Collaboration and Humor in Thought Leadership| Jerome Pagani & Craig Joseph | 442

Let's talk comedy duos. Today, Key Peele, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Penn Teller. And if we join Mr. Peabody in the Wayback Machine and set the dials for the past century, we find duos like Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, Abbott Costello. Comedy duos have a way of making the invisible visible. So in today's episode, I want to explore the concepts of collaboration and humor in thought leadership. I've asked two guests to join me. Craig Joseph is the Chief Medical Officer for Nordic Consulting, and Jerome Pagani is the head of thought leadership there. I'm eager to talk with them about making collaboration work and how they weave insights and humor together throughout their body of thought leadership work. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin.

Welcome to the show, Craig and Jerome. I'm glad to have both of you here and eager to talk with you.

Thanks for having us.

I'm excited to be here.

So Jerome, I want to start with a question for you on collaboration, because thought leadership on its own can be curation. Maturation, and deployment. But one of the things that I see between the two of you is a very active collaboration across all three aspects. So how does it work from your perspective? And then I'll get Craig's perspective.

To me, the collaboration process is really where your ideas get honed before you take them out for prime time. One of the things I like about collaborating with Craig, and I hate to admit that there's anything I like, but one of the things I like about collaborating with Craig is that we have similar but not completely overlapping backgrounds, which means we can establish kind of a common understanding, but we don't share necessarily a common framework. And that means the framework that I put forward gets challenged, the framework that he puts forward gets challenged. And there's lots of really good stuff that happens in the gaps between our two different approaches to a topic.

So Jerome, to clarify, your training is in?

I am a behavioral neuroscientist by training. I spent about 5 and a half years at National Institutes of Health doing basic research and moved on from there to consulting.

Well, and now, Craig, your perspective both from your training as well as then going to the question on collaboration. How were you trained?

Sure. So, uh, well, my undergraduate degree is computer science, which is a little unusual because I ended up at medical school. Medical school and became a pediatrician. And I think that Jerome and I, I think part of the key is complementary. We're complementary. There are areas that he's quite focused in that I only have really a superficial understanding with and some real-world clinical experience that Jerome doesn't have that I have. And so I think that's been one of the keys of our successful collaboration is filling in for where the other has a little bit less training or experience. I think one example that comes to mind quickly is that there were some studies that I was referencing that supported some point I was trying to make, and I was very excited and showed Jerome and said, look at the study. It says what I want it to say. And he said, he responded, did you even read the methods section? And my response was, what is the methods section? And so that I thought that was a little bit, you know, from my clinical experience is, yeah, I just look at the, I look at the conclusions and I like what I see. And Jerome's forced me to be more analytical, which I appreciate, but continue to fight against.

And there's an intellectual sparring as a third-party observer that I've seen the two of you as you work through ideas. And it starts with you get quicker off the blank page by intersecting with each other, but more importantly, that sort of push and pull and seeing different perspectives, I think really helps sharpen an idea faster.

Yeah, I definitely think that's true. I like to blurt out things and then Jerome tears them apart and then And vice versa. So again, it does happen that sometimes it just comes out perfectly well-formed, a well-formed, well-supported thought leadership piece, but that's uncommon. And so anything I write, Jerome generally gets first ability to edit and vice versa.

So—

Go ahead, Jerome.

Yeah, I was just going to agree. I think stylistically we're very close to one another. So most of our conversations end up being substantive rather than focusing on form. And that ability to very quickly dive, understand and dive to the heart of what the other person is saying and play devil's advocate or flip it around and either support and go back and support that original assertion. I think has been very helpful for us.

So the two of you have used many different communication forms, short-form video and conversations with each other, as well as incorporating humor into the pieces. And one of the things that I want to ask you about is where does humor fit in thought leadership and why do you use it?

Well, humor is funny, Bill. Did you know that?

Just not in Craig's hands.

Jerome?

What I would say is that healthcare is a really serious business. Our clients are out there literally saving lives every day. And you've probably seen every article published out there about burnout and just how stressful it is and has been for the last 2.5 years on top of how stressful it is just in the ordinary day-to-day. I think humor is a little bit of a balm, so we don't use it to make light of a topic or any sensitive content. We use it just as a little bit of add-on there to try and give somebody information and then a little bit something extra that's kind of feel-good.

So can you give me an example of where you've used humor in an unexpected way, contextual humor or situational humor. Craig, I know you've done some pieces that you've had fun with.

