A year ago this week it was announced that an effective COVID vaccine had been developed. This was the metaphorical starting gun to begin to communicate the merits of taking a vaccine while reducing hesitancy.
The last three editions of Coached have given a glimpse into how we focussed efforts, persuaded sceptical audiences, and made storytelling a central part of the communication strategy.
Now I want to deal with complexity and summarise the three-step approach to removing this as a barrier to good communication.
Context
Complexity might have become a major barrier to the success of the communication of the vaccine programme.
It didn’t because we understood the key to being seen, heard, and understood is clarity which meant separating out how vaccines were communicated from the complexity of the global pandemic.
The world is complex which helps to explain the spread of Covid around the world in early 2020 and the continued battle against the pandemic.
The rollout of the Covid vaccine was – and continues to be – complicated. There are many moving parts but each of them is connected in a relatively simple chain that ultimately ends with an injection going into someone’s arm.
However, the science to understand the virus and the development of the vaccines themselves was complex.
This separation of complex from complicated helped inform what and how was communicated as well as helping to decide who was doing the communicating. On average, we consume five times as much information per day as we did only twenty-five years ago. This makes the communication recipe - what, how, who - so important to make sure we were aligned with our audience’s level of knowledge and what mattered to them.
For example, we wanted people who were hesitant to actively seek out more of the right kind of information. We also wanted those who might have been months away from a vaccine, to understand and accept the prioritisation process we were following without seeking to undermine that process.
Communicate concisely
Whether dealing with something that is complex or complicated, concise communication cuts through all the other noise. That clarity is more easily achieved with a disciplined tactical implementation of the strategic approach. For example, that meant the removal of all unnecessary words, phrases, fillers and waffle from media performances, written documents and face-to-face (via Teams) briefings of key audiences.
The problem comes if those doing the communication - doctors, scientists, researchers – fail to understand which words and phrases are unnecessary.
I’ve seen it a lot in business too, when engineers must communicate with product managers or marketing teams, or when executives and founders need to communicate their strategy to investors. They are all so expert in their field that they get bogged down in unnecessary detail or confusing verbal cul-de-sacs. In doing so concise communication, and with it the audience’s attention, is lost.
A brilliant way to bring complex science to life while also being concise is to use analogies. We saw this to great effect with Professor Jonathan Van Tam who became a much in demand media star because he was able to communicate concisely through using easy to understand analogies.
Too often during the pandemic government spokespeople haven’t done this, but our aim was that if we were using data we should make sure it was relatable to something a layperson could comprehend. In doing so it helped them understand something beyond their scientific knowledge but also why it mattered to them.
Use chunking
Scientists deal with complexity, uncertainty, and risk in a way that many today find difficult as the rest of us have a basic human tendency to seek clarity by simplifying. Yet psychologists have proven that in a world where we are increasingly driven into polarised thinking giving people a glimpse into the complexity makes us think again.
To do this, we’d group an argument or a piece of information by subject or create themes that helped break up the information into more manageable chunks. Finally creating lists of threes rather than a long list of 8, 9 or 10 as is common from policy experts.
We are inherently programmed to deal better with a list of three – three pigs, three bears, three wise men – which makes that content easier to consume, understand as well as deliver to our audience.
Next time you are needing to communicate complex information do so by putting it in the right context, communicating concisely and using chunking to order the information in a way that makes it easier to understand.