You see it more and more often.
Organisations collaborate in chains. Researchers work in interdisciplinary consortia. Professionals step outside their field of expertise, to solve problems that emerge from specialisation.
All this interdisciplinary work doesn’t make the world – or your communication – easier. That is why there’s such an enormous demand for Analytic Storytelling 😉
If your topic has many different facets, you can probably think of it as a Venn diagram.
Let’s take a hypothetical example: you want to say something about the legal aspects of the way our healthcare system is financed. Your diagram looks like this
In cases like this, how can you tell a story about your topic?
I sometimes see people trying to introduce all circles at the same time – overwhelming their audience.
My advice is to do it step by step.
You start with the circle that the audience is most familiar with. With healthcare professionals, you first talk about healthcare, then about financing healthcare, and then about the legal aspects of financing healthcare.
In reality, topics are even more complicated than in this example. A participant in our training once showed me a Venn diagram of interdisciplinary research with nine circles…
So: do you have a multifaceted topic? Venn it!
Regards,
Arnaud