'Scrap the Old COVID Script for Act Four'

 "Everyone is confused." That was part of the headline in a July 23 article in Reuters about new mask rules for the vaccinated amid escalating COVID-19 cases. You might think that a year and a half into such an enormous public health crisis, all sources of confusion would be gone, but sadly it's the opposite. Why?

Science consists of two parts: 1) research and 2) communication.

On the research side, at the start of the pandemic, there was an outcry during the Trump administration to throw everything possible into developing a vaccine. And later for deployment, the Biden administration laid out plan after plan to get the country vaccinated as efficiently as possible. However, a key ingredient has been missing all along: a communications plan.

Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, identified the seriousness of the communication problem last October on NBC's "Meet the Press" when he said, "we don't have one consolidated voice." He also noted the failure to draw on the power of story.

We're still paying dearly for the failure to establish effective communications today.

Simultaneous with the lack of focus on effective mass communication was the emergence of an anti-science voice at a level never before seen. It produced a resistance to everything from masks to vaccines, complicated by advocates of unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. All of which has led to headlines like, "Everyone is confused."

Communications Lessons from Professional Storytellers

There are many aspects to the communications challenge, but there is one specific new tool that addresses Osterholm's plea for a singular voice. The problem is based in narrative dynamics.

For over a century, Hollywood has focused its efforts on how to use the power of narrative to connect with audiences. The result has been a great deal of knowledge of the practical side of narrative that has only sparingly been shared with the general public.

One of the simplest and most important observations came from legendary screenwriting instructor Frank Daniel in a 1986 speech about the shaping of material from a first draft to a final draft. He boiled basic narrative structure down to two paragraphs, saying:

"Monotony is a problem in first drafts. One reason for it is that the scenes follow in the forbidden pattern: and then, and then, and then."

"In a dramatic story the pattern is: 'and then,' 'but,' 'therefore.' If you don't have this 'but' and 'therefore' connection between the parts, the story becomes linear, monotonous. Diaries and chronicles are written that way, but not scripts."

He was talking about screenwriting, but the principle applies just as well to the communication of science to the public. That last line could be rewritten as, "Laboratory notebooks and journals are written that way, but not public communication."

It is this transition from pure information into the narrative structure that Osterholm was pleading for. In simple terms, "Narrative is leadership." People don't follow leaders who are boring or confusing. They follow leaders who are able to wield the power of narrative structure to deliver information that is concise and compelling to a broad audience.

The secret to accomplishing this lies in what Daniel identified: The three key words of and, but, therefore, and the powers they embody -- agreement, contradiction, consequence. The words come together in a simple tool called the ABT Narrative Template, which is this single sentence: "___ and ___ but ___ therefore ___."

Applying the Narrative Model to COVID Communications

This is the tool that every COVID-19 communicator needs to be working with every day in all communication. It is the tool that distills down the central message to the three basic elements of setup (the context), problem, and solution.

For example: The public is not crazy in feeling confused by contradictory messages and there are multiple perspectives on what do to, but right now daily COVID-19 cases are again topping 100,000, therefore what is needed is ...

"What is our ABT?" needs to be the central question for all communications teams.

We are now training thousands of scientists and communicators from government agencies (National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Geological Survey, Federal Aviation Administration, Army Corps of Engineers, and many others) in the ABT Framework. Last year, I published a short article in Scientific American explaining the relevance of the ABT to medical training. Now, the ABT Framework is desperately needed to help combat the cloud of confusion plaguing COVID-19 communication.

It's not the singular solution to the problem, but it is a solid resource that is needed everywhere in the communication of the pandemic to put an end to headlines that say, "Everyone is confused."

Randy Olson, PhD, is a scientist-turned-filmmaker. He is the author of "Houston, We Have A Narrative" and 2020 recipient of the John P. McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication from the American Medical Writers Association.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/93949