52 Weeks, 52 Words: Week 35 - Patience

I don't have to tell any of you, we live in a very “now” culture and our collective need for instant gratification has driven a slow deterioration of our attention spans. Slow, I suppose, is relative and in this new era with Tik Tok-led bite size videos being the 12-second replay versions of our reality, the trend is only accelerating.

And while on demand content – literally when, where and how we want it – is normalizing and allowing us to better cater to health care professionals on behalf of our clients, the platforms and philosophy behind it are having other unintended consequences as well.

When we suggest that information can be served up “on demand” and then casually or routinely fail to fulfill that promise, our constituents confidence erodes and we, in turn, begin to go on an epic quest toward alternatives that will support greater levels of on demand delivery.

With that frenzy guiding us down the rabbit hole deeper and deeper we create a paradoxical and heretical no win situation. While we want everyone else to stop and take more time, we drive the narrative of speed and expectation.

As a society in general and within medical communications specifically we have become conditioned toward impatience. That Pavlovian response is understandable given the trends in media as I noted above, but it actually does us a disservice particularly in our agency and new business culture.

I would propose the anti-Tik Tok substitute to our approach for agency performance optimization and even client engagement; or, for the very least our peace of mind. For some, it won’t be easy. And for others it may feel totally unnatural. But, for me, as I have a proclivity toward ADHD and short-attention spans already, it’s an approach that has given me a north star for my business interactions and a degree of solitude in equal measure and with an added benefit of perspective (though a timely reminder now and again from my colleagues doesn’t hurt either!). 

How patient should you be in our industry? I’d say as patient as you need to be as long as the process is continuing. Am I saying you should just let the client lead the process? No. That may prove hazardous with their own inertia and agendas clouding the process and leading to further cycles of endless deliberation.

At the same time that you’re being patient, you also need to be urgent. It’s what I would call the delicate balance of patience and urgency.

It’s really a simple concept.

• Be most urgent with what you can control
• Be most patient with what’s out of your control
• Practice a blend of patient-urgency with what you influence

“Your circumstances don’t make it easy or hard to be patient, the degree of patience you exercise is what makes your circumstances easier or harder to work with.”

So, what’s the benefit? Let’s look at what falls into these categories first, then understand where the greatest achievement for medical communications agencies can come from.

With what’s IN Your Control: Practice Urgency

• Preparation
• Keeping promises
• Addressing any conflict
• Leading the team and your clients through a process
• Dealings with other agencies and 3rd party partners
• Managing expectations
• Educating yourself, your team, and your clients
• Developing skills
• Product/Therapeutic area knowledge
• Promptness of your responses
• How you make others feel

With what’s OUT of Your Control: Practice Patience

• The response time of others
• Broken promises by others
• Delays due to regulatory bureaucracy or setbacks
• “Bad luck” circumstances that arise
• Changes in client teams
• If others perceive value in your product or service
• Other people’s opinions and biases
• How others feel

With what you Can Influence: Practice Patient-Urgency

• How a customer views the problem
• Opportunities for collaboration
• Another person(s) trust level with you
• The level of understanding someone has regarding a recommended solution
• Someone’s motivation level to make a change or implement something new
• How other people make others feel

In general, a degree – a modest degree – of impatience is a good quality within medical communications, particularly in a pre-launch phase. Who wants a team sitting around waiting? No one. So, let’s exercise “urgency” in what can be controlled and in what can be influenced.

Problems with unfettered impatience arise when our urgency is not matched by those we are attempting to move along.

When this happens too often, or with the wrong buyer, trust levels go down and defenses go up. Our customers’ (and those of their customers, the HCPs) decisions are largely out of our control, so patience in these moments should be applied.

As an aside, it’s perhaps because of this mismatch that so many product launches don’t immediately show overwhelming, blockbuster success. With just a little patience, applied with appropriate urgency, is used we often see the bend in the trend that probably should have been acceptable from the beginning – or at least expectations should have been managed/tempered to not allow such an off-base forecast.

When we stay urgent on what we can control it will almost always lead to a greater focus on activities and tasks that are inherently higher payoff. This will drive more opportunities for trust, leading to results and a track record that makes it easier to be patient within the future. When urgency is applied to every promise made, action item to be completed, and knowledge displayed trust is built. This will increase the chances of positive outcomes more frequently.

The bottom line is this: Staying urgent with what you control will lead to more opportunities for relationship and trust-building. Being patient with what is out of your control will build deeper levels of trust and keep communication lines open more often than not, enriching and improving on relationships.

I am not particularly optimistic that the model I am espousing will take firm hold and become mainstream, even if it should, and even if it my hasten a paradigm shift away from the Tik-Tokiness of our 2020 existence. I am not, as I noted before, always successful and have to be rigorous and disciplined in my approach. We all have far too many external forces pushing and goading us toward impatience on all fronts that obscure a more deliberate and intentional approach. If everything is viewed as urgent, aka on demand, then there is no room to turn down the volume, let alone change the media. 

Despite my own or Donald Trump’s rants and rails against it, Tik Tok isn’t going away. It may vanish because of political stratagems, but a newer version will be close on its heels and the future state will be chock full with a panoply of facsimiles to it.

Others are already waiting in the wings; in fact, we have to recognize Tik Tok for what it is: really just the evolution of Vine that came before it and died less than a quaint decade ago. The tech march forward and evolution of our social media sensibilities will invariably introduce something to either take its place completely or tinker with its user experience and usher in another service/platform, perhaps one that is even more short-spanned in media delivery.

Yet, we all could benefit from finding a healthy balance of patience and urgency – regarding them not as opposing forces but rather as guiding principles. It certainly couldn’t hurt.

I don’t write this to totally disparage Tik Tok (though in my house I could do without the loop of one micro-refrain from Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” or Jason Derulo’s “Savage Love Remix” constantly overlaid on an increasingly sophisticated choreography). If anything, I write of it only partially jaded.

Tik Tok is a symptom of the larger disease that has ravaged our minds and pushed impulsivity and impatience to a pandemic level. That said, I can’t control it at a population health level, so critiques are mostly akin to that of an old man clamoring “get off of my lawn.” However, in recognizing that it’s something largely out of my control, I can and have developed patience for it and will welcome its eventual demise.

I guess the thing I can control is the hours it is in front of me and to which my wife and kids are engrossed by it. I did, with great urgency, append my own sort of ban and prohibit it from the dinner table. I may have deluded myself into believing it to be controlled…I am a father of daughters after all. But the urgency to set its limits did achieve some modicum of sanity for me. Even if it comes in a collection of accumulated 12-second reprieves.

For me, I will be patiently waiting for whatever is next…

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