Over the years, I’ve identified the single biggest challenge that faces my clients when they come to me for support: overwhelm. They’re all intelligent people with great health communications skills in their own right.
The problem is that when you’re firefighting 20 different projects, with a head full of internal politics and a diary full of meetings, it’s hard to step back and:
- see the bigger picture
- reflect on your organisation’s own practice
- set the priorities
- find the interesting angles
- talk to the people whose stories need telling
- recognise what you’re already doing brilliantly.
In recent years, I’ve increasingly found myself acting as a sounding board and collaborator alongside the healthcare and communications professionals I work with – brainstorming ideas and then coming up with some simple actions to move forward.
In anthropology, we talk about two perspectives for understanding a situation: ‘emic’ (seeing things from the inside) and ‘etic’ (seeing things from the outside, looking in). A good ethnographer will do a little bit of both.
I’ve borrowed this approach to combine an inside understanding of people’s frustrations, fears and challenges with a fresh perspective and an understanding of the wider health communications landscape, to produce clarity, calm and – often as not – a big sigh of relief.