52 weeks, 52 words - Week 47: Intelligence

Clients can be morons.

They don’t know anything about what it takes to actually do the work we do in medical communications. They don’t appreciate the intricacies of Veeva PromoMats or all of the ways that our creative teams’ concept to design the work can bring forth a multitude of well-thought-out options – and they don’t seem to understand the obtuseness of “Frankenstein-ing” from the various concepts to form some amalgamation. And they don’t seem to appreciate why creating clinical content but not proactively planning for channels and distribution ought to happen in parallel. No, instead they ask sophomoric questions and get hung up on minutiae that couldn’t matter less to ROI but ultimately paralyzes them with indecision or hyper-focus on the ephemera. Yes, it’s true…the ignorance of our clients sometimes can be truly staggering.

Except, none of that is true.

Or all of that is also true of many of us if we flip the script. We, too, can be absolutely moronic in equal measure in our full appreciation or understanding of the complexities of bringing a drug to market or the pressures that come from efforts to remain competitive despite budget cuts. Or to the regulatory pressures that come from a label change and the FDA breathing down your neck that the fair balance in a slide deck is in jeopardy because the KOL speakers that have been trained are glossing over key sections of the label’s safety section. Or that the slide deck that was created for a 45-minute lecture is now ballooning to 75 slides and the compliance officers are threatening action due to the risk of information being omitted because participation is limited after the first 10 minutes in virtual peer-to-peer.

Meanwhile, the marketers we are banging our head against the wall over are themselves banging their heads against the wall because they are bemoaning the perceived lack of intelligence amongst their colleagues in the sales force or amongst medical affairs, or amongst perhaps, even the HCPs who form the core audience for all of our collected efforts.

I thought about this week’s theme and immediately was drawn to a famous quote attributed to Albert Einstein’s about genius. Einstein (or some anonymous author) posited that, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will lives its whole life believing that it is stupid."

Whether or not it is an actual quote of Einstein’s or an allegorical construct derived out of the realm of Aesop’s fables, the part that I fixate on is not in the polarity of genius and stupidity, but in the aspect of judging.

Intelligence, in a straightforward way, is the capacity and ability to take in information. But real intelligence is the action taken upon receipt of that information.

While we may judge our clients to be morons sometimes, isn’t the onus on us then to communicate better or to work tirelessly to be better teachers? Our clients may not appreciate the realities of our workstream, but isn’t the burden on us, then, to shine a light for them and to offer a steady flow of data and perspective to fill that void, thereby widening their intake of information and increasing their overall intelligence? It should be…but too often, all too often, our first impulse is to bang our fist and clamor on about how the other party just doesn’t understand.

We all have so much to learn and being judgmental can shut us off from truth and wisdom. More than that, being judgmental not only siphons off our desire to share information but to receive information ourselves.

So, instead of the potentially errant attribution of the first quote to Albert Einstein, I meandered to a different quote that I can anchor to as I sound my own barbaric yawp.

Intelligence can be summed up in a couplet from Walt Whitman: “Be curious, not judgmental”

Admittedly, I didn’t know of the quote above from having read verse from Walt Whitman, but it came to me through an unexpected source, Ted Lasso, the uber-positive, “fish” out of water protagonist on the eponymous Apple+ TV show, played by Jason Sudeikis.

Without spoiling the premise of the show, this Yankee football coach is thrust onto the scene of English Premier League football and expected to find his way. And hilarity ensues.

Lasso proves that determination and transparent fidelity to action may not always lead to victory on the pitch, but it can transcend the two similarly named sports and break down barriers of broken communications.

We owe it to our clients to take a similar approach and encourage improved dialogue – we are in communications after all. But, if we are judging and they are judging and it’s an endless carousel of judgement, no real learning will ever come about for anyone, ourselves or our clients. The turns of that screw will literally just bore each of each deeper into the ground and further entrench our beliefs and biases, thereby encouraging greater levels of ignorance.

The greatest thing we can offer our clients to increase their intelligence is a curiosity to stoke our own intelligence.

Instead of judging the lack of knowledge from our parapet we should demonstrate curiosity to allow a wider flow of information coming our direction. Armed with that intelligence we may see the world differently and change our approach or our recommendations because we aren’t quite so ignorant ourselves.

Our minds are meaning-making machines, constantly making assumptions, judgements, and looking for patterns. This is not an inherently bad trait – it kept humans safe as we evolved for a very long time. However, interpersonally these same tendencies may not serve us as well. Our internal narratives can be filled with bias, can be self-destructive, or can result in a false impression that others are simply morons when, more likely, they may only be ill-informed.

At the end of the day, our judgments are the lens through which we understand the world and that lens is foggy at best, opaque at worst.

So, what would happen if we replaced our judgments with curiosity? What would that client-agency world look like then? And what would a workplace like that feel like?

The more we learn about something ourselves, the more we open ourselves up to different points of view, and the more we question, the more truths and wisdoms we will learn. Leaders in medical communications must continue to pursue intelligence gathering and dissemination as the world continues its fast pace of change. It serves each of us to be more curious, to not judge, and to not rely on what has worked in the past.

Armed with more information, er intelligence, we are certain to make the impact for which we are all striving – from the agency, to the marketer via the sales rep to the HCP and, ultimately to the patient.

One tiny bit of intelligence procured by choosing to be curious rather than judgmental could be the droplet that transforms the dialogue. It could, quite literally, be the rain that bursts the levees and pours water out across the valley.

Soon after, I suppose it’s possible you might even see a flooded area where barely a tree top pokes out above the waterline…and somewhere on a submerged branch some trout may find its new habitat.

That would certainly be a curious sight…

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