by Dr. Sebastian Barnutz and Dr. Wiebke Gronemeyer
It’s never as simple as asked and answered. Choosing the right format for your circumstances and topic requires careful consideration.
Strategic decisions must be based on reliable, representative, and validated information. To meet this bar, pharmaceutical, and life sciences companies buy market share data, conduct market research, and invite physicians to advisory boards. Market share data and market research can be good sources of quantitative information — but they do not provide the ‘why’ behind the insights gleaned.
Different Settings Yield Different Results
Ask the same question to a single physician, a group of physicians, and a temporary small workgroup composed of a physician and a member of the R&D team. In each case, you will get very different answers. In groups, interpersonal dynamics create micropolitics that influence answers. For example, in one-on-one settings, participants are often more open – but are less likely to challenge each other.
It is essential to understand what each setting has to offer and how that setting will cater to your strategic intentions: What type of information do we need? How well-defined is the matter we need to discuss?
Here, we’ve detailed three formats we frequently use, along with some thoughts on how they should be executed and when they are most appropriate:
Individual Exploratory Interviews
Individual exploratory interviews are appropriate if a topic is still new and undefined, especially if you are uncertain how relevant your questions are for your target market. With this approach, you can test the waters while gaining insights that can apply to the larger market. These findings will give you clarity on how to frame your topic, which elements should be included in your questioning, and how to approach the community of physicians you have identified as most relevant.
In this setting, the initial questions are well-thought-out, but then the turns and dynamics of the conversation are flexible. The interviewer can react to the emphases and interests apparent in the answers of the interviewee.
It’s best to plan for two to four interviews in a row. This allows the interviewer to compare perspectives and insights, to recognize themes, and to extrapolate hypotheses where possible.
These individual interviews can also be useful as part of the preparation for a group discussion, arming you with knowledge of how the members of the group discussion will position themselves, which topics will be controversial, and how you should design the group discussion.
Lastly, individual exploratory interviews are a quick way to gain an initial understanding of a market and its underlying dynamics. When resources or time are limited, these interviews require few logistics and only moderate preparation, allowing you to gain insights quickly and adapt to them speedily.
Advisory Boards and Other Group Discussions
The power and beauty of a group discussion lie in its potential for controversial discussion. By pitting participants with different viewpoints against each other, the strengths and weaknesses of arguments become apparent. As participants defend their positions, they often attain — and spell out — a deeper understanding of their own perspectives. In the process, a textured understanding of the market and its dynamics can be achieved.
To be effective, facilitators must prepare questions and other inputs to immediately initiate group reactions — either by choosing content that stimulates reflections or by presenting in a way that provokes an immediate response or questions. Organizers should seek to understand the rationale behind these questions. They should ask: Why is a question important? What are the underlying assumptions of the person raising the question? How are medical, organizational, and economic considerations influencing the questioner? Often, the primary insight to be gained from such questions is that the person posing the query has an opinion on the matter.
In such interactions, one of the primary goals should be to see whether participants’ initial assumptions and viewpoints withstand the vigorous challenges of the discussion. The goal is to uncover profound insights that go far beyond the basics of the underlying disagreements. This gives you the possibility to understand the dominant explanation or reasoning on a given topic, and how that argument can be used to sway other stakeholders. To achieve this, you must prepare thoroughly so that roughly 80% of the turns and critical moments the argument lives through in the discussion are known ahead of time.
Small Group Work
For those seeking to spark innovative thinking in a collaborative rather than conflictual engagement, this setting is best. True innovation is difficult to create without a meeting of the minds, after all. For example, this format could be applied early in the development process, at a stage when significant changes can still be made.
In this approach, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies bring external advisors into internal workshops in which all participants have the expertise and are expected to contribute to the discussions. Thereby they challenge each other’s thinking. The course of the discussion is not structured around a predetermined list of questions. Instead, initial questions lead to others. The workshop participants determine what the relevant questions are and further develop them together.
When planning such a workshop be sure to allow time for a one-on-one, brief conversations between external and internal participants, creating informality to encourage unguarded questions and candid responses. After each of those mini-sessions in the workshop agenda, the group comes back together, and the debrief is used as a springboard for an in-depth discussion delving further into the topics raised.
Organizers should depart from traditional PowerPoint formats for visualizing information, making two birds with one stone: selecting key facts and figures and displaying them on boards visible to all will make it easier for the participants to understand the information provided; also, the boards can be used by the moderators to take notes on key discussion points and for collaborating with the participants. Ultimately, all participants benefit from having an up-to-the-moment visual record of the insights and questions for refining conclusions as a group.
By working together to build this record, and by fully involving key stakeholders, this more open-ended approach carries with it all the benefits of co-creation, the much-vaunted business strategy that blurs company boundaries to integrate customers into the design process and centers that process around customer needs.
In a pharmaceutical development setting, co-creative processes such as these interactive forums give rise to ideas about how clinical developments can be accelerated. Because the feasibility of these ideas is hashed out by both internal and external experts, they have an unusually high chance of being realized.