. You don’t want to be found out, right?

Good.

Now change your focus. Think about your audience. Think about how you want to influence them. How do you want them to leave your presentation?

• What do you want them to think (or know, or have an opinion about)?
• What do you want them to feel?
• And what do you want them to do?

All three goals matter. But the dynamic between them will shift, depending on your audience.

• At a conference, you might want your audience to know a lot but not necessarily do anything.
• If you’re presenting to policy-makers or government officials, you might want them to take specific actions.
• If you’re talking to young people at a science festival, influencing their feelings might come to the fore.

Now you need to decide how to achieve these goals. So:

4. Find the narrative.

Your goals for the presentation describe where you want your audience to be at the end of the presentation.

Now think about where they are at the start.

What do they already know and feel? If you’re not sure, then make a reasonable guess: what are they likely to be thinking about and feeling in relation to this topic?

Your presentation needs to take them on a journey from where they are to where you want them to be. That journey is the narrative of the presentation.

There are lots of ways of creating this narrative. You might want to tell a story. But stories are only one kind of narrative. Two narrative structures that I find consistently helpful are the And, But, Therefore structure, and something called Monroe’s Motivated Sequence.

(Image Source)

By this point, you’ll probably realise that you need to reorganise your material. Go ahead.

5. Practise and get detailed feedback.

Rehearse. In real time. With a real audience, if you can possibly do so.

Choose someone whose opinion your trust: preferably not a close colleague or someone who’s familiar with your research. Ask for specific, detailed feedback. What did they understand? Where did they get lost? How are you coming across?

Use this feedback to identify your strengths as a presenter. Build on those skills. Don’t worry about eliminating your faults. They’re probably not faults, anyway.

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It is possible that impostor syndrome is not actually a Thing. Or rather, it could be as much the result of external factors as of mental activity. Increasingly, researchers are looking for the roots of this experience in social structures, systemic inequalities and what historian Christy Pichichero has called discriminatory gaslighting. All of which deserves another blog post.

Meanwhile, one final thought. It’s not mine; it comes from Professor Jessica Collett.

“Impostorism,” she writes, “is most often found among extremely talented and capable individuals, not people who are true impostors.”

So, if you do feel assailed by imposter syndrome, it’s probably because you are extremely knowledgeable and competent. If you were a real imposter, you wouldn’t feel like one.

If you want to read more about preparing a great science presentation, check out these three posts on my blog.

So what? The conundrum of science communication

Whats your message? Finding-the-foundation-of-a-great-science-presentation

Presenting science: finding the structure

Speaking a better future into existence

Philip Collins

When they go low, we go high: speeches that shape the world – and why we need them

4^th Estate, 2017

ISBN 978 0 00 823569 7

£8.99

Ignore the clunky title. Philip Collins’ impressive new book is not just another anthology of speeches, but a powerful and passionately argued polemic.

Collins believes fervently in liberal democracy. And open, public speech is democracy’s very life blood. But our democracy is in poor shape. “If we want to attend to the good health of our democracy,” he writes, “and we really must, then we need to attend to the integrity of the way we speak about politics.”

The ailment, he claims, is disillusionment, which he suggests may arise from democracy’s manifold successes over the decades. Those successes mean that there’s less to fight for; all too often, political speech has become dull. In fact, he suggests, “most political speeches today are unnecessary.”

But democracy will always face new conflicts and threats. “It is the nature of human beings to disagree. Politics is the means by which that division is recognised, negotiated and settled.” That’s why politics demands speech: “it is in the spoken word that the defence of politics has to be conducted.” A speech is a performative act: it enacts the very process of politics. In this argument, then, rhetoric and politics become virtually synonymous.

Disenchantment with politics fosters the illusion that there is an alternative. The current contender is populism, which Collins roundly condemns but perhaps doesn’t quite pin down. If democracy – he quotes his hero Camus – is the system for those who know that they don’t know everything, the populist always claims to have all the answers. 

Collins places populism in the context of a long and heterogeneous absolutist tradition. Democracy demands patience – “and patience,” he writes, “is usually in short supply. Many distinguished people have called for a short cut to utopia.” But, from Plato to Mao, the politics of the shining path invariably leads to tyranny. And tyranny silences, with catastrophic consequences.

