095 – How to Tell the IDEMS Story

Hi and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name’s David Stern and I’m here today with Kate Fleming, fellow director at IDEMS. Hi Kate.

[00:00:16] Kate: Hi David.

[00:00:18] David: It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, but I’m really keen to discuss how we tell our story because it’s something we’ve really struggled with and you’re helping us. But you found it hard too, which was rather a relief to me. It isn’t just me being useless, it is hard.

[00:00:39] Kate: No, it is hard and, I mean, I would say this is across many businesses, but there’s always a lot of listening. So if you just come in guns blazing the odds are you’re going to tell the story wrong, you’re going to miss something. So there’s always a period where you’re just discovering. But there is definitely more complexity, and there are things that seem like they are not related, and at first glance can feel all over the place.

But in fact, there’s a lot of relationship, everything is linked, everything has interplay, work on one project actually ends up informing work on another project, there are all kinds of things, so how do you make somebody see that much more efficiently, so they don’t have to spend three to six months talking to team members and getting to the bottom of things to really be like, oh, I get it. It all fits together. So yes, that is a challenge. Yeah.

[00:01:30] David: I think you’re articulating your own journey, I think a little bit there. But there is also this element that you did understand very quickly compared to other people. In fact, you’re one of the few people who understood before you went on that long journey quite well what we’re about. And yet I wasn’t telling my story very well then. So maybe you could just talk through a bit.

[00:01:53] Kate: I think I was in the unique position of having been on that same journey myself. So I had seen all of the problems with existing technology, I’d understood social problems and the complexity of trying to develop innovation in relation to social problems, the quite collaborative teams and stakeholders you need to bring into participation.

So there are all of these things at the moment you really go down the path I think of really any social problem. I don’t think it’s unique to any particular one. The moment you’re trying to solve something in social complexity, that’s a really hard problem. There are quite common problems, and particularly in relation to layering in tech.

You either don’t have the tech, or existing technology just can’t work in too many contexts. Or it works, but it’s exploitative. There are all kinds of variables where you immediately bump up against all these problems. But just to tell somebody that is very different from living it and experiencing it and having really tried to make something work.

It’s like, okay, there’s gotta be something I’m just missing here. And then at some point you realise no, I’m not. So when we met, and I always tell the story of when I presented on what I was working on.

[00:03:10] David: Yeah.

[00:03:11] Kate: You were the one person in the audience who just instantly got it, who instantly saw other applications who, yeah, I think there is just a lived experience there that unless you’ve been in the trenches on it, you can’t… It’s just very hard to really grasp.

[00:03:27] David: Well, but here’s the key thing, because there’s two things you’ve said. There’s one, which is the fact that you had a whole load of lived experience before you could understand our story, and then you needed another three to six months.

[00:03:41] Kate: No, okay, so I didn’t need that time, but I think it is worth being patient, because there are always little details, and there’s nuance, and it’s not every problem is alike in the same way. And I think it’s also, there are places where I did see actually these are different, but I wanted to confirm that before I just was making that assumption.

So I always think there’s an element of patience, which I think we see in all of the projects we work on is, if you’re working on a normal tech project, it’s like, how do we get this to market in six months? Everything is on this timeline that’s so escalated and expedited and just hurry.

And actually a lot of this is just, you know, when you’re working on hard problems, there is an element of patience and testing and, are we stepping correctly? I don’t want to introduce new harms. I don’t want to mess something up. So I think I brought that same thinking to this. And in the end, many of my original assumptions have been confirmed, but I’m still glad that I was patient on the journey. Yeah.

[00:04:47] David: I guess the thing I really appreciate in what you’re drawing out there is this issue of patience, because it’s one which I feel is central and it’s one of the things that I found hard to learn because everybody talks about these urgent problems and they are urgent problems and if you don’t deal with them now they get worse.

And so there is this urgency and that need for patience. To be able to say no, actually, if we do run, sometimes not sometimes, we’re most likely to not be getting it right. We need to be able to step back and understand how to be, to deal with the urgency, but in a way which is actually sensitive to the complexities. Because otherwise you can create harm as you’ve articulated quite clearly.

[00:05:38] Kate: No, and I think that’s why when we’ve talked about a lot of this, I think the thing that has emerged for both of us is one of the big differentiators for IDEMS when it comes to tech is really that research layer. How are we building research, validation, clinical trials basically, and randomised controls, and all these things that are not in the normal world of tech.

It’s not how you think. It’s like, I identified this problem. We know what’s best. I’m an expert. I’m going to come in. I’m going to solve it. And this is very different. It’s very much, we’re going to do this on a very small scale. We’re going to do this as ethically as possible. Yeah, it’s because these are consequential interventions.

