How this one image changed the way we tell stories to each other

The first time I pitched storytelling to a pharma, biotech or healthcare company, I knew within minutes that they’d say no. It’s that word. Stories. ‘We don’t do stories,’ I could telepathically hear them think. ‘Our work is too serious for that.’

That was eight years ago. Since then - especially since about 2019 - I’ve worked for some of the world’s biggest, most innovative and specialised life sciences companies.

It’s not me that’s changed – the pitch is still journalistic storytelling. They’ve changed. And I’m convinced that it’s mainly because of one thing.

Covid. (That's a close-up of the Sars-cov-2 protein above)

Suddenly, the world’s biggest story – every second of every minute of every day in every country, community and family in the entire world, at the exact same time – was healthcare. Science, R&D, nursing, medical affairs, compliance and regulatory issues, funding, sales and marketing, the NHS, tubes and pills and machines that went beep, pharma companies and people in white coats. Everything that was in our peripheral vision was centre stage. Five years on, it still is.

And because these stories have dominated the attention of people who didn’t really ‘get’ healthcare (or at least what goes on behind the scenes), it’s had a ripple effect across life sciences industries. People want to know more and so organisations have had to change the way they communicate and also invest more in training those communicstion skills. To each other as much as the wider public.

Government, internal comms, PR and ‘professional’ media have always been the most obvious vehicles for this but nothing is as powerful as social media, where experts are invariably drowned out by louder and – especially during covid – less trustworthy voices.

From my perspective, working with businesses and leaders who need to engage fellow professionals and the wider public, the industry has changed its opinion about storytelling. Because the work is too serious not to engage. When the world wants to know what you do – and they do – you have to start exchanging and translating information in more compelling ways. Internally and externally.

Whether that's a presentation or slide deck, thought leadership or a speech, a conversation at a conference or even an email. You have to be able to find, make and tell better stories.

The pandemic and its repercussions smashed down the carefully-constructed barriers that multiple healthcare industries had become a little too comfortable with.

Just as a covid-scarred world has embraced science – or at least grown hungry for its stories – so healthcare professionals, scientists and business leaders have embraced a new way of communicating.

Storytelling.

It’s why I’m thrilled to have been asked by Nigel Robbins and Ian Chamberlain at the Life Science Access Academy to provide a snapshot of how journalistic storytelling can help to elevate the influence of pharma and healthcare experts. In their own organisations and among their key external stakeholders.

The newsroom is a brilliant means of gathering data, distilling what matters, packaging it up in a way that grabs attention, and then making people care enough so that they are inspired to make decisions. Whether it’s tabloid or broadsheet, experts or generalists, words or pictures, journalists find, make and then tell stories which create impact.

The more work that I’ve done in pharma, science and healthcare, the more convinced I am that their stories are among the most important we can tell. And yet because they’re often so complex and the ‘so what’ is buried beneath a mountain of data, patients, investors, networks of decision-makers and even colleagues, don’t care enough about them.

That’s why storytelling is more serious than you think.

It helps you to see what matters.

It would be great to see you there - you can find more information at https://app.livestorm.co/lsa-3/202473/