Sure. You know, I think the way we use it most commonly right now is we have a little video series where Jerome and I talk about for about a minute and a half or so, 2 minutes, a medical or a healthcare-related issue, and it's typically pretty serious. Some of it has been very serious, but we always end it with a little bit of what we call shtick, a little skit near the end for a few seconds where we make fun of ourselves or we make fun of the situation. And I think that's one of the keys, of course, is that we're not making fun of anyone else. We're making fun of ourselves. You know, he's got the PhD, I have the MD. And in this particular series that we call Doc Talk, it always ends with one of us kind of acting a little silly and the other trying to correct them. So, and we make fun of, you know, the stereotypes of the PhD as an academician who's wearing a smoking jacket with elbow patches. And I'm the clinician who's busy asking lots of crazy questions to medical students and trainees. And so I think that no matter who you are, professionals are fine with poking fun at themselves, and especially when you're calling out traits or characteristics that everyone knows are really there but we don't generally talk about. Jerome and I like to talk about those.

Yeah, that natural tension between, or maybe it's a good-natured rivalry between MDs and PhDs has been sort of a rich field for us.

Well, and to layer onto that, I think because you're calling out not only yourself, but part of the community that you are a part of and also speaking to, there is a sense of shared experience and humor. Where it is, and I've seen the examples of this, more joyful and certainly not cruel in any way, right?

Yeah. And I think adding just a touch of humor adds some, it helps us to differentiate ourselves. And so just to give you another example of a piece that we just did, I was interviewing a fellow physician here at Nordic, while he was barbecuing chicken in a professional kitchen in Kansas City. And so, it's kind of ridiculous. The background is just ridiculous. We're both wearing suits and we have all the accoutrement that one would have when they're working in a barbecue joint. Yet, we're talking about very serious topic and what we really are seeing in healthcare. Trying to predict some of the things that in the future. So if you just look at the words that we're saying, it's completely straightforward, just like anyone else. But we kind of add a little twist by making the surroundings a little silly and unbelievable.

And I think one of the things that we have to do is recognize that even if we have great ideas for our audience, we've got to find a way to catch their attention. And heavy white paper or a long-form piece isn't necessarily the way to do that. There's very much a spoonful of sugar piece with humor. And humor's subjective, but I remember a project that we did years ago where we were doing content creation specifically on a topic that was quite serious in stress and burnout. But before we went into studio to record, we actually had professional comedian and writers look over the script and go, "Where can we add a little bit of levity into this? Because otherwise this is just going to be too dry." And so how do you bring back that entertainment rather than making it feel like an obligation?

Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think there's a place for long-form content for sure, but most of the ideas that we want to get across are digestible enough that they could be done in sort of a short-form format. And that little bit of humor adds the hook that people know, come to expect, builds a little bit of trust that it's not going to be big and heavy and plodding and sort of a commitment to come and engage with the content.

So Jerome, as the PhD who enjoys reading the methods section of articles, how much of a mental shift was that to move from that long-form rigorous sort of documentation to short-form for you? What was that transformation like?

Yeah. So in writing, it has always been a challenge because you tend to try to write everything like it's an academic paper and it just looks and reads like the sort of stilted academic paper it is when you put that many citations in. In terms of speaking, I would say that I was challenged early on to really think about who my audience was and make sure that whatever I was interested in talking about would resonate with them. And that was probably one of the best lessons I got sort of early on in my academic career was just that ability to really try and tune into your audience. And that constant challenge has helped me move away from being sort of overly academic in tone. Although I think you could just have to listen to me and Craig, you can easily tell which one of us is it, which, so it's still there. It's certainly.

So let's go, Craig, to you recording, because I know you do a lot of audio and video recording. Do you have the audience in mind or how are you shaping the conversation so that you're connecting either through camera or through recording?

I just try to place myself in the audience, Bill, actually. I mean, it's just, I don't want to produce content that I don't want to read. And so I'm always trying to kind of come up with specific actionable recommendations if I'm putting out, if I'm writing a blog post. You know, again, trying to, if I were on the receiving end of this, how would it read to me? How would this video appeal to me? How could I actually use it every day to do my job or to take care of, you know, to help hospitals function better? And so it's straightforward. I'm writing for me. And I think I'm pretty good at judging how most of my peers use the tools that we're creating and the thought leadership that we're creating. So I don't put much thought into it. If I like it, then going to be something that I'm going to put out. And it won't resonate with everyone, of course, but I think it resonates with a good chunk of people in my position.