Collins develops his thesis into five claims. Politics gives voice to the people, promotes peace over war, speaks nations into being, improves the condition of the people, and tames the worst human instincts. “All of these virtues,” he writes, “require poetic political speech,” so he creates five main sections, illustrated with a clutch of speeches and bookended with essays elaborating his argument.

These essays are the most engaging parts of the book: at times, more so than the speeches themselves. Collins' practical insights into speechwriting are useful but sporadic. (You can find a selection of them here.)

More absorbing are his broader discussions, pitting the slow-burning successes of democratic politics against the demagogues and the revolutionaries – all those who thought that they were on the right side of history. Camus, writes Collins, “understood that history doesn’t have a side. History does no work for us; we have to choose for ourselves.” The greatest speeches – in the face of time and chance – make that choice.

Tyranny denies the possibility of choice by removing the possibility of conversation. “To live in utopia is to be amidst perfection already achieved. Nothing develops and nobody can change their mind.” Collins analyses oppression in rhetorical terms. Camus again: “Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes.”

That remarkable sentence signals the ambiguous power of rhetoric sitting at the heart of Collins’ argument: the power to overcome fear, despair and isolation by welding its audience into a community.

Populism does so by demonising. Collins watches Hitler scapegoating Czechoslovakia, in the speech he gave in 1938, immediately before annexing the Sudetenland. “One of the puzzles of Hitler’s rhetoric,” he writes, “is how someone whose thinking was so disordered, in every sense of that term, could be so effective on the stage.”

The solution is in the rhetoric itself, which bodies forth the utopian dream in the very act of entrancing its audience. The order Hitler craved was possible only the podium. By creating an identification between himself and his audience, he manages to seal off, for a while, the exigencies of reality. As Collins writes: “the novelty in his rhetoric was to create a bound community, a Volksgemeinschaft, just by talking it into life… This is the trick of the shaman. He has created a need and a Weltanshauung and claimed it was what the people thought all along.”

Exactly. Binding is what rhetoric does. As Collins himself ruefully admits, “it is the pinnacle of what every speaker would like to achieve; for rhetoric to be true as soon as I say it, and because I say it.”When

Political truth has to be talked into life. It’s never transcendent; it always emerges from the clash of arguments. You’ll find yourself arguing with Collins as you read. That’s surely his intention. And, because, as La Rochefoucauld said, “the passions are the only orators that convince,” Collins argues that democratic politics must rediscover “the principle of hope.” Rhetoric matters because we need a “better, more enchanted politics.” The responsible democrat must describe what has gone awry and find words to speak a better future into existence. “The spectre of utopia is profound fear; its promise is extraordinary hope. The purpose of politics is to contain the fear so that the hope can thrive.”

Remembering Fred Metcalf

 

 

My colleague Brian Jenner told me today that he'd heard of the death of Fred Metcalf.  Fred was one of modern rhetoric's unsung heroes: a jokesmith and writer for the great and good, who has not received the recognition he deserved - and undoubtedly shunned.  His lugubrious, subversive humour will be greatly missed. 

Read Brian's obituary - where are the notices in the national press?  Fred deserves better. 

Here is my short review of his book, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Political Quotations.  The very title somehow conjures a wry smile. 

 

 

 

Fred Metcalf:  The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Political Quotations

Biteback Publishing, 2012

ISBN 978 1849542 241

£9.99

A good book of quotations is like a box of superior chocolates.  You enjoy one, and before you know it...

Fred Metcalf’s collection of political quotations is among the most superior.  His range is remarkable, historically (from Cicero to blog postings from 2012) and stylistically.  He includes one-liners and slow-burners of up to 60 words; he quotes real people and fictional characters (The West Wing is well represented).  Some of the humour is broad (including – perhaps a few too many – American stand-up comedians); some traditionally witty; and some satirical (Yes Minister is here). 

You’ll find writers, actors, activists and plenty of real politicians, many of them with their own entries:  quotation collages that deliver caricatured, often surreal pen portraits.  The entries on national characteristics brazenly celebrate their own political incorrectness.  Metcalf is happy to include Anon, and its more recent descendant, the bumper sticker (“GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE. ABORTION CLINICS KILL PEOPLE.”)  “That’s humour at work,” chuckles Metcalf in his introduction; “ever ready to undermine your most precious and long-held beliefs.  It thinks it’s funny!”

