We should all listen to Richard Feynman

I did not expect a world-famous physicist to be teaching the same thing I do.

I was watching an old clip on YouTube, it was Richard Feynman at a blackboard at Cornell in 1964, a year before he won the Nobel Prize, explaining in under a minute what science actually is. And he did it using laymen terms that everyone can understand.

“In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.”

Then the punch line. “It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.”

Guess. Work out what would follow if the guess were right. Test it against reality.

I sat there and realised he had just described, exactly, the thing I spend my days teaching pharma cross-functional teams to do when planning to engage healthcare stakeholders. Begin with the data and facts, everything you know, form a hypothesis about where the real problem sits, then go and test that hypothesis in the conversation with the person who lives inside the system.
The problem is the guess. The meeting is the experiment.

Why this is worth reflecting on

Because most of us in this industry were taught a different engagement method, and we were taught it well.

The model I was once handed, that most field teams are still handed, looks like this. You learn the key messages. You rehearse the dialogue. You carry the branded detail aid with the data laid out in the order designed to lead a doctor to a conclusion. And the conclusion is decided before you walk in. The whole craft is in delivering and hoping the doctor agrees.

People build careers on doing this skillfully. I did. But put it next to Feynman’s method and something obvious jumps out.

The two positions, side by side

Here is the first one, the way we were taught. You arrive with a conclusion, and the job is to make reality agree with it. The key message cannot be wrong, because it is not a hypothesis, it is a verdict you have been asked to deliver. The detail aid exists to remove doubt, not to invite it. If the doctor pushes back, that is an objection to handle, a problem to get around on the way to the agreement you came for.

Here is the second one. You arrive with a hypothesis about this doctor’s patients and where the pathway is failing them, and the job is to find out whether it holds. The conversation is the test. If the doctor corrects you, that is not an objection, it is the experiment returning a result, and a better one than you walked in with. You leave understanding the patients more truly than when you arrived, and so does the doctor.

Now notice what is different, because it is not ethics and it is not the quality of the science. The data on the detail aid may be excellent. The difference is what each approach does with being wrong. The first one is built so that being wrong cannot happen in the room. The second one is built so that it can, on purpose. One has removed Feynman’s third step. The other is depending on it.

The part that changed my mind

The doctor across the table is already using the method, it’s what clinical practice is built on. Form a view of the patient, act, watch the outcome, correct. A good clinician is a working scientist who never stops testing.

So when we walk in with the first approach, we are asking that scientist to put their own method down for ten minutes and accept a conclusion they did not test.
When we walk in using Feynmans approach, we are doing the thing they are already doing, with them, about their patients. We join the loop instead of interrupting it. And the thing we are testing together is not whether they will start using a product, it is whether their patients could be treated better. The prescription, if it comes, is downstream of that.

So which of the two has proved itself?

Doctors are walking away from the traditional approach. More than half of physicians, fifty-three percent, now put moderate to severe restrictions on whether a rep gets through the door at all, up from forty-nine the year before. In oncology only about a third of providers are fully accessible. Ask doctors how useful they find reps and only around one in three say very or extremely, ranking them behind a medical website and behind unbranded disease education. The approach built to convince is, quietly, being shown the door.

And when you ask those same doctors what they do want, the answer points straight at the other approach. They value the rep who brings real trend data, who helps with the practical problem of supporting patients, who connects them to other experts. They say they want companies working on the unmet need in front of them, not the next commercial push. That is not a request for a better pitch. It is a request to be helped to treat patients better. It is the second approach, in almost the exact words.

So here is the experiment, and you do not have to take my word or Feynman’s for any of it. Run it yourself. Take the traditional approach into your next handful of meetings, the key messages, the detail aid, the conclusion you came to deliver. Notice what happens. Then switch. Walk in with a hypothesis about the doctor’s patients and let the meeting test it. Notice what happens then.

Compare the result to reality, as the man said. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.