We were just on a call where it’s what’s the greatest harm? The greatest harm is suicide. It’s like you’re introducing a mental health thing, but if that mental health intervention doesn’t work, it’s not just oh, we didn’t get our product out in time. It’s no, literally there are life and death stakes. And so I think that sensitivity to the stakes involved that really, it’s a different calculation altogether.

[00:06:42] David: Yeah, and I think the thing which I really appreciate about the sort of the way you’ve come in and helped us to think about the story, because I always got criticised because it was all too complicated. And in my mind it is all quite complicated. And the thing which I still struggle with is I understand the need and the desire to tell simple stories. But I also see the danger of simple stories. It’s exactly that element, if you’ve got a really simple story, why don’t you just run with it?

Once the story is simple, you can run. And actually that’s where the danger lies. It’s that… balance of being able to be patient. And I don’t know, I still haven’t got around this yet.

[00:07:31] Kate: Yeah, I think the challenge, I would say this is true for many technical products, the challenge is to tell a simple story that resonates with people, that actually sends them, it does enough work to pique their interest, to get them interested. And then they actually are going to be motivated to follow a journey of like, oh, this is something I’m curious to learn more about, I want to explore.

So it’s not that your goal is to reductively tell this really easy, simplified story, and that’s all you need to know. It’s how do you make it much more accessible for someone who doesn’t know anything about any of this to grab their interest and now they’re curious and maybe you give them a few different ways in or it’s like they might be interested in math, they might, but they might also be more interested in social problems or maybe they’re interested in child abuse.

Like what is the thing that’s going to capture their attention. And then everyone in the end, if they take that journey, should converge with the same insights. You end up becoming interested in math and complexity because you were interested in child abuse. You end up becoming interested in child abuse because you were interested in the application of the math and complexity. So it’s just that you can’t assume that everyone starts from the same place of being interested.

And I think the unique thing that we had is we speak completely different languages, but because we had both converged, we’d done in our own ways that journey.

[00:09:01] David: Yeah.

[00:09:01] Kate: We actually spoke a completely common shared language. Even though sometimes when we dig deep, I’m like, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And I will say something. I said something recently and you said, I don’t know what that means. It was something, it was like that moment where I realised, oh yeah, there’s something that I see quite clearly in the way my brain works.

[00:09:19] David: Yeah.

[00:09:19] Kate: And you have the same thing all the time, where it’s just, it’s like a beautiful mind, you see this whole mathematical complexity. And I had to trust. But yeah.

[00:09:31] David: There still being that element of trust, but having enough common ground to be able to build that trust, to know that it’s not that once you scratch under the surface that there’s big divergence. No there’s strong convergence in terms of the way we’re going and how we’re trying to communicate.

And there’s a big divergence in terms of the language that we own and how we came to where we are. So I’m conscious that I was keen to get into this sort of question of why is it so hard, and it might not just be our stories, but more generally, we’re in a time where there are these sort of crises all over the place coming up.

And it does seem to me that part of the problem is the stories that are told are too simple. And so part of, I guess, what I’m keen on understanding or digging into a bit more with you is how do we tell more complex stories? How do we live with nuance a bit more than I think is sometimes common?

[00:10:38] Kate: Oh, I mean, this is like Neil Postman and people like that who’ve talked about the medium is the message. And I think a lot of what we are working through is obviously technology has been designed for simplification. It increasingly prioritises, you know, 30 second messages in a video where you’re also charismatic and hot. And it’s the ability to tell a complex story to elevate people who don’t fit a certain aesthetic.

It’s like all of these ways that the message is just not getting through. And so I think a lot of what we think about is how could we design the medium to be both captivating but also take people on more complex journeys where we’re not trying to pull you back into like, here’s this 500 page novel that I need you to read to fully understand this concept.

Okay, I recognize people have changed, they engage with things differently. But how can I recognize that and still build a medium and recognizing that technology is where we are, that digital tools are going to be how we communicate, at least in large part? How do we design those to serve those more nuanced stories and complex conversations?

[00:11:59] David: That’s what I realised a year ago and that’s why we started doing the podcasts. That was my only answer to that question! I’m still happy with the podcasts and I’ve enjoyed doing them and I think the IDEMS podcast has a bright future, as I have a softer voice in the future. But I think part of what you’re also saying is that there needs to be not just a medium, but multiple mediums, which fit into this sort of mesh of actually getting people involved, not having to listen to, it’s now over 90 podcast episodes.

[00:12:38] Kate: I think it is the dedicated podcast listener who’s going to listen to all 90 podcasts.

[00:12:45] David: By the time they finish them, there’s going to be a load more.