One quibble.  The dictionary is arranged by subject, including issues, movements, philosophies and political parties.  My pedantic side would have welcomed an index of authors. 

Use this book in two ways.  Reach for it when you want to add the sharp tang of a ready-made quotation to a speech.  And study it closely to discover the secrets of being quotable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fred and Rodger Evans at a recent European Speechwriters Network conference

The best lack all conviction

Mark Thompson: Enough Said

The Bodley Head, 2016

ISBN 978-1847923127

£25.00

The simple answer to the question Mark Thompson asks himself  – “What’s gone wrong with the language of politics?” – is that it has split in two. 

On one side, “the weirdly affectless and dehumanized style in which many public policy documents are written.” 

On the other, “honesty of emotion and at least the appearance of being willing to engage with the lowliest members of [a] chosen community.”  Thompson labels these two rhetorics rationalism and authenticism. 

“Something has gone awry with our politics,” he says; but it’s a mark of his intellectual sophistication that he resists simplistic explanations.  Instead, he places public language “in the centre of a causal nexus”: “our institutions and organizations,” he writes, “are living bodies of public language, and when the rhetoric changes, so do they.”  He quotes George Orwell (whose Politics and the English Language he submits to a nuanced analysis): “the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and … one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”

The dichotomy between gutless rationalism and the “punctiliously immoderate language” of authenticist politics is hardly a new phenomenon. As I read this book, I kept hearing Yeats's words from 1919: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst  / Are full of passionate intensity.”

In our own day, rationalism is evidenced in the impenetrable policy wonkery of government departments and NGOs, which Thompson traces to the gradual breakdown of technocratic consensual politics in the post-war period.  As data has become ever bigger, it has become harder to explain or justify policy decisions clearly.  (Deciding on a third runway, for example, is far more difficult than deciding to build Heathrow in the first place.)  Decision-making must involve compromise, but compromise hardly figures in political campaigning, which has by now become more or less a continuous process.  “The zone of ambiguity and flexibility,” writes Thompson “– that zone where almost all political progress takes place – has become rhetorically insupportable.” Instead, rationalism fetishises dialectic (and evidence), while the authenticist foregrounds narrative.  The rationalist venerates facts and evidence; the authenticist dismisses both as 'factoids', preferring greater, fuzzier, 'truthier' truths.

From a longer perspective, Thompson seeks the roots of both rhetorics in the Enlightenment. 

Rationalism derives from the empiricism of Hume and the positivism of Comte, and authenticism from the counter-Enlightenment writings of Johann Georg Hamann, through Hegel and Kierkegaard to Nietzsche and Heideigger (in whose work it connects explicitly to nationalism). 

Authenticism fuels the contemporary distrust of the political class.  Nietzsche, along with Marx and Freud, figures large in what Thompson calls “the school of suspicion”: all three “detected a layer of falsity and deception in human utterance that must be stripped away before the truth can be revealed.”  The meme of ‘false consciousness’ proliferated in the (very authenticist) counterculture of the 1960s and has now gone mainstream.  The presumption of bad faith in every politician (“Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”) also colours the investigative and analytical journalism that forms such a major part of Thompson’s own career (DG of the BBC, CEO of Channel 4, CEO of the New York Times). 

His analysis of these two competing rhetorics thus spirals, like a widening gyre, to encompass the media, celebrity advocacy and all the other components of an increasingly complex public space.

At every turn, his deep understanding of rhetorical principles – from Aristotle onwards – is leavened by vivid stories drawn from his experience.  He discusses Thatcher and Reagan, Berlusconi and Putin, Clinton and Trump.  He describes the parabolic adventure of spin from Campbell to Cameron.  All the big stories are here – the notorious Belgrano phone-in on Nationwide, Jo Moore’s “a very good day” email after 9/11, the David Kelly tragedy – and, in substantial chapters that repay repeated study, Thompson explores how a failing public language affects the discussion of three contentious issues: the presentation of scientific research, the decision to go to war, and the boundaries of free speech. 

