Ivanna trained as a behavioural economist, drawn to one deceptively simple question: how do you get large groups of people to make good decisions.

She started out in digital marketing for software companies, then moved into consulting at a firm optimising clinical trials. That took her to Switzerland for five years, fixing everything from cross-department collaboration to process and technology roll outs.

What she learned was that what slows down drug development often isn’t the science or the regulations – it’s behaviour.

“I kept seeing different manifestations of what was essentially people problems,” she says. “And it inspired me to keep attempting to bring the human back to the centre of my communications, as a tool to unlock transformation.”

That insight pushed her to pursue a new skill set.

“Besides my day job, for many years I’ve been an improv comedian,” she tells me. “And quite recently I’ve taken up stand-up comedy.”

Partly because it’s liberating and creative, but also because she thinks play is serious business in an industry that can feel allergic to it.

“When we’re communicating about pharma, we tend to make it so dry and so serious that it loses personal significance,” Rosendal says.

Her antidote is to look for the game in the conversation: metaphor, a relatable truism, the everyday hook that makes a complex topic stick.

She’s been testing that approach on a life sciences podcast she’s run for four years, recently revamped to be more playful.

The result: the audience has widened from people deeply invested in the niche to listeners who simply want to understand how the system works.

One recent episode tackled innovation: big pharma behaving less like a single product machine and more like a venture capitalist, building a portfolio by acquiring and funding smaller biotechs.

Rather than disappearing into deal jargon, they explored it through a restaurant metaphor – because everyone understands menus, risk and why you don’t want to bet the whole business on one dish.

And then there’s the stand up.

This year her schedule is full of industry events where she’ll do “no presentations – just jokes”. The first set is (at the time we speak) two weeks away, and she’s already on draft five.

“The test audience laughed in all the right places,” she assures me, with relief.

Her logic is practical. If you can laugh at the problems you’re facing at work, she argues, they seem smaller – and therefore more solvable.

She’s already seen it translate back into the day job. Having written pharma specific material about “the industry’s dysfunctions”, she now finds herself meeting those same dysfunctions at work and, as she puts it, “serving the joke”.

People laugh, the tension drops, and suddenly you’ve got a shared summary of the problem – and permission to try something different.

There’s a familiar objection here: isn’t humour risky in a field that deals with life and death issues.

Rosendal’s view is that a good joke is proof you’ve understood the system well enough to distil it.

“To write a good joke about pharma, you really do need to understand what you’re talking about – and you need to make your audience understand and relate to it too,” she says. The laugh isn’t the point; the clarity is.

So, what’s her advice for comms professionals who want to bring more lightness into serious work.

Start with analogy.

“Whatever problem you’re trying to describe, what’s an analogy that an everyday person could understand,” she suggests. Shopping, the bus, a bad restaurant booking system – anything that makes the behaviour of a molecule, a process or an organisation feel recognisably human.

That kind of playful reframing, she says, is often what unlocks a line that’s both accurate and genuinely engaging.

And if you want the shortcut.

“Take an improv or stand-up class,’ she says. ‘I can absolutely recommend it.”

In an industry that can take itself very seriously, a little well-placed laughter might be less of a distraction – and more of a route back to the human point of it all.