Scientific Storytelling: Turning Data Into Influence

[00:00] Introduction (host)

[Len Czuba, the SPE Medical Plastics Division's webinar coordinator, opens the session.] My name is Len Czuba, coordinator for this lunch-and-learn webinar series. John was gracious enough to agree to be our presenter this month. We typically hold these every two months — the last one, in June, was a technical presentation by a friend from a company that makes biopolymers. This time we're doing a non-polymer, non-technical talk on communication.

So let me introduce our speaker, John Skabardonis. He was responsible for technical marketing in the electronics industry in the Americas before retiring from Covestro, where his tenure goes back 35 years — even before it spun out from General Electric and, earlier, Bayer. So his career in polymers spans 35 years, and I'll venture to say he won't leave our field in his new career. He enjoys public speaking and refers to himself as a scientific storyteller. He's fascinated by the rapid evolution in technology and focuses on the materials and processes that empower it; he's interested in circularity — a hot topic in our industry — and maximizing resource utilization. He's a board member of SPE's Pittsburgh section, where he lives, and a member of the National Speakers Association, a Distinguished Toastmaster, and a member of IDSA, the Industrial Design Society of America. So, John, let me offer you the floor.

[02:00] Opening

Thank you very much, Len. And I hope that wasn't too much information in my bio — as an old guy, you know, I've done a lot of things. So: good afternoon, or good morning, or good evening, wherever you're at. Let's talk about storytelling.

Now, if you hadn't guessed from my last name, I'm originally from Greece. So I could talk with you today about the most famous storyteller from the ancient world — Homer. Not Homer Simpson. The Homer who gave us the Iliad and the Odyssey, about 750 BC. These were epic tales, told out loud for hours at a time, and spellbinding enough that we're still talking about them 28 centuries later. Anyone watch the movie, by the way? Anyone? I'm going to skip on Homer.

And if you hadn't noticed, there's a pin on my lapel — it's my alma mater, Case Western Reserve University. There's a story behind that too: a story about a fork in the road, where I came to the US to get my bachelor's degree and never made it back to Greece, and somehow I'm sitting here in front of you today, several decades later, talking about scientific storytelling. Again, I'm going to pass on that, because I don't want to talk about ancient poets or my personal journey. I want to talk about storytelling where you live — in a professional setting, in the 21st century.

If you were to look me up on LinkedIn — that most professional networking platform, with about a billion users, as Len mentioned — you'd see my descriptor reads "Scientific Storyteller." And before you presume I was chasing the 2025 buzz, where storytelling suddenly became a fancy way of saying "I'm a good communicator" — I've been using that descriptor since 2017. Here's how it started. As Len said, I retired from Covestro last year; Covestro was Bayer MaterialScience, the largest polycarbonate producer in the world. While I was there I had a variety of roles, and prior to technical marketing I was doing marketing communications — specifically for the healthcare industry, on a global scale. Along the way I discovered something interesting: the way to get inside people's heads was not to lead with the engineering properties, the iterative product improvements, and the vast library of colors our plastics came in. Engineers cared about those things, and we made sure they had access to all that information. But if you wanted to win over the marketers, the procurement specialists, the average person on the street — we needed stories. Stories about what our materials make possible.

[05:20] The spark: "What if?"

The most imaginative companies on earth all start at the very same place, with the same two words. Pixar. IBM. Nike. "What if?" What if a toy had feelings? That's Toy Story. What if a computer could out-think a chess grandmaster? That's Deep Blue. What if the materials Nike needs are already sitting in the shoes we're throwing away?

"What if" is where a story begins — and it's where a product begins as well. Every self-driving car and medical device story I ever told started as somebody's "what if." So that's what today's talk is all about: how to make your science resonate — starting with "what if" and ending with people who care. Oh, and how not to lose the room along the way.

[06:45] The trap: the curse of knowledge

Let's start with why it goes wrong, because it goes wrong for a very specific, very forgivable reason. It's called the curse of knowledge. Once you deeply know something, it's almost impossible to remember what it's like not to know it. Everything obvious to you feels like it must be obvious to everyone else, so you skip over the "why this matters," because to you it isn't a question — it's like the air you breathe.

And we have a second habit working against us: our training. Every paper we've ever written follows the same skeleton — methods, results, discussion. You build your evidence brick by brick and deliver the conclusion at the end. That structure is perfect for a journal, where a reviewer is actually paid to get to the end. Your audience is not.

[07:31] An audience is not a journal

When you lead with methods and results — with those engineering properties and the library of colors I mentioned earlier — you're handing people the answer before you've told them what the problem or the question is. You're pouring concrete before anyone knows what you're building. And the moment you treat a room full of humans like a peer reviewer, you've lost them.