And you said something that I want to underline there, which is I create things that I want to consume. One of the things that I see across thought leadership is your audience is never going to be more engaged than you are with the piece. So whether it's that video recording of you having the conversation about the topic while you're at the barbecue joint or translating a piece of academic research into something usable, if it's not sparking you, it's just going to feel like a trudge the entire way and your audience is going to pick that up. So Jerome, you talk about standing up a thought leadership as a function. And I'd like to explore a little bit what that journey was in terms of setting up thought leadership as a function at Nordic. What were some of the priorities and how did you and Craig come to collaborating? So let's get to the origin story.

So the origin story is actually fascinating. They had hired Craig to do some thought leadership and then 6 months later said, 'You know what, we really need somebody else.' And that's, uh, no, that's not far off actually.

Um, and so I'll take it from there. I was actually hired to do thought leadership because we really weren't doing any at Nordisk at the time. And I thought I knew what thought leadership was, Bill. It was blog posts, and I know how to do those, and I'm I can inject a little humor and say some intelligent things every now and then, and that's what I thought it was, and there wasn't anything more. And so, yeah, it became quickly apparent that I was not an expert in thought leadership. I knew enough to be dangerous, and so we did go looking for someone who could add some of that experience, and that was Jerome. Sounds better when I said it.

And Craig's being modest, but he is a natural thought leader. I mean, the content that he was producing was very much aligned to what any thought leadership program would be happy to have. I think the piece that was missing there was he hadn't seen it at work in a larger organization and in a bigger context. So when I came in, part of the journey was really convincing people, and Craig got it right away once I said it, that the Message and the medium were not the same thing to try and convince folks that what we were doing was not getting up and talking about how great our solutions are or how fantastic the company is. Those have a place and are absolutely fantastic, but our job was to really connect with the issues and values that resonated with our audience and then to be thinking thoughtfully about how they might want to consume the kinds of things that we were talking about.

So in explaining thought leadership to peers and internal folks, you talk about, okay, there's product marketing, there's brand building and positioning. Thought leadership sits adjacent to each of those. They use some of the same resources to create and some of the same modalities for deployment. One of the challenges will be your audience doesn't necessarily know unless you signal early on in a piece what are they in for, right? Am I gonna get pitched somewhere through this piece? How do you signal to your audience in that case?

What I would say is that when you approach people with the right sort of data right away that informs your point of view, they connect with it and they understand what it is that you're talking about from an issues perspective. And building out from there, I think you've established enough trust that they're willing to continue and engage. And it's a little bit of a journey. You're giving people just enough trust at each point to know that the next piece that they're— next part of the piece that they're continuing on to consume is going to be worth their while. And you don't end it. With a pitch so that you get repeat customers because there's nothing worse than reading, you know, 3 or 4 great paragraphs and all of a sudden it turns into something you weren't expecting. It can be jarring. And again, as you said, thought leadership sits adjacent to branding and marketing and those have their place and they're fantastic and there should be alignment between those functions. But if you are telling people upfront, what we're going to do is we're going to have a conversation that's going to help you think more strategically or give you a bit of information or perspective that you hadn't thought of before, you hadn't put things into quite that frame, then it's going to be, if you transition to something else, that's going to feel like a little bit of a violation of that trust.

So Craig, how would you respond to that question in terms of signaling to the audience? Because I know you're creating a lot of content out there. How do you cue them up early?

Well, as Jerome said at the beginning of the piece, you're signaling. I think it's also equally important to continue with all of the pieces that you create. And so, you know, it's essential that week in and week out folks know that anything that we produce is not going to end with, "And contact us for more information." It's, you know, we're giving you something for nothing and we're doing it week in and week out. And so you kind of— it's a known quantity. It's like Starbucks. No matter where you go, you know what you get. And then if you like it, then that's great. And that's what we're trying to do.

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So Jerome, let me ask you this. We talk about giving something for nothing in thought leadership. What are you giving and to whom?

Yeah, that's actually a great question. And I'll back up and start to say that the thought leadership that we produce is based on research that's very well done and fairly rigorous. And we develop insights from that research that inform our point of view. And what I should say is that what we're offering the folks that we talk to externally is the same thing that we offer our exec team or business line leaders here, which is a way of seeing what's going on in the market or what's coming and a frame for thinking about it that we think is going to lead to a productive series of actions down the road, but it becomes part of a strategic thinking process. So that's the thing that we're giving away is a frame to help think strategically about the kinds of problems that are out there that will lead to some sort of action for an organization. Who we're speaking to are the kinds of people that wrestle with those issues. And the thing is, they may not have time to think about them in day-to-day because everybody is fire drill busy. And so what this does is we offer a chance for them to engage. And because we vary the kind of content and the length of the content and how specific it is, but we offer them a chance to engage where they're at with the time they have and just kind of get that ball rolling. And that can be the start of a conversation with us, or it can just be something that they take away and think about on their own.

