Every cuisine has its version of the dreaded Red Sauce that showed up, in one form or another, almost every day in the university cafeteria when I was a student.
On Monday, it started out as spaghetti sauce. On Tuesday or Wednesday, it became a layer in lasagne. On Thursday, it evolved into the base for pizza.
At the time, I thought the university cooks were unimaginative and lazy. Now, with decades of cooking under my belt, I understand they were being efficient. And they were following a pattern we find not just in utilitarian kitchens but also in every global cuisine.
Around the world, every cuisine has its version of the Red Sauce, a simple, versatile foundation for many different recipes. In Cajun cooking, it’s a roux, a mixture of fat and flour that forms the base for gumbo and other flavourful stews. Many Indian dishes start with some version of a curry. French recipes typically incorporate one of the five “mother sauces”: béchamel, espagnole, velouté, hollandaise, and sauce tomate.
Like cookery, knowledge mobilization is a complex and highly variable process, which takes on multiple forms. Yet a single mother sauce grounds each different knowledge mobilization activity: communication.
In the cooking world, the ability to whisk together the perfect roux or hollandaise separates great chefs from cafeteria line cooks. In knowledge mobilization, the ability to communicate separates changemakers from information brokers.
Four Recipes for Knowledge Mobilization, One Base
I’ve spent the past three years engaging with a wide range of knowledge creators, inside and outside academia. Each of these clients and learners has shared a common goal—to put their knowledge to practical use solving a tough, urgent problem.
Those problems have varied widely, from climate change to chronic disease, homelessness, health issues, AI governance, and more. So has the approach to knowledge mobilization and the language used to describe it. I’ve noticed at least four different recipes for transforming knowledge into impact:
- Advocacy—A client in a healthcare not-for-profit, who has a long history in advocacy, said to me, “Knowledge mobilization is really advocacy work.” And, without fretting too much over theories, models, and frameworks, I’d say she’s generally right.
This recipe for KMb aims to turn research findings into policy changes by influencing decision-makers in public systems. That’s advocacy by another name.
- Commercialization—In Canada, we often let funding mechanisms shape the way we think about change, and my guess is that’s why we see an artificial divide between technology transfer practitioners and knowledge mobilization practitioners focused on advocacy. When you zoom out so you can see past organizational silos, the two groups engage in similar activities, just with different populations.
- Science Communication—Science communication brings a PR lens to knowledge mobilization work, often aiming to educate a broad public. (Not “the general public,” which is a fictional construct, but a large, diverse group of people.)
Interestingly, science communication has not always been perceived in this narrow way. I first taught scientists how to communicate more effectively back in 2011, and I relied heavily on The Craft of Scientific Communication by Harmon and Gross. This book is anchored in the basics of classical rhetoric (the art of persuasion), so its teachings sounded familiar to someone who had been teaching technical communication for a decade. It helped me design a course that equipped scientists to share their findings through different personal interactions—including reports and presentations for senior military leaders—not broadcast them through journalism.
Scicomm now seems to be widening its scope, and I’m glad to see that because it could play a much more central role in KMb than it now does.
- Public Engagement—While public engagement often plays a role in advocacy and scicomm approaches to KMb, I see it as a distinct thread because it has grown its own group of practitioners. As knowledge creators come to recognize the value of hearing first-person experiences and co-designing solutions to complex challenges, they’re also recognizing the need for specialized facilitation skills. As a result, we’re seeing a growing cohort of professionals with expertise and experience in bringing community members into the KMb process.
Each of these four recipes for KMb comes with its own frameworks, methodologies, and terminology. At the same time, all of them rely on a base skillset that depends mainly on sophisticated communication skills.
Because I’ve had the privilege of working across so many different sectors, collaborating on many different kinds of engagements, I’ve seen this common denominator up close. Here are just a few examples of situations that may seem like they belong in different categories of research-to-impact activity but are remarkably similar in terms of the skills they require:
- Preparing a policy brief proposing policy changes and preparing a pitch to persuade an investor to support a startup
- Recruiting participants for a public engagement event and finding customers for an innovative product or service
- Developing training for practitioners and creating online tutorials for patients or customers
- Creating a series of science videos for teenagers and networking with industry or community
- Writing a strategy for KMb and convening leaders from various public systems
- Crafting an interactive infographic summarizing key research findings and leading a meeting with multiple stakeholders
- Crafting a strong follow-up message to a meeting with stakeholders and creating a blog series to build trust in science
The common thread through all these interactions between knowledge creators and knowledge users is audience-centred communication. When you understand how to analyze, connect with, and adapt to your intended audience, you can make any of the four recipes for KMb impactful.
How to Refine Your KMb Mother Sauce and Increase Your Impact
Warning: I’m about to slip into a bit of communication jargon. In most situations, I avoid what I call the “R” word because it has gained a bad reputation outside scholarly circles. But here goes…
Whatever stream of KMb you’re engaged in, the quality of your mother sauce—the foundation on which all your efforts stand or fall—depends on your skill with rhetoric.
Not rhetoric in the sense of empty, bombastic talk, cheap promises from politicians who will say one thing and do another. Rhetoric in the Aristotelian sense, the ancient art of persuasion. Or to be more precise, the art of seeing all the possible means of persuasion in a given situation.
Rhetoric is not manipulation or coercion, although many philosophers from ancient Greece on down through the ages have flagged its potential for abuse. Language used skilfully is incredibly powerful, so some wariness is justified. But electricity is also powerful, and we’ve found responsible ways to produce and use that without electrocuting people.
Rhetoric is to knowledge mobilization what a world-class roux is to a mouthwatering gumbo. It lifts the communication from the level of mere knowledge transmission to the level of influential meaning-making.
That’s the level where novel ideas and evidence start to gain traction, where the response shifts from “That’s interesting” to “How can I get in on this?”
Honing in on Innovation Communication
As I’ve argued previously, the role of communication in KMb is often misunderstood, due to an undervaluing of the ancient discipline of rhetoric. For example, the communication function, which spans the KMb process, is sometimes confused with strategic communication at the organizational level or pigeon-holed into a narrow definition of scicomm.
It’s time to stop thinking of the human function of communication in terms of various use cases and start adopting a more holistic approach. Such an approach must take a panoramic view of the role that communication plays throughout the innovation process, of which knowledge mobilization is just a part.
Because the language we now use to describe communication splinters a multi-faceted activity into many different, competing concepts, I think we need some new language. The term “innovation communication” embodies the full range of expressive and relational activities needed to translate novel ideas into concrete outcomes.
As I’ve described in a new eBook, Communicating at the Edge of Innovation, innovation communication is an emerging practice that requires sharper-than-usual communication skills. When you’re dealing with genuinely novel ideas, standard approaches to connecting audiences and motivating them to act just don’t do the job.
While scicomm is starting to broaden its scope, innovation communication goes further. It provides a set of advanced principles and methods that make communication effective when ideas are boundary-breaking and stakes are high.
Anchored in the ancient principles of rhetoric, and informed by both theoretical and empirical scholarship, innovation communication addresses the missing link that prevents so many KMb aspirations from becoming reality. That’s the human link, the ability to connect authentically and deeply with the people who will move brilliant ideas from peer review into practice.
The construct of innovation communication gives us a name for the mother sauce on which all KMb recipes depend. It draws on more than two millennia of rhetorical thinking and practice, as well as up-to-date communication science. And it enables you to serve up knowledge in ways that aren’t just palatable to your audience but whet their appetite for actively supporting you in your research mission.
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