A 'Conversation' Piece
I am evidently a bit of a monster: I am unbothered by, and sometimes even enjoy, listening to recordings of my own voice. But reading my own quotes from interviews? Yiiikes. So it’s taken me longer than it should have to read and share a rather important thing I did earlier this year. In April, I was interviewed by editor Cheri Sirois for a Conversations feature in the journal Cell (it’s paywalled, sorry, but you can email us for a PDF).
WHY IT MATTERS: Cell is one of the really important journals in the biochemistry & molecular biology space, so I knew I was functionally on stage in front of thousands of researchers. More importantly to me, I knew that this piece was going to be part of a special “focus issue” dedicated to immunology, which just happens to be the originating discipline of the non-profit I co-founded in 2021, Solving For Science (we often call it SolvingFor or abbreviate to SFS). SolvingFor gave me an incredible opportunity to create a brand-new professional development course last year. The 10-hour ENGAGE program is the first time I’ve ever really been able to dedicate an entire block of programming to the underlying values and philosophies of why we do science communication and public engagement, instead of rushing into the details of how to do it.
This interview was an incredible opportunity to distill complex ideas for an important audience, all by using the skills that we teach to convey the values that animate our teaching. Tidy, isn’t it? It is also a gift that keeps on giving: I don’t just have a product to share, I have an opportunity to learn from the process. Each interview I do is a chance to iterate and improve on my interviewing strategies and tactics. I love working this way! It gives me a chance to celebrate the things that went well and to minimize agonizing over the things that didn’t, because I can learn from them.
In this case, the published text of the interview is very close to a verbatim transcript of our 40 minute conversation, so it’s all on the page for you to judge whether I succeeded in sharing the values and purpose of our work at Liminal. But here, I wanted to share a bit of my process and thinking from during the interview, to illustrate the kind of reflexivity that I do my best to practice. I originally thought I’d annotate the entire thing for you, but as I started writing, I realized that even just the first question is a treasure trove of things to unpack, and so I’m going to focus on just that.
Can you answer the question?
Cheri's opening is “Very nice to speak to you today. You trained in marine biology and conservation, but you also have wide experience in communicating a range of ideas, from neuroscience to the COVID-19 pandemic. You’ve said in the past that you’re focused on the ‘‘theory and practice of sensemaking.’’ So, to start things off, can you talk about your process for homing in on what is most interesting when you take on a new subject? How do you decide what to focus on in a complex topic?”
This is a complex question! It was clear that Cheri had a lot of exciting ideas about where our conversation could go. But as a listener, this threw me off a little. I heard a string of keywords from my work: marine biology, neuroscience, COVID, sensemaking - conversational threads I could imagine pulling on. And then she asks two questions: 1) how to determine what is interesting about a new subject; and 2) where to focus within a complex one. Where would you go with that? Here’s some of what was racing through my mind:
Right, complexity - immunology is one of the most intricate fields I’ve encountered, and it has a ton of jargon, I bet that’s why she’s asking me to speak to complexity. I need to remember to try to weave in something about intricacy and jargon.
She’s asked about my process, so I have license to talk about my own opinions and expertise here, instead of trying to represent consensus. Does such a thing even exist? Wait, that’s a tangent: don’t get distracted, focus.
So I’m invited to talk about how I figure out what’s interesting. But not just interesting to me, because that’s idiosyncratic. Nobody reading this cares about what I find interesting. Right, she’s asking me for thoughts on how we understand our audiences and find ways to connect with their interests.
Man, first question: it’s important to get the tone here right! Remember: calm and competent, confident and kind. (I’m not a natural extrovert, so any kind of social interaction, especially public-facing ones, benefit from a little internal pep-talk. I also sometimes swap in “fun, friendly, and fascinating” for variety.)
Four bullet points ricocheting around in my mind, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What a mess! It would have been so easy for me to get lost in a rambling, foggy answer. But that wouldn’t have done anybody any good, would have flustered me even further, and would have been quite the bitter irony when the question ultimately was “what’s interesting and how do you begin?”
Fortunately, “sensemaking begins in chaos.” (This indelible line is from the paper that helped inspire Liminal in the first place.) And so that’s where I began.
“Let’s start with what “sensemaking” is. What I experienced, especially during the pandemic, is that the challenge of modern life is that we don’t need to be experts in just one urgent thing. It’s that we’re grappling with what feels like the omni-crisis. It’s not just the pandemic. It’s not just climate change. It’s everything all at once. Sensemaking is a concept or framework that I’m pulling from organizational psychology. It’s the way that people collectively take stock of ambiguous or maybe dangerous situations, figure out: what is happening? And what are we going to do about it? It is both retrospective, looking back in the past, and forward-looking, asking, “What are we going to do?” And it is iterative. So, it is the place where we come together and make sense of our world, and that’s where science communication fits in.
The question of how we focus in the midst of all of that is really the question of defining what is important. Focus is about priorities, right? What is signal and what is noise? The core task of sensemaking is figuring that out. In science communication, specifically, people are saying, “How do we figure out what’s interesting to other people?” so that we can spend our effort there, because we want to connect beyond our expert communities. And I think that is a separate conversation. Because there’s priority and importance, and interesting does not necessarily mean the same thing as important. So, if you’re a researcher, imagine there’s a spectrum: on one side, there is the sort of artistic, aesthetic, irrepressible, creative urge that is just like, “I love this topic, it fascinates me, I just want to share it.” That’s sort of internal. And then on the far other end of the spectrum would be perhaps a strategic, public-service-oriented goal. Something you think needs to happen, maybe a social priority, and you want to develop careful strategies to create conversations, create a behavioral change around the topic. Anywhere on that spectrum you may be with a topic is legitimate, but where it falls does shape the kind of work that you might want to do, the why and how.”
When I read that answer, I notice myself building a foundation with the definition of sensemaking (which also is something I can describe fluently), and then working my way back around to the questions of interest and the acknowledgement of complexity. And I count at least three talking points I prepared in advance. Given where my mind was during the question, it feels somewhat miraculous that what came out of my mouth looks coherent on the page. Could it be tighter? Definitely. I was probably trying to do too much. The other nine questions in the interview similarly hold moments of great clarity, and places where I wish I could do some retroactive editing.
But overall, I’m happy with this conversation. Dialogues and interviews are endlessly interesting to me. I love that we can deconstruct the rhetorical moves in a conversation, and retroactively judge the success of a particular gambit. More than anything else, I love how careful preparation can set us up to enjoy the unpredictability and serendipity of creating meaning with someone else.
This post is already too long and somehow barely begun. If you’d like to discuss it a bit more, that’s what our Slack is for. If you’d like to get into a whole lot more discussion, I have good news: we teach interview skills as part of our work! To be one of the first people to see our newest materials about trainings and coaching, and for help figuring out how to find the right words for the right moments, email us at Workshops@liminalcreations.com.
