What Dilip Mahalanabis Can Teach Us About The Importance of Communicators
One of the things that really interests me is the ability to take things from culture and science and mathematics and apply them to what we do in what usually turns out to be an unexpected way.
The writing of Steven Johnson always presents this kind of opportunity. Johnson has written 14 books he has a substack newsletter (who doesn't) and he is the new host of the Ted radio hour.
After reading his book The Ghost Map, I did a post on John Snow, who had correctly determined that contaminated water caused cholera. He battled with the public health authorities who were certain—certain—it was caused by a “miasma” in the air. The book led me to three suggestions on how to convince the hidebound elites in your life to see the truth…and to remember to have some humility because sometimes we are the hidebound ones and what we know for certain isn’t true.
A few days ago, Johnson wrote about Dilip Mahalanabis, who died recently. Johnson wondered why his death did not get more coverage in obituaries because Mahalanabis was vital in a public health invention that has literally saved millions of lives.
Infectious diseases that cause diarrhea (like cholera, in fact) have been responsible for the deaths of millions of people, predominantly children. Until Mahalanabis came along, the standard treatment was rehydration through an IV, which is effective but, as you can imagine, difficult to scale when you have tens of thousands of people sick at any given time. Nonetheless, this was the standard of care.
Mahalanabis was instrumental in the adoption of Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT), which consisted of a packet of sugars and salts dissolved in boiled water and used to rehydrate patients. Mortality fell from 30% to 3%. Millions of lives were saved.
The Lancet called ORT “potentially the most important medical advance of the 20th century.”
Yet, Mahalanabis died without the fanfare you would expect from someone with this kind of track record.
Why? Because he didn’t invent ORT.
What did he do? He advocated for it and popularized it. He isn’t responsible for inventing it, he’s responsible for getting it used.
In Johnson’s words:
The key point here is that when we talk about the history of innovation, we often over-index on the inventors and underplay the critical role of popularizers, the people who are unusually gifted at making the case for adopting a new innovation, or who have a platform that gives them an unusual amount of influence.
Johnson is worried that this is self-serving because he is a writer—a worry that I do not share.
Because my first reaction is for all of us to take a minute to appreciate the vital role communicators play as “popularizers and explainers.” Our expertise and skill make the expertise and skill of inventors relevant.
Secondly, I’d like to speak to the bosses and the strategic planning types out there. When you do your little GANTT charts, they probably stop when you hit the launch date or announcement date—whatever is D-Day in your world. It probably says “product launch” right next to “debrief” on the far right edge of the page.
It shouldn’t. It took Mahalanabis years to get ORT adopted, and while there’s nothing wrong with a big splash at the beginning, projects like this require sustained reinforcement to succeed. The GANTT chart should extend out 60-90 days for this, and even after that, communication moves into a more normalized phase.
(Note: this is true of all communication requiring change. Organizations often make a major announcement and then move on.)
Further, your communication phase should start from the beginning. The storytelling would be all the better if communicators are in the room where it happens. You’ll have communicators who are immersed in the project, and they will also be able to tell the story on a longitudinal basis, which is more engaging for audiences.
Lastly, we tend to think of words when we are popularizing and explaining. (Johnson notes that Johnny Ive—the famous Apple designer—has a writer on his new team to put into words what they are creating). Words are fine, but we have a lot more tools at our disposal. Quality explaining and popularizing will also include videos and pictures to create relevance. We should be using them all.
Finally, a bonus insight. Sometimes the answer is less technical, not more.