Responsibilities Via Recognition of Excellence and Quality Public Speaking
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/06/06
Professor Gordon Guyatt, MD, MSc, FRCP, OC is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact and Medicine at McMaster University. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.
Here we talk about responsibility to various communities with recognition of professional excellence and the differences between good and bad public speaking.
In the extended 2017 interview in In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Guyatt and I talked about the numerous representations in the media. He gets representation in the news, in interviews, in articles, in peer-reviewed articles, and so on.
The responsibilities come from the influence or the power. The influential garner responsibility by virtue of power. People listen to them. It depends on the community too. Guyatt seems to gain power and so the responsibility to the medical, public policy, and scientific community.
When I asked about it, Guyatt stated, “To behave with integrity, the main responsibility when you disseminate is accuracy. Another specific concern is a conflict of interest. Many people within the medical community who take public stances are conflicted. They get lots of money from industry. It is hard for that not to influence you.”
He talked about other conflicts of interest. These can mean intellectual conflicts of interest. That is, a researcher prefers their own research compared to others. If someone has evidence or research in disagreement with one’s own, then the other person must be wrong.
Guyatt finds this as a universal phenomenon. “There is a responsibility to be aware of one’s conflict of interest. When there are conflicts of interest, it is crucial to make the conflicts clear. Also, there is a responsibility to attempt to minimize the conflicts of interest, and the presentation and interpretation of things,” Guyatt explained.
He also mentioned the responsibility to listen to others and remain open to other perspectives. In the midst of the presentation to the public, there comes the added benefit of public speaking engagements. People with influence and professional respect get speaking engagements.
They are asked to talk to the public and to constituencies in the professional community. In this case, it is in the medical community. I asked about the good public speakers versus the bad ones.
Guyatt said, “There are the same pieces if you’re talking about medicine and public policy, or whether you’re talking about basic clin-epi. We will talk about large group presentations. [Laughing] I run a course on how to teach evidence-based healthcare.”
He gave an analogy with lectures, on the goodness or badness of a lecture. Guyatt’s first tip is to be enthusiastic. No one wants to see a boring speaker. This gives the impression to the audience of an interesting and energetic presentation.
“I never speak from behind a podium. I give a roving mic. I come out in front of the audience getting or becoming immediate with the audience. As one of my colleagues has said, ‘Just talk to them.’ Which means, be calm, relaxed, and conversational, and look around, and talk to the people in front of you, you should make eye contact,” Guyatt explained.
To give a good speech, and to have public recognition, these go hand-in-hand.
To give a good speech, and to have public recognition, these go hand-in-hand. There is a responsibility to be a good speaker or at least give a better public speech. With a bigger audience, Guyatt continued, there can be the chance to give eye contact to people all over the place.
Another rule is to be organized and repeat in a proper manner.
“Well-organized, very knowledgeable about what you’re talking about, we have a rule: ‘Tell’em what you’re going to say, say it, and then tell’em what you’ve said.’ An organization includes, ‘Okay, folks, here are the major points I’m going to make,’ Guyatt stated, “You do it. At the end, you say, ‘Okay, folks, what might you want to take away from this, what major points have we made.’ That structure is a crucial thing.”
One other thing is to have humor and to tell the stories in an effective and convincing way. You can tell many stories to illustrate everything. A final point is to vary the tone. Guyatt will have pace and modulation in tone per point.
Altogether, a good speech is another responsibility, and a concrete example of that to the public, which comes from the professional recognition of excellence.
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The British Medical Journal or BMJ had a list of 117 nominees in 2010 for the Lifetime Achievement Award. Guyatt was short-listed and came in second-place in the end. He earned the title of an Officer of the Order of Canada based on contributions from evidence-based medicine and its teaching.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2012 and a Member of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in 2015. He lectured on public vs. private healthcare funding in March of 2017, which seemed like a valuable conversation to publish in order to have this in the internet’s digital repository with one of Canada’s foremost academics.
For those with an interest in standardized metrics or academic rankings, he is the 14th most cited academic in the world in terms of H-Index at 222 and has a total citation count of more than 200,000. That is, he has the highest H-Index, likely, of any Canadian academic living or dead.
He talks here with Scott Douglas Jacobsen who founded In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. We conducted an extensive interview before: here, here, here, here, here, and here. We have other interviews in Canadian Atheist (here and here), Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Humanist Voices, and The Good Men Project (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
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