[08:11] Relevance first. Evidence second.

So here's my entire talk in four words: relevance first, evidence second. Before you explain your data, explain why it matters. Connect the work to the decisions, the challenges, the opportunities the people in front of you are actually facing. Relevance earns you the right to be heard. Evidence is what you do once you've earned it. Get those in the wrong order, and the best data in the world can land on empty chairs. Not cool.

[09:29] Why it works: WIIFM

Now, I'm a scientist — by training, that is — so I can't just tell you to do something because it sounds nice. Here's why it works. Your audience's brain is asking two questions, in a fixed order. First, what marketers call WIIFM: "What's in it for me?" Or, put another way, "Do I care about this?" Only if the answer is yes does the brain bother with the second question: "Is this true?" Attention is a gate, and relevance is the key. If you don't open the "what's in it for me" gate first, all your gorgeous evidence is stacked on the wrong side of a locked door.

[~10:10] The signal: "…and then what happened?"

There's actually a chemical mechanism underneath all of this. When a story grabs a room, you're literally raising the dopamine in it. And if you didn't know, dopamine is the pleasure hormone — the same thing behind wanting one more chocolate, or one more episode of the show you're binging. Dopamine also sharpens focus and drives us to think, to plan, to strive. So a good story doesn't just inform; it chemically primes people to lean in and want more.

You don't need to be a neuroscientist to trigger it, either. You just need to make people ask the four most powerful words in storytelling: "…and then what happened?" Children ask it out loud, if you pause a bedtime story; grown-ups ask it silently at the end of every chapter. When the room is quietly asking those four words, that's the signal that the dopamine is doing its job — and that those folks care.

So that's the whole game underneath the science. We remember what we feel. A number attached to a consequence gets tagged and stored; a number floating in space gets forgotten. Relevance isn't the sugar that helps the medicine go down. Relevance is the reason anyone opens their mouth.

[11:31] The oldest structure in the world: Hero. Failure. Victory.

Here's a secret that really isn't a secret. Every story that ever held a room — every myth, every movie, every one of Homer's epics — runs on the same three beats: introduce a hero, put the hero through a failure, bring them to a victory. That's it. Thousands of years of storytelling, three moves. And here's the good news: your work already has all three. You've just been trained to hide them.

So, introduce your hero. This is the twist most of us get wrong: the hero is not you, and it's not your data. It's whoever the audience is rooting for — the engineer trying to get a device to market, the patient on the other end of that device, even the material itself, which is asked to survive things no material should have to survive. Make the room care about somebody or something, and they will follow you.

Two: failure. This is the part we're tempted to skip, because who wants to dwell on what didn't work? But the failure is the engine of the story — the cracked component, the extractable nobody could explain, the deadline nobody could meet. Don't rush past the struggle, because the room feels it. If there's no failure, there's no stakes. If there's no stakes, there's no story.

And three: the victory. This is where your data actually walks onto the stage and means something, because the room has felt the problem your data solves. This is where your data lives — not as a wall of evidence, but as the moment the hero wins. These are the same numbers you always had, but now they're a rescue, not a readout.

Hero, failure, victory. Get those three in that order and you're telling a story. Leave them out, and you're giving a report.

[13:27] The toolkit: five things you can do on Monday

So how do you actually do this? I'm going to talk about five tools, and you can use every one of them on your very next talk — no rehearsal required.

[14:11] One — start with the stakes. Before you build a single slide, answer one question: if this work succeeds, who's better off, and how? That answer — not your title, not your method — is your first sentence. I imagine the sharpest person in the room leaning back, arms crossed, saying, "So what?" If I don't have a crisp answer, the claim isn't ready. "So what" is the most useful heckler you'll ever have. Invite him to every rehearsal.

[14:46] Two — one sentence. If you can't say the core of your talk in one plain sentence that a smart person outside your field would understand, you don't have a talk yet — you have a pile of slides looking for one. No "ands," no semicolons. Here's a way to visualize it: you're on a plane, and you explain to a seatmate what your talk is about before the drink cart arrives. If you need the whole flight, that's not your message — that's your appendix.

[~15:35] Three — reorder the story. Take that paper skeleton — methods, results, discussion — and flip it into the order humans listen in. One, problem: the tension — what's broken? Two, the stakes: why that tension matters to the folks in the room. Three, insight: your discovery, the turn, what matters. Four, evidence: now, and only now, you present the proof, and your data shines. And five, the ask: what do you want your audience to do, decide, or remember? Notice your evidence didn't disappear — it didn't even shrink. It just moved to the moment the audience is hungry for it. Same meal; you just stopped serving dessert first. And if this looks familiar, it should — it's the hero, the failure, and the victory again, just with the seams showing. Problem and stakes set up your hero and their struggle; insight and evidence are the victory. Same story arc, one level down.