[00:12:48] Kate: So yes, and I am a dedicated podcast listener. I love podcasts, but right, that’s certainly not for everybody. It’s one medium that for some people is great, for other people is less great. And I know last year, and I have heard about this last year at our team meeting, you said to the team, oh, I want everyone to record a video. And that created like chaos because people on our team are just thinking, I’m not a creator, I don’t want to create a video. And not to mention, I have to be on camera. So now I have to think about how I look and be able to look good while I’m being articulate and telling a good story. It’s just like creates panic. I have to say, when I heard that, I said, whoa, that sounds horrible.

[00:13:33] David: Those videos still don’t exist a year later.

[00:13:36] Kate: I know. And they never will. But somebody, or some section of our team, and I think this is often what you see, is either you will see someone who steps up, who really is interested in creating that kind of content, and so they get interested in owning that, doing that, or we figure out how to make it really easy.

And it’s funny, I’ve been following this on the New York times. They started introducing little video interviews with their reporters where the reporter will do like their films, but they’re talking about the story they’ve been working on. And I find them quite, at first, I was like, oh, this is pandering, but actually they’re really good. You get a sense of the person, you get a sense of their work, you start to see really the work that goes into reporting on these stories, because people will talk about the history of the reporting they did that really doesn’t fit in an article, and wouldn’t fit in a documentary, or something where it’s like you have a very polished story you want to tell.

[00:14:33] David: Yeah.

[00:14:33] Kate: It’s just very focused. So that would be a good example of where there’s a lot of interesting directions to be pushed in for storytelling.

[00:14:44] David: This was exactly my idea a year ago, where actually all of our staff are doing really interesting things and they’re interesting people. So if only they told their stories of what they’re doing, it would be really interesting. I’d be interested.

[00:14:57] Kate: But I think we need to, that would be an example where we need to make it easy for them. We need to figure out how to set up the format where it’s okay, just come sit down. I have these questions for you. You’re just going to talk. We’ll edit it, don’t worry about looking great, or maybe do worry about looking great, I don’t know. I do feel like the shallowness of video is tough where it’s like, yeah, I don’t know.

That’s not necessarily fair because I do, when I’m watching someone who’s just really smart and talking about something, it’s so compelling. So I think there’s a counter case to be made that when the content is actually really substantial and interesting, you spend a lot less time thinking is someone’s makeup perfect or whatever. So it doesn’t have to be shallow as I guess, my basic point.

That also relates to incentives, where you are incentivizing certain kinds of clicks and certain kinds of, you know, certain things are more universally appealing in a way that’s going to drive profits instead of getting into some niche kind of channel that’s not for everyone.

[00:16:00] David: Yeah. Well, this has been fun, as always.

[00:16:03] Kate: I just realised, yeah, we probably could talk an hour more on this topic. We barely scratched the surface.

[00:16:11] David: Not only we could, but of course we do have our full team meeting coming up, where we are going to try and get people to tell their stories, and we are going to try and eventually tell our story. If you’re listening now, then heads up, at some point in the not too distant future, after over 100 podcast episodes, we may finally learn how to tell the IDEMS story.

[00:16:37] Kate: Yes.

[00:16:38] David: And the fact that it’s hard doesn’t worry me anymore because, I’m not alone.

[00:16:44] Kate: Yeah, no, and it’s going to be fine. And the website, I will say the website redesign is happening right now. A lot of that work is happening behind the scenes of how do we tell this story well. So, stay tuned.

[00:16:56] David: Yeah, this is why it’s such an appropriate time to have this discussion, because right now we are still at this point where our website doesn’t tell our story. We don’t know how to tell our story and so on. But, because of the work you’ve been doing behind the scenes, because of where we’re getting, I am confident that this will be in the past and we’ll look back at this episode and say, oh, telling the IDEMS story is easy.

[00:17:20] Kate: Yeah.

[00:17:20] David: Let’s ask Kate.

[00:17:23] Kate: Hopefully I can then move my energy to other things. But right now, yeah, this is a big, important, yeah, it’s needed. It’s needed because I think we’re all exhausted sometimes with trying to do the work of what is IDEMS. Like, whenever I get asked that question, what’s IDEMS? I’m like, oh, there’s a little sigh. I’m like, oh god, okay, here we go. Because it either, yeah, it’s either you tell a longer story or you realise you’ve only scratched the surface and someone didn’t fully get it.

So I want to just be able to say go start with the website and then let’s talk, or listen to the podcast, find your way in. But also I suspect that going down the path of getting the website right will get us to that elevator pitch that lands where we’re like, yeah, that actually feels like a great encapsulation of what we are.

[00:18:15] David: One day we’ll get there. Anyway, I hope this episode, if anyone is struggling, to tell your own story, whatever, I hope this episode helps reassure you it can take ages, and maybe eventually you’ll meet people who can help you along the way.

Thank you, it’s been fun.

[00:18:35] Kate: Thanks David.