Your Data isn't the Problem - Your Connection to Stakeholders Is

I thought I’d write a follow up to a previous article about scientists and their presentation style, based on the webinar I attended last week by Helge Tennø on ‘Systems Thinking’.

During the webinar, I had one of those aha! moments where I realised that I already knew what systems thinking was, but had never been able to put a name to it in the past.  Now I see that as a concept, it has been around for a long, long while.

If I were to define the approach in my own words, I would say it was a “slightly messy, yet thorough way to ‘put yourself in the other person’s shoes,’ prior to finding the best way to connect with them”. It’s what great marketing can achieve, if done well.

So, if I relate this back to us scientists, fiendishly pulling our data together into some sort of presentation - a systems thinking approach applied to our stakeholders ahead of the talk would yield great insights into what data elements we would need to include, the vocabulary we may need to employ, or even just the story we would need to wrap around our data to ensure that the message really lands in the right way.

Without this stakeholder ‘connection’, we risk our hard-earned efforts being misinterpreted, misunderstood or, horror of horrors, being ignored.

Thanks to Nyambe (Yam) for hosting the session last week.  It’s great to see that ‘steady climb’ in action.