How, then, to address the crisis? Thompson calls up our capacity for prudence – what the Greeks called phronesis – to help us “perform a sense-check on anything that sounds too good to be true.”  One way to develop prudence, he suggests, is to put public language “at the heart of the teaching of civics.”  It’s a tall order: “the humanities as a whole,” he writes, “stand at low tide, judged less economically valuable … than the sciences.”  But if the most important question confronting any society is how we are to live with each other, then becoming skilled in public language must be a first step in addressing it.  Thompson’s words should raise a cheer among all right-thinking liberals: “Let’s teach our children rhetoric.”

And where can we professional rhetoricians seek improvement, at the verbal end?   “The seeds of renewal,” writes Thompson, “germinate in unexpected places:” in the language of the immigrant, the refugee and the marginalized; in satire; and – intriguingly – in hip hop.  And he sees a promising new bud within political discourse itself.  “Though it is often spoken by the weak and dispossessed,” he writes, “there is something unstoppable about the language of fairness.”

Mark Thompson’s remarkable – and remarkably readable – book bulges with useful information and ideas.  For anyone who contributes to public language, Enough Said is essential reading.

The Essentials of Speechwriting - the book

 

 

 

This book supports my course, The Essentials of Speechwriting, which I run regularly for the European Speechwriter Network.

 

 

 

 

Download Essentials_of_Speechwriting_background_book_v2

If you would like to discuss running this course in your organization, or if you would like to book a place on the network's public course, please contact Brian Jenner:

[email protected]

You can find out more about the European Speechwriter Network here. 

Read the network's informative newsletters.

Listen to a range of entertaining podcasts on the pleasures and perils of speechwriting.

Enjoy!

Download Essentials_of_Speechwriting_background_book_v2

Speechwriting for diplomatic candidates in South Korea

This is an adapted version of the slidedeck I use on the speechwriting module that I run for the Korean National Diplomatic Academy in Seoul.  The slides include references to a workbook that accompanies the course.  This link is aimed primarily at students who want a copy of the slidedeck.  But it might be of interest to anyone interested in speechwriting.

i also run speechwriting courses in other organisations and venues, and run The Essentials of Speechwriting regularly for the European Speechwriter Network.  Check out their website for details of the next course.

If you want to discuss training for speechwriting in your organisation, please contact me through this blog, or through my website.

Download KNDA_blog_version_course_slides

Arouse, Withhold, Fulfil

Houston, We Have a Narrative:

Why Science Needs Story

Randy Olson

University of Chicago Press

2015

978 0 226 27084 5

$20; £14.00

 

Scientists urgently need to use narrative well, and Randy Olson has developed a set of tools to help them.  But the tools can easily become empty formulae, so Olson offers a strategy to help scientists develop an enhanced understanding of narrative: what he calls ‘narrative intuition’.

That summary of Olson’s new book a model he calls ‘ABT’: and, but, therefore.  Olson borrowed it from Trey Parker, one of the writers on South Park. Hollywood, claims Olson, is the place to go for such models. 

(He gives short shrift to humanities departments, who are so busy ideologising that they wouldn't know a narrative if it...  Olson is not polite about humanities academics.)

Olson has developed this material in the years since publishing Don’t Be Such a Scientist.  That book offered five key principles of good science communication (I discuss them here); this one develops practical, useable techniques.

Why does science need narrative so badly?  Partly, says Olson, because scientists tend to communicate by offering “piles of facts”.  Partly because science is signally failing to engage a non-scientific audience.  (He is especially good on the conundrum of communicating climate change.)  And partly because a lack of narrative awareness is damaging science itself.  Journals are increasingly publishing research that’s ‘significant’ rather than sound: according to scientists Olson has spoken to, many papers in Science and Nature are overstated in their conclusions.  “Most of the claimed statistically significant effects in traditional medical research,” claims John Ioannidis of Stanford, “are false positives or substantially exaggerated.”  (Olson noticeably avoids discussing the role of Big Pharma in all this.)

The other reason scientists need to understand narrative is that they’re so hostile to it.  This storyphobia, Olson suggests, is the result of a profound misunderstanding of the terms narrative, story and storytelling.  He quotes Yarden Katz, in a paper called Against Storytelling of Scientific Results: “Great storytellers embellish and conceal information to evoke a response in their audience.”

Not so, says Olson: Katz and other scientists are confusing content with form.  True, stories can deceive, fabricate and exaggerate; but they can also be “accurate, honest, true and reliable”.  Storytelling itself is as value free as E=mc².  

“The bottom line,” asserts Olson, “is that I fail to see anyone taking [a] critical approach to these terms.”  