[16:54] Four — translate jargon into consequences. This is what separates a good technical speaker from a forgettable one. Don't make people do the translation from your numbers to their world — do it for them. Let's say you reduced extractables by 40%. To you, that's the result. To the person in the third row, that's just a number floating in space. So finish the thought for them: fewer surprises in the tox review; one less reason a submission comes back with a deficiency letter; a material that clears the safety conversation instead of starting one. The number is the evidence; the consequence is the relevance. Hand them both, in that order.

[~17:45] Five — one spine. A talk is not a list; a talk is a line. Everything hangs from a single spine, and you keep coming back and touching it. Pick that one idea — the spine — and then every slide either hangs off it or it comes out. When a room drifts, you don't need a louder slide or a bolder font; you need to reach back and touch the spine again: "and here's why this still matters." That through-line is the difference between a talk people follow and a slideshow people endure.

[18:45] Delivery: Pause. You. Contrast. Signpost.

Okay — I've given you a lot. The structure I just described gets you most of the way, but a few habits carry you the rest.

First, the pause. It's a really powerful tool. When you land a sentence that matters, stop talking and let it sit. The silence tells the room, "This one counts." Just like that.

The "you" pivot. Count how many times you say "I found, my data, we showed" versus "you, your work, your decision," and tilt the balance toward them. People lean in more when the talk is about them.

Third, contrast. The ear loves a before and an after. "Without this, here's your headache. With it, here's the Tuesday you want." Contrast makes the value impossible to miss.

And finally, don't bury the lede. Tell them where you're going before you go: "I've got one finding, and it's going to change how you spec this material — let me tell you about it." That's a signpost. Curiosity is a gift; suspense is a gamble.

[19:20] A story that worked: the F-150 foglamp

Now I'll give you the example I mentioned. It was December of 2019 — just before COVID totally turned our world around. I got a new boss. She came in from fast-moving consumer goods; she knew a little about plastics and frankly was curious, maybe even suspicious about the "Scientific Storyteller" descriptor. So she challenged me: "Tell me a story about one of your products."

I could have opened with properties, with values, with that color library I mentioned. Instead, I told her about thermally conductive polycarbonate — a material that molds like plastic but radiates heat like metal — and I told it as a story. The engineers at Ford used it in the rear housing assembly of the F-150 foglamp. It passed every torture test they could devise, came in at half the weight of the steel housing it was replacing, and handed Ford a significant reduction in assembled part cost. The story took 90 seconds. By the end, that brand-new, plastics-skeptical boss was smiling and nodding. Same facts the specs would have provided — but wrapped in a problem, a hero, a win, so they stuck. Ninety seconds. That's all relevance-first costs you.

And it scales beyond that. Lately I've been telling stories about circular design — about a world getting tired of devices that die on schedule; some people call it planned obsolescence — and what changes when a device is designed for repair, for upgrade, and for easy disassembly at the end of its life. Same move: you start with what the audience already feels, and then you bring in the materials science as the thing that makes the better ending possible.

[21:32] The close

Storytelling asks you to get inside your audience's head — to understand what they truly care about, and to speak to it. You describe the challenge honestly, you talk about the failures even, and then you introduce the hero: the solution that overcomes the challenge and saves the day. Do that, and your message will resonate. People will remember your solution — not because of the data alone, but because of how you made them feel.

Now, we have a 30-second video. Theresa, if you can line that up. This is the same idea, but it's how I pitched it to a group of professionals who are not scientists.

[A 30-second video clip plays:] "If you want to be a storyteller, you need to get inside your audience's head. You need to figure out what they care about, and you need to speak to it. You need to talk about the challenges — potentially about the failures — and then you introduce the hero, the solution that comes in, overcomes the challenges, and saves the day. This type of story sticks inside your audience's mind because of how you make them feel."

[After a brief pause to restore the screen share:] So, here's my challenge to you. Whatever you're working on — your next paper, your next pitch, the next 15 minutes in front of an audience like this — craft your next story carefully, and make sure the humans in the room find it impactful. Remember: relevance first, evidence second. Thank you.

My message to people is this: if you want to get in touch, LinkedIn is where I'm at — easy to find there.

[~23:30] Q&A and close (host)

[Len Czuba:] Let's take advantage of the next half hour — we scheduled a one-hour meeting, so the next 30 minutes are for Q&A, open discussion, and networking. You can put your question in the chat box or raise your hand and I'll try to recognize you. … We're about at the top of the hour, so I'd like to thank everyone for attending, and especially thank you, John, for giving us this fascinating presentation. It has merit for pretty much anybody in any occupation — including those going through school, because even kids these days are asked to give presentations.