Chapter 7. The elevator pitch
Why scientists can't explain their work (like a normal person...)
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A younger colleague said something to me once that has stayed with me longer than most professional feedback I have received. We were at a local event in the middle of Melbourne, and after watching me talk to several people who had no research background, he pulled me aside and told me that I did not talk like a scientist. He added that if I put on a suit, I could probably pass for someone running a … pyramid scheme (LOL)
He seemed to mean it as a mild criticism. But on the other hand, I took it as one of the more useful observations anyone had offered me about communication. Why ? Because it hits something inside my mind.
The gap that I would like to discuss today, funnily enough, is not about knowing enough or having results significant enough to warrant explaining. It is about whether you can take something you have spent years understanding and explain it in plain language to another person, in less than a minute, in a way that makes them want to ask a follow-up question rather than change the subject.
That is what the elevator pitch is. It is not a sales technique, a networking trick, or something that requires a particular kind of extroverted personality. It is the most basic test of whether communication is actually happening, and it is the test that scientists, as a professional group, fail more consistently than almost any other kind of expert.
I posted about this problem once, framing it as the biggest challenge in research science, which is the gap between what scientists know and what they can explain to anyone outside the room. I put it as a question about why a farmer can build a working plane or submarine by figuring it out from available materials, while a team of trained scientists cannot explain what they are doing to someone who was not already in the building. The responses came almost entirely from researchers, recognising something about their own communication failures that they had not previously had language for.
The pitch
The most common version of the elevator pitch that scientists produce is a compressed abstract, which is itself already a compression of a paper. What comes out is the thinnest possible distillation of a structure that was never designed for a live conversation. Someone asks what you work on, and you begin with the organism or the dataset, move through the method, mention the finding, and end somewhere in the middle of a technical sentence at the precise moment the other person has decided to look for an exit.
An abstract is written for someone who chose to read it. They opened the PDF, scanned the title, decided it was worth their time, and gave you their attention before they read a single word.
The elevator pitch is delivered to someone who asked a polite question. They did not ask for a presentation. They are perfectly capable of ending the exchange in the next ten seconds if you give them no reason to stay, and the background of the field is not a reason to stay. It is the signal that a … lecture is coming.
The abstract also begins in the wrong place for this purpose. It starts with what the field already knows, moves through the gap, then to the method, then to the finding. That sequence makes sense for a document being evaluated for its scientific contribution. For a few minutes conversation, starting with what the field knows is handing the other person context they did not request before you have given them any reason to want it. By the time you reach the part that might genuinely interest them, they have already made their decision.
Well, you know the decision was made in the first 20-30 seconds.
Start with the problem, not with what you did
The version that works begins with a problem the other person can recognise before you have explained anything technical. No, I’m not talking about a gap in the literature, neither a methodological challenge, I want a problem that connects to something a person with no scientific training can understand well enough to feel its weight without preparation.
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If your work is about improving the accuracy of genomic predictions in livestock, the version that starts with those words loses most conversations immediately. The version that starts with the observation that a dairy farmer makes breeding decisions whose consequences play out over decades, and that the genetic information currently available leaves a lot of useful signal untouched, is a version that almost anyone can follow, because it gives the other person something to hold onto before you explain what you are doing about it.
The problem-first opening works because it tells the other person why they should listen before you tell them what you do. That ordering is the reverse of how scientists are trained to present their work, which is why it requires deliberate practice rather than instinct. Scientific training builds the habit of establishing technical context before making any claim, because that is what reviewers require and what journals reward. In a short duration conversation, the technical context is exactly the part that makes the other person’s attention drift.
Once you have the problem, stay with it longer than feels comfortable. Scientists tend to rush toward the science because the science is what they are proud of and feel qualified to explain. But the other person cannot care about the science until they care about the problem, and caring about a problem takes more than one sentence.
The specificity that makes the pitch work is specificity about the stakes, not specificity about the method. A sentence that names precisely what is at risk for a real person in a real situation is both specific and accessible. A sentence about what the pipeline does is specific only to people who already understand the pipeline. You do not have to choose between being precise and being understood, but you do have to choose what you are being precise about.
A structure that scales to infinity
The elevator pitch has a shape that stays useful when it expands into a five-minute dinner conversation. It has three main parts.
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