So, in this book, he sets out to do just that.

He defines a story as “a series of events that happen along the way in the search for a solution to a problem.”  Given this definition, Olson can link narrative to both explanation and argumentation.  He claims, for example, that the IMRAD structure of experimental papers – Introduction (I), Methods, Results And Discussion – “is the structure of a story, which has a beginning (I), middle (M & R), and end (D).” 

Sleight of hand?  IMRAD is surely an explanatory structure, designed to help other scientists replicate an experiment.  My own experience of working with scientists suggests that they tend to offer, not "piles of facts", but over-elaborate explanations.  Our task as science communicators is surely not just to find the core narrative, but to help scientists explain better.

Olson goes further.  He compares ABT to the argumentation structure offered by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein in their book They Say, I Say (present what your opponents say, then what you have to say, before reconciling the two).  The two structures are the same! What’s more, they share that structure with the Hegelian Triad (thesis, antithesis, synthesis).  Narrative encompasses, not just explanation, but argument as well.

Little wonder that Olson can claim, “in science, narrative is everywhere.”

Heady stuff.  And perhaps he’s on to something.  Maybe the rhetoric of explanation and argumentation really is founded, at some deep, intuitive level, on narrative.  Maybe narrative itself instances an even deeper, musical structure of statement, tension and release: a structure that finds expression in IV-V-I chord progressions, in sonata form and the twelve-bar blues.

(Marcus Webb spoke illuminatingly on this theme at a recent conference.) 

It’s a pattern humans can’t resist: arouse, withhold, fulfil.  Maybe, if we can tap into that deeper structure, we can make our explanations and arguments more compelling.  And maybe this is useful, not just for scientists, but for anyone who wants to engage audiences in important issues.

To help us on our quest, Olson offers three tools, on three levels: word, sentence, paragraph.

ABT is the shaping tool at the sentence level.  And, but, therefore sits at the heart of his method because it embodies the narrative structure in a single, tripartite statement - and, probably, because Olson has found it the most practically useful of his techniques.  The model  bears a striking resemblance to Barbara Minto’s ‘situation, complication, question, response’ structure (which I use, substituting ‘problem’ for ‘complication’ to create SPQR as a Roman-themed mnemonic).  It also closely resembles the Freytag Triangle, although Olson doesn’t say so.

[Source]

ABT, says Olson, can rescue scientists from the structures they so often use: AAA (And, And, And) and DHY (Despite, However, Yet).   ABT informs the elevator pitch.   ABT, in short, “is the age-old structure of logic that works best for the masses.”

At the word level, Olson offers us the Dobzhansky Template.  Named after a notable Russian geneticist, this template helps us in our initial efforts to “find the narrative on a given topic”.  Which sounds very like Aristotle's "discovering the best available means of persuasion;" this template brings us close to invention, one of the five canons of classical rhetoric. 

The template goes like this:

Nothing in ___________ makes sense except in the light of __________ .

Fill in the blanks.

(Picture source: AZ Quotes)

The Dobzhansky Template gives your presentation a single focus.  It helps you stay on message when talking to the media.  It even helps you write grant proposals.

But this isn't quite invention proper.  The template focuses on a subject, rather than a topic.  The practical question for the science communicator is: how does subject [b] make sense of subject [a]?  Invention would suggest topics to answer that question: patterns of explanation, like comparision, cause and effect, categorisation...  patterns which simplify complexity.  None of this is quite narrative; but then, I've noticed that some patterns of explanation compel attention more than others - perhaps because they arouse, withhold and fulfil in a kind of narrative way. 

I'll try the Dobzhansky Template.  And I'll let you know how I get on.

At the paragraph level, Olson offers us the Hero’s Journey, as defined by Joseph Campbell and made famous by George Lucas.  Olson, wisely, tells us to treat this one with care.

All three  of these tools can become empty formulae, but none more so than the Hero’s Journey.  Check out the hundreds of books on movie writing that rely on it, and the resulting proliferation of identikit movies, “as if,” to quote Peter Suderman, “a mad scientist has discovered a secret process for making a perfect, or at least perfectly conventional, summer blockbuster.”  (An ironically apposite image, linking Hollywood to science in just the way Olson doesn’t want.)   Scientists can go to Hollywood for technical help with narrative, but they must resist “bending the science to tell a better story.”

