Olson is a communications expert.
In an op-ed in MedPage Today earlier this week, the authors called on the government to ” [H5N1] More efficiently and effectively.’ Who could disagree?
But the title begins with the dogmatic statement that “uncertainty is not a bad word,” and the article calls on federal agencies to “communicate what they don't know as clearly as they communicate what they do know.”
This may be true for knowledgeable academics, but for the general public, uncertainty is somewhere between delicate and dangerous baggage. Uncertainty is certainly a bad word for mass communication if not handled properly.
Humans communicate through the same set of fundamental principles in all disciplines. For the most part, there is no such thing as “science communication,” just as there is no such thing as “economic communication” or “Hollywood communication.” There is only general information communication. In all disciplines, information is presented and discussed according to fundamental principles that are thousands of years old.
Ideally, it provides three things: First, it establishes a context. Second, it identifies a problem and provides actions to solve it.
One of the core consequences of this dynamic is that there are two fundamental audiences: those who already know the topic, and those who don't. In my group's work training scientists to communicate, we've developed a very simple, yet powerful diagram to communicate this distinction.
Credit: Olson
The inner circle is the people who know the subject well. These people certainly find uncertainty interesting and fascinating. But how big is the inner circle on any subject? In the case of epidemiology, how many people really know the basic details of viruses, vaccines, and pandemics?
The rest of the population (the majority of the US) who lack basic knowledge of epidemiology in general and H5N1 in particular, are in the outer ring. They need different communication. They need a proper clear and simple structure, but the uncertainty in implementing it will have disastrous consequences.
How can I be so sure? Because if we look beyond the closed world of H5N1 science, beyond the world of epidemiology, and even beyond science itself, we find a wide audience driven by ancient narrative principles, one of which is the universal desire for a so-called “omniscient narrator.”
This is also true of the novels you read and movies you watch: the narrator doesn't ramble on about things we don't know. He tells us what we do know, and that's what the audience wants.
When President Barack Obama was running for a second term in 2012, he was asked what the biggest flaw of his first term was, and he admitted this: “My mistake in my first term, the first few years, was thinking this job was just about getting policy right. That's important. But the essence of this job is also about telling the American people a story…”
I believe what he meant by “telling a story” is presenting information in a clear three-part structure: setup, problem, and resolution.
This is the key to communicating more effectively and efficiently.
A good recent example of what I mean is the recent subcommittee hearing of Dr. Anthony Fauci on the origins of the COVID pandemic. Most of the Democrats who spoke followed a similar opening line to President Obama's: stating facts but making no attempt to tell a story. But Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) did a great job of executing the basic three-part structure of a story: setting up, presenting a problem, and discussing actions taken related to that problem.
“Think back to the height of the pandemic, when family, friends, coworkers were dying one after the other, when we were afraid to go near anyone,” Mfume says, and he immediately goes into a storytelling mode that President Obama might have dreamed of.
What he's presenting here is information that we are completely certain about, so that we can get the public to tune into our channels of communication. Crafting this kind of message isn't easy, but it's essential. And while you can certainly present uncertainty, it requires the right context.
When it comes to communicating about H5N1, we can’t force uncertainty on the public and expect them to like it: if we did, we would be steering many people towards voices that offer complete certainty, rightly or wrongly (i.e. the kind of misinformation/disinformation that Fauci repeatedly warned against in his testimony).
The biomedical community needs to unlearn this basic tripartite structure of communication, drawing on millennia-old principles of narrative structure. The public, the members of the outer circle, desperately need this kind of structure, and it is built around stating what we know, rather than stating what we don't know.
Dr. Randy Olson is a scientist turned filmmaker, 2020 recipient of the John P. McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication from the American Medical Writers Association, and author of eleven books on science communication, including Houston We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story and The Narrative Gym for Medicine.
