An Interview with the American Chemical Society on Challenges in Life Sciences, Non-Traditional Career Paths, and Gen Z
SUMMARY
In an interview with American Chemical Society, Founder Hamid Ghanadan shares advice for engaging with Gen Z audiences in a productive, meaningful way. Beyond conversations about Gen Z, he also shares insights from his non-traditional career path — and how trusting his gut led to the origins of LINUS.
Read the full interview here or a selected excerpt below.
An excerpt from ‘How to Better Engage With, and Sell to Generation Z: Hamid Ghanadan says this cohort wants a conversation, not to be ‘marketed to’ in American Chemical Society’s Industry Matters newsletter.
What are some of the most pressing challenges confronting the life sciences and healthcare industries?
At the highest level, I believe that science suffers from a usability problem. People don’t know how to interact with and ‘use’ science in their daily lives. And virtually every societal problem that we can think of, from the climate crisis to healthcare affordability, to education, to people’s wellness choices, all have a common root: the science is there, but people don’t know how to access it, understand it, make meaningful decisions, and take positive action based on it.
It's not because people aren’t smart enough. It’s because we haven’t applied the same principles of usability that we apply to other facets of society to the most valuable corpus of knowledge we have, which is science.
It’s my belief that we should stop telling people about the science, and start inviting them to experience it. By understanding and applying principles of how people learn and how they make decisions, we can make profound change, not only for the life science and healthcare industries, but virtually every industry and enterprise globally.
As an example, I would like to re-invent the scientific paper. At the most basic level, this is a fundamental unit of scientific currency that authors deposit into the bank of knowledge. The fundamental structure and usability of this unit of currency, however, has seen little to no innovation or improvement in usability for well over 100 years, despite all of the tools that are available to humanity today. It’s time to rethink the usability of science.
In a TEDx Cambridge talk, you referenced ‘science moving truth forward.’ How would you assess the performance of the global scientific community over the last 2.5 years in terms of communicating with the public regarding Covid?
In December 2021, as Dr. Francis Collins was retiring from his role as the director of the NIH, he was asked in an interview what he wished the NIH could have done differently during the pandemic. He lamented “Maybe we underinvested in research on human behavior. I never imagined a year ago ... that we would still have 60 million people not get vaccinated.”
The pandemic has provided a tremendous lesson that science moving the truth forward requires so much more than providing data or convincing people to take action based on facts and figures. We need to acknowledge that human beings are beautifully complex, and we can understand decision-making patterns to architect choices that invite them to experience science for themselves.
With every project we take on at LINUS, whether it’s launching a new product for scientists, a new tool or therapeutic for clinicians to use, or a health technology for patients and consumers, it is our mission to close this gap between science and humans by applying better usability in any arena where technical decisions are made.
What have you learned about the decision-making patterns of scientists that you can share to help them be more persuasive with workplace colleagues?
Well, I have written two books on the topic, but the most fundamental thing that I have learned is that you need to first gain emotional acceptance before intellectual acceptance. And the way to do this is by starting from a perspective of empathy, then using storytelling as a form of communication where the audience you’re trying to persuade see themselves as the hero of that story.
Everyone has a film playing in their minds, in which they are the main character and the hero. Tap into that mental film, and you’ll have a far better reception than if you were to provide a lock-tight logical argument that wrestles your audience into intellectual submission. That argumentative approach usually comes across as combative instead of empathetic, and it rarely produces the desired result.