And that's something that I think thought leadership does exceptionally well, is the ability to form hypotheses, look into the future and say, what might be and separate the signal from the noise and then be able to distill it back and say, let's take it to this audience now so that they're not ambushed by this in 6 months or a year or 3 years saying, I never thought about that. And so whether you're creating that thought leadership for your internal team, your execs and your line leaders, or an external team, you build a relationship by saying, Here's what we see is coming. Be ready for this. And here's some things to do now. And people remember that and you create trust in a different way. Craig, I want to ask you about the same question I asked Jerome. You talked about something for nothing. For whom?

With what?

Our target with most of our thought leadership are senior leaders at our clients and our prospective clients. And so that's who we write for and that's who we produce for. With what is a little different, I think, if you ask Jerome or myself. Jerome's quite methodical. This is something that you've heard over and over. And so he plans these things out and has calendar and does a lot of work to make sure that things happen in an orderly fashion. And sometimes I follow that, but other times, with what is, hey, this is— I just read an interesting article. And so that's what often— that's how my thought leadership kind of comes about, which is just some individual something. So I'll read an article in in a journal. I'll read— I'll see something in the news that seems relevant or just a little off and off topic, and then I'll try to relate it to something that seems to be something important that folks should be thinking about. And so that's what I'm always trying to do, is kind of weave in to what you're dealing with today some ideas about what's going to be happening tomorrow. And of course, one of the benefits of writing a thought leadership piece is that you're predicting things and you're highlighting things. And you're not saying this is going to happen tomorrow, but you're saying, hey, look at what's happened in the past. Look at where we are now. Seems obvious that in the future, these things might happen. It would probably be prudent if you were running a large healthcare system to be considering these things today. And that's that something for nothing that we've been talking about. And as you mentioned, you didn't ask me the why question, but why is we're trying to get into leadership's head. We want them to be thinking a year from now or 3 years from now, oh, I remember that group or those folks were talking about this. And I remember reading and thinking, oh, that's not relevant for us. And it just happened. So maybe we should— reach out. That's one of the purposes of thought leadership. And so that's the why.

Well, and you've talked about doing things consistently, and I want to come back to that because each of you have been putting out content consistently with different personal brands tied to the overall thought leadership brand. So I know a piece from you, Jerome, is going to have a different look, feel, and style than something produced by Craig, either in written form or in video. And that's okay because you're signaling again, coming back to the signaling, to your audience what to expect. And if they want a more research-driven piece or if they want an impressions and heuristic piece, you can serve the same content and the same insight in different ways.

Yeah, I think that's true. I, I think the one caveat to that is that the types of issues that Craig is drawn to is slightly different from the ones that I am. Mine are probably going to be more analytical and his will be more practical, uh, or mine will be slightly more theoretic and mine will be slightly more theoretical and his will be a little more practical.

And I think that's very much like a journalist covering a beat. If you had a magazine or a newspaper, you wouldn't hire 52 of the same reporter to cover the same beat. You want different perspectives because you're making those connections between data points and saying, if this is true and that is true, well, what Craig is reading and looking at is different than what you're looking at, is reading. And so it's that sense-making through the lenses that you bring, which adds value in the content, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And that becomes part of that larger strategy where the kinds of audiences that you're engaging with is slightly different depending on which thought leader within the organization they're engaged with.

So let's build on this. I know neither of you trained for thought leadership, nor did you train as journalists, and I referenced many journalists do go into thought leadership, behavioral neuroscience, and pediatric medicine. Craig, I'll start with you. What did you learn either in your training or practice of pediatric medicine that you carry forward today into the practice of thought leadership?

