The loudest thing in the room was self-judgement — a national academy for early-career medical researchers

Quick answer

For a national academy that trains early-career medical researchers, IMPROV Communication delivered two trainings in one day on communicating science and connecting with peers. The aim was to help researchers make an audience feel something about their work, and to use the people around them. In anonymous feedback, 27 of 28 respondents would recommend it, and self-judgement emerged as the room's dominant theme.

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At a glance

• Client: A national academy for early-career medical researchers
• Engagement: Two trainings in one day, September 2026, two facilitators
• Focus: Communicating your science, and using the people around you
• 96% would recommend the training to a colleague (27 of 28 respondents)
• 5.9 / 7 average rating that the training is worth continuing with
• 12 of 28 named Do Not Judge Yourself as the principle that spoke loudest — the single largest theme

Source: anonymous post-session survey completed by 28 participants across the two groups. No attendance figure was recorded on the day, so no response rate is claimed.

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Why this academy asked us in

National research academies exist to build the next generation of scientists. The science tends to take care of itself. What decides whether a career opens up is often something else: whether a researcher can make a room care about their work, and whether they reach out to the people who could take it further.

The academy asked for a day built around two outcomes. First, help researchers communicate their science so a listener feels something rather than politely follows along. Second, help them use their network more deeply — the peers, collaborators and senior figures already within reach.

The challenges that shaped our design:

• Precision is the training, connection is not. Research careers reward being exactly right. That same instinct makes people cautious about telling a story, and hard on themselves when they get it slightly wrong.
• A network that exists on paper. These researchers already sit inside a well-connected community. The gap is in using it — asking for help, proposing a collaboration, writing the first email.
• Two rooms, one standard. The cohort split into two groups with two facilitators. The design had to deliver the same experience in both.

What we delivered

Two trainings in a single day, each led by an experienced IMPROV facilitator, built so that people did the work rather than watched it.

The central exercise put researchers in small groups to explain their own research while deliberately creating one specific emotion in the listener — curiosity, surprise, awe, compassion, concern, hope or amusement. Each emotion has its own techniques, and participants worked through them on their own material rather than a case study.

Each session followed the three-phase architecture at the heart of our methodology:

• Activation. Participants arrived expecting to take part rather than to sit and listen.
• The trainings themselves. Experiential work grounded in the research on emotional intelligence and psychological safety (Goleman, Edmondson, Brown) and the 5 Guiding Principles of IMPROV. People try something, notice what happened, then name what they will carry.
• Reinforcement. A 30-day sprint of short prompts, twice a week, to carry the day past the point where a good experience usually fades.

What participants told us

Twenty-eight people completed the anonymous survey. Three findings stood out.

Self-judgement was the loudest thread in the room. Asked which of the 5 Guiding Principles spoke to them most, 12 of the 28 named Do Not Judge Yourself — more than double any other single principle. The reasons were unusually candid for a professional survey. One wrote that their work environment is judgemental, so they struggle not to judge themselves. Another realised that people do not judge you as much as you think. For a group whose careers are built on being right, naming the internal cost of that out loud is the shift that matters.

The two rooms read the day differently. In the first group, eight of fifteen named Do Not Judge Yourself and nobody named Do Not Judge Others. That room turned inward. The second group spread evenly across three principles — Make Each Other Look Good, Do Not Judge Others and Do Not Judge Yourself — and turned outward, towards the people beside them. Same design, same day, two distinct routes in.

The network gap showed up in the numbers. Likelihood to reach out to someone for help or collaboration scored 4.9 out of 7 — the lowest of the three scales, with nine respondents at the midpoint. At the same time, one participant wrote that it turned out to be easy to talk to anyone in the room. Willingness was not the problem. Sending the message was, which is exactly what the 30-day sprint is built to address.

In their own words

My work environment is very judgmental and therefore I often struggle to not judge myself. — Participant, anonymous survey

The thoughts I have about myself might not be that different from what others think about themselves. — Participant, anonymous survey

If you are too self conscious, focusing on the people around you helps. And if you make them look good, maybe they will do the same for you. — Participant, anonymous survey

It was fun trying to describe my project through the lenses of different emotions. — Participant, anonymous survey

Everybody feels the same as I do, so I should not be afraid. — Participant, anonymous survey

What they noticed about themselves

• That they judge their own work far more harshly than anyone else does.
• That they think ahead to their next sentence instead of listening to the one being said.
• That talking to a stranger in the room turned out to be easy.
• That relaxing changes what the mind is able to do.
• That the habit of answering with "but" shapes every conversation they have.

Bring this to your organisation

Researchers, engineers and specialists share a version of the same problem: the work is strong and the telling of it is where value leaks away. What transfers from this engagement is the approach — people practise on their own material, in a room where getting it wrong costs nothing, and leave with one specific thing to do rather than a set of principles to admire.

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