(Olson recommends a good TED talk by Matthew Winkler on the Hero's Journey.  Find it here.)

Olson’s wisdom consists in precisely this: understanding that we should use his models perceptually rather than mechanically.  They help us see the structures inherent in our material, but we should resist imposing them unthinkingly.  The Hero’s Journey – that most seductive model of all – works best as an analytical tool, not a creative one.  “If you get to know it well,” he writes, “you’ll end up spotting the elements, by themselves, in real world situations.”

And, when you do start to spot those elements, you’ll develop narrative intuition: “the ability not just to know the basic rules of narrative but to have absorbed and assimilated them so thoroughly you can actually sense them.”

Narrative intuition helps you decide how much narrative to include; it helps you find the specifics that bring a narrative to life; and it helps you develop what Olson calls relatability: of character (“You’re just like me!”) and narrative (“That’s just what I did!”). 

But – and here Olson displays his wisdom once more – narrative intuition doesn’t come quickly

This book, like all Olson’s work, will benefit presenters of all kinds – not just scientists.  He mentions Nicholas Kristof, for instance, who dares to suggest that NGOs should embrace the dark arts of marketing to get inside people's brains.  And John Yorke, whose book Into the Woods delves into the fractal nature of stories.  And Karlyn Campbell, who writes in her book, The Rhetorical Act:

"Truths cannot walk on their own legs.  they must be carried by people to other people.  they must be explained, defended and spread through language, argument and appeal."

"This is a source of irritation for many scientists," claims Olson, "but it's the real world."  Hear, hear.

And there's more: hints and tips, examples and case studies, drawn from his own practical experience as a trainer, from real scientific papers and elsewhere. You’ll find yourself scurrying off to all the other books he’s read, and the TED talks he’s watched (and given).  

Olson is on to something.  I think he understands that narrative has some irreducible core of mystery; it can't ever quite succumb to rational analysis.  When it works, something magical happens.  That magic is what we rhetoricians are hunting for.  Olson's book will help us.  I for one will be using his ideas in my own quest, not least in my work with scientists.

I help scientists develop their communication skills, including - well, yes - their narrative intuition.  Find out about my work with the British Science Association here.  Contact me if you'd like to discuss training or coaching in science communication.

Appearances are everything

Simon Lancaster

Winning Minds: secrets from the language of leadership

Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

ISBN 978 1 137 46592 4

£19.99

Books for leaders – and for aspiring leaders – need to combine pragmatism, intellectual credibility and flair.  Many leaders are ex-managers: they’re no longer interested in doing things right, but in doing the right thing.  They want to know how to inspire.  They want ideas that are powerful but not complicated, delivered in a style that’s racy without being superficial.

Simon Lancaster manages all this with aplomb.  Other political speechwriters have tried to transfer their attention to the broader canvas of corporate leadership, not always successfully.  Lancaster at least shows that he’s worked with leaders outside the Westminster bubble.

His aim is to link rhetoric and neuroscience.  He notes, for example, that figures of speech might have specific psychological effects.  Take asyndeton, the omission of conjunctions:  the resulting short, sharp clauses imply rapid, shallow breathing and hence anxiety (one of David Cameron’s typical rhetorical strategies).  We’re more likely to believe statements if a speaker simply repeats them, or – intriguingly – if they contain rhymes. 

But Lancaster wants to go further: he suggests that “new developments in behavioural economics and neuroscience” show Aristotle’s rhetorical theories to have been “astonishingly accurate”.  

The neuroscientific framework Lancaster chooses to structure the book isn’t, in fact, new at all.  Paul MacLean’s theory of the triune brain appeared back in the 1960s; Lancaster seeks to align it to Aristotle’s three musketeers.  Logos, for example, maps to the neocortex, and pathos to the limbic, ‘emotional brain’.  The fit between ethos and MacLean’s ‘reptilian brain’ – which Lancaster renames ‘the instinctive brain’ – feels more forced, although the point that we expect our leaders to provide security and rewards is well made. 

Lancaster fits his various tools and techniques into these three neural compartments.  He clearly thinks the ‘instinctive brain’ by far the most important: he devotes 82 pages to it, compared to 47 for emotion and only 34 for the ‘logical brain’. 