So I'm not sure it matters that I'm a pediatrician. I think though that physicians in general are trained to be able to take in a lot of information, try to find out what's important, and then to be able to communicate that information to the different audiences in a cogent way. And so I remember when I was a third-year medical student, that was the first year we were actually in the hospitals or in the clinics, and I would write a progress note in the ICU and it was 3 pages long. And there were lots of words and it took up lots of space and it said absolutely nothing because I didn't really know what was important and what wasn't important. So I threw everything in there. And part of the training of a physician is to take lots of information in and say, these are the essential points. This is why these are the essential points. And then to communicate that out to multiple different audiences, right? So I have to be able to communicate that to my colleague, I have to be able to communicate that to the patient. In my case as a pediatrician, I also have a parent that almost always that I need to communicate with as well. And so I think that's really helped me in this job to be able to find what I think are essential pieces of information and then mold them into a way of that they'll be quickly received and also people won't have to do a lot of processing. Because I've done all the work for them. That's my goal. Hey, this is the information I think will be helpful. This is why, and this is how you can use it in the future. And I give it to them all in a succinct little package. That's the goal. I'm not sure I achieve it all the time.

Distill and make it digestible for your audience. And that's going to differ depending on whether it was another doctor or a patient or a child or a parent. Right. And I think we have to do that in the practice of thought leadership a lot, but we don't necessarily have as sharp of distinction in training of thinking about this is talking to a peer, this is talking to a 5-year-old. We talk about metaphorical, explain it to a 5-year-old. You actually had to, right?

I did. I did.

So Jerome, what did you carry forward from your training in behavioral neuroscience? That makes you a better thought leadership practitioner?

Yeah, there— I would touch on what Craig said and say part of my training was very similar. What we had to be able to do was to explain very complicated topics both to peers, so establish credibility with folks who may have spent quite a bit of time studying that exact thing that you're talking about, but also being able to explain it to undergraduates who may or may not be hungover and actually paying attention to what you're saying. But to be serious about it, it was figuring out what the right level of explanation was for the audience that you were addressing. That was one big thing. I think the other thing was really the importance of collaboration, to come back to that topic that we started with, particularly for an integrated discipline like neuroscience where you have people from a lot of different backgrounds coming together to try and answer the same kinds of questions. It impressed upon me that I would never know everything. That I'd likely be working with people who knew much more than I did about a particular topic. So a little bit of humility there. And then the value of being able to work together on something that we're all passionate about to really achieve a better outcome. Just a small example, when I first started publishing as a postdoc, I really looked for opportunities to share first authorship, which way back in the dark ages was not all that common.— or is not as common as it is now. And that was a fantastic explainer for me about the power of bringing people together who had just as much skin in the game as you did to really ensure that that final product was really super high quality. And then probably the third thing was the importance of grounding a point of view in, call it reality, in some kind of data and being able to say, This is what we're fairly certain about. This is the place where it begins to get a little fuzzy. And over here, this is a wag and we'll just kind of see how it plays out.

I think from what I hear, there's commonalities. And this is one of the things I've noticed. The more I look underneath the surface between the two of you, there's a shared vision in pieces you approach differently. But you talk about what you carried forward from your training, very similar, which is fantastic. So as we begin to wrap up, I want to ask you a question that I ask all of my guests, and that is the following. Given that you are practicing thought leadership now, what advice would you give your younger self? And Jerome, I'll start with you.

I would say probably watch more Johnny Carson and maybe a little more Benny Hill. That would have been my advice. It would have been extremely useful. In all seriousness, I would have asked my younger self to practice writing on a daily basis more, just for the habit of it and the discipline that it creates, but also the clarity of vision that comes with just trying to articulate to yourself what's going on in your noggin on a daily basis. Because that's really what it's all about.

And Craig, what would you give as advice to yourself?

I think I would tell myself that things that are obvious to me are not obvious to others. And that kind of sounds maybe odd, but there are certainly so many times in my experience as both a practicing physician, as a consultant, as a leader where I couldn't— it seemed like the choices that I was offered were obvious, the best choice was obvious, but it wasn't to everyone. And so I think that's part of the key from a thought leadership standpoint is realizing, hey, what are the things that you're good at that seem pretty straightforward and intuitive to you, but that others are struggling to understand? Ooh, that's a— if you run into that, that's a sign that you are a thought leader. And now you can communicate that to others if you can, and you'll be successful. And it took me a little while to figure out that, oh, I was really good at this and not everyone else is good at this little aspect of life. And once you find that niche, you're golden.

You find the niche where you have the ability to make the complex and the complicated simple. And if you can do that, people tune in. Not everybody needs your area of expertise, but the people who do, they're going to come to you. And on that note, I want to thank both of you, Craig and Jerome. This has been a delightful conversation.

Thank you for being here.

Me too. Thanks, Bill.

Thank you.

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