Success Skills for Engineers— Part 1 — Tell Me a Story
You are nothing without the ability to communicate clearly
A comprehensive internal study at Google analysing what made the most successful teams found that technicals skills ranked dead last (!) of the 8 qualities looked at — soft skills ranked significantly higher with communication being amongst the top.
The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.
This series of posts is all about giving you some high level tools to improve your soft skills. Particularly they will focus on improving communication and productivity skills. The series is split into 3 parts:
The focus of this post is on communications skills.
Being able to communicate a clear message to key stakeholders is perhaps the most important skill an engineer can develop. It does not matter how good your technical abilities are, if you cannot effectively get your ideas and concepts across to your audience your impact will be limited. Effective communication results from understanding your audience, crafting the message so they engage with it, and delivering it with impact through your medium of choice.
For bonus points think about how you can deliver more - what is the next question your audience will be wanting answered? Provide that and leave them impressed!
“Communication is not about saying what we think. Communication is about ensuring others hear what we mean.” Simon Sinek.
Ensuring others hear what we mean requires you to communicate at their level, understanding what they are wanting to hear and delivering that message in a clearly laid our format.
Tell me a story
Context
There are two important contexts to consider.
The first is your own point of view — what are you or your boss hoping to get out of this body of work. A task assignment, impact filter or commanders intent are excellent tools to make sure the objective of the work is clear.
The other context to understand is your the customers or audience. What is their back story? What are they wanting to hear from me and how do they want to hear it? Design thinking provides some excellent tools to help you understand your customers needs.
- Design thinking tools
- User