He also touches on Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrell’s APET model – without acknowledging them, which is a shame.  Griffin and Tyrell stress the importance of pattern-matching: we create meaning by filtering sensory impressions through mental patterns, some inherited and some learned, and ‘tagging’ them emotionally.  These matches are mediated by the limbic system, which regulates the hormonal responses that Lancaster is so keen on:  the book is filled with “squirts” of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin.  So the division between ‘instinct’ and ‘emotion’ seems fuzzier than he implies.

Unsurprisingly, language is Lancaster’s forte.  The chapters on metaphor and story are among his best.  You want to understand a leader?  “Analyse their metaphors.”  What’s your personal story?  How does it demonstrate your values?  How do organisations assemble stories into cultures?  Any manager seeking to transform themselves into a leader will find Lancaster’s answers useful.

And he understands the great rhetorical lesson is that appearances are everything.  If you can’t be honest – and leaders often face that challenge – then you must create “the illusion of honesty”.  The logical brain responds, not to actual logic, but to “the appearance of logic”.

Which doesn’t set us up very well for the final section.  If the logical brain is interested only in what seems logical – well, what price rational thinking?  (But then, rhetoric and logic have always enjoyed a stormy relationship.)  It’s hard to see how tricolons have much to do with logic.  And the Ciceronian speech structure (Exposition, Narration, Division and the rest) is surely not an exercise in balance (to which Lancaster devotes a whole chapter).  When did you ever hear a great leader open a speech with “On the one hand...”?

This final section loses momentum.  It’s a pity, because so much of the book is genuinely insightful and readable.    

There’s a hidden lesson in this book.  It’s never stated explicitly, but Lancaster’s superb examples of imaginary speeches point up a skill that’s critical for speechwriters, and probably for leaders as well: an endless curiosity about general knowledge. 

I run The Essentials of Speechwriting regularly for the European Speechwriter Network.  To find out about the next course, go to their homepage and look at 'upcoming events'.

Seven ways to make science zing

An inspirational day last week at the British Science Association, working with the winners of this year’s BSA Award Lectures.  The BSA has presented these lectures since 1990; notable past winners include Professor Brian Cox (2006), Maggie Aderin-Pocock (2008) and Richard Wiseman (2002).  This year’s speakers are absolutely in that league.

The lectures embody the BSA’s vision of a world where science is at the heart of society and culture.  They recognise and promote the work of early-career scientists in the UK.  Each one aims to engage a broad audience, without at any point diluting the seriousness or complexity of its material.  Somewhere in the tension between those two imperatives is born the sense of wonder that makes a lecture zing. 

Here are seven ideas that I took away from the day, and that any science presenter might find useful.

Let the material find its own shape.  Every theme, every topic, every message, demands its own structure.  But we can lay down three broad principles. 

• First, the structures that succeed are always dynamic: they arouse expectations, and then fulfil them.  Many scientific presentations are static: they’re all fulfilment.  (‘Make your point, then give the evidence.’).  Instead, look for the points of arousal – the moments of mystery, choice, uncertainty, conflict – and arrange your structure around these turning points.  (Charles Crawford calls them ‘hinges’.)
• Second, narrative isn’t everything.  Sure, standard narrative structures can help. (Cue the Freytag Triangle; ‘SPQR’; and Monroe’s Motivated Sequence.)   But explanations can generate points of arousal, too (‘Why did that happen?’ ‘How does that arise?’).  And if you’re bold enough to make an argumentative claim, then that will almost certainly arouse your audience. 
• Third, let your intuition help you.  Caroline Goyder suggests factoring in dream time.  Create a loose framework “as soon as the invitation goes in the diary.” “Once you have that frame,” she says, “your unconscious will get to work and the idea will grow, even while you’re doing other things.”  I’d also suggest talking your material through with a (preferably non-scientific) friend.  Where do their eyes light up?  What fascinates them?  Those moments are potential hinges.

Create a mystery.  The more intriguing, the better.  It doesn’t have to be a burning controversy.  A life cycle with intriguing gaps; a manufacturing process that remains a mystery to this very day; a mismatch between theory and findings; all of these can give you the narrative hook that will capture your audience’s attention.  You might find the suspense you’re looking for in the gap between hypothesis and results in your own research. 

Give us meaning, not just information.  Your audience will appreciate simple explanatory models – either physical or mental.  We’re not very good at appreciating statistics (how big is a trillion?).  We are extremely good at deriving meaning from examples – even if they’re not exactly representative.  Analogies and metaphors are useful.  Another powerful technique is to talk about physical elements as if they’re characters in a story.  “The particles get really hot and want to get as far from each other as they can.” 

Involve your audience in the research.  The speakers in the group were brilliant at this.  They had dozens of ideas for creating mini-experiments in the hall: asking the audience to stand and asking a sequence of questions that filtered out sub-groups as respondents sat; using mobiles to conduct polls; offering a choice of experimental paths and asking the audience to choose one; asking the audience to explain surprising findings.  Test out these procedures, if you can, before the big day.  And give them lots of time.

Make it relevant.  Of course, you may want to show the social, economic or political effects of your research.  But imagination is just as relevant as utilitarian outcomes.  If you can make your audience feel awe, or wonder, or intrigue, you’ve strengthened their bond to the natural world, to their fellow humans or to the scientific project.  No bad thing.  

One very obvious way to do that, of course, is to –

Invoke the ‘wow’ factor.  Every subject will offer its own ‘wow’ opportunities.  It might be a spectacular demonstration, a dramatic visual analogy or a mind-blowing statistic (“for a few moments, this is the hottest place on the entire planet.”)  Potential applications for an untried or forgotten technology will often create a tingle.  The point about ‘wow’ moments is that they make us see things differently.  If you can shift people’s perceptions in some way, the shift in their thinking will follow.

Embrace controversy.  This is the toughest one.  Some issues are inherently controversial; others may provoke unanticipated emotional responses. 

We had powerful conversations in our group about how public expectations of scientists can frustrate their plans to communicate their ideas.  We (lay members of the public, like me) want scientists to give us definite answers; and we distrust them when they try to do so.  We want scientists to solve moral and ethical issues for us, and then criticise them if they dare to do so.   

The best thing you can do is show that you, too, are a human being.  Demonstrate the implications of your research, good and bad.  Point out how far the science can go, and where morality or law must take over.  Don’t be afraid to take a stand, if you believe in it and can justify it.  Above all, show us why your material fascinates you.  Excitement is contagious.

Here are the 2015 winners and their respective awards.

• Katherine Woolf, from University College London, is the Charles Darwin Award Lecture winner for agriculture, biological and medical sciences.
• Jill Stuart, from London School of Economics and Political Science, is the Margaret Mead Award Lecture winner for social sciences.
• Julie Wertz, from University of Glasgow, is the Jacob Bronowski Award Lecture winner for science and the arts.
• Hazel Gibson, from Plymouth University, is the Charles Lyell Award Lecture winner for environmental sciences.
• Alex McLean, from University of Leeds, is the Daphne Oram Award Lecture winner for digital innovation.
• Radu Sporea, from the Advanced Technology Institute, University of Surrey is the Isambard Kingdom Brunel Award Lecture winner for engineering, technology and industry, supported by Siemens.
• Ian Chapman, from the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, is the Rosalind Franklin Award Lecture winner for physical sciences and mathematics, supported by Siemens.

Each winner will give a talk at the British Science Festival in September in Bradford.  You can find out more about their lectures here. 

Making the Most of Yourself: a webinar for ICAEW

This is a webinar I delivered for the student community of ICAEW.  It focuses on the skills of confident communication - vital for anyone starting out in a professional career.

The three parts of the webinar cover:

• the roots of confidence;
• the secret of confident communication; and
  
• how to get your point across.

The webinar lasts about 45 minutes, with about ten minutes of Q&A at the end.

To view the webinar, click here or on the picture.

 

Stand and Deliver: conference speaking at CML

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are full details of Stand and Deliver, my seminar on conference speaking, designed exclusively for speakers at conferences run by the Council of Mortgage Lenders.

I run this seminar in association with my colleague and good friend, Sue Smith.

Numbers for the seminar are extremely limited, so if you are interested, book quickly.

Email:[email protected]

Download CML_StandandDeliver_promotionalmaterial_2015_v1

 

We're running the course at CML HQ, in Bush House, on these dates in 2015:

• 24 February
• 1 July
• 7 October

Bush House
North West Wing
Aldwych
London
WC2B 4PJ

See you there!