When I was young there was a programme called Jackanory.
It was a children’s programme on every day at something like 4pm and the presenter would sit with a book and read a story.
Everything we teach our children from a younger age is with a story and it’s interesting that everything we teach ourselves following on from that is with a story.
I was listening to the Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett as he interviewed Daniel Pink and they returned to that situation again.
And so, yesterday I got to speak at the Royal College of Physicians in London for the 5th time.
I’ll assume it’s the last time I’ll get to do that, in such an extraordinary and wonderful venue right next to Regent’s Park, with a history where some of the greatest physicians of our entire medical density have graced the floors, spoken to people and taught how to be a doctor.
For a short little while at the front of that room I got to tell a story and my story was about how people who provide sinus grafting for patients can take 75% off the treatment time.
The fine detail of that is probably irrelevant and certainly irrelevant over 30 minutes because you can’t reallyteach in that time, but you can tell the story quickly.
And so, against all the principles of modern teaching in clinical settings, I just start with the punchline and then tell the joke.
The reason we do that is because people are interested in stories and not really interested in graphs or statistics or reams of scientific references.
In my short, shallow and relatively inexperienced journey into clinical research, it is a much, much more complicated world that you could possibly imagine, and the politics, incentives and provers incentives are ridiculous.
For this lecture alone I could pull out hundreds of references and just present them over a 30-minute period in rapid fire in order to try to justify ‘my position’ or I could tell a story and ask people to collaborate with us going forwards to get more detail, more information and to help us to make things better and different.
Everybody who left my lecture will understand that I think it’s possible in almost every single case to reduce the healing time for a patient in sinus grafting from 12 – 3 months and if they want to dig deeper, they can find out how and why to do that.
Most of the time, in the world we live in, we have very limited window of opportunity to get people’s attention to make a bigger difference.
The best way to do that is to tell a story.
Blog Post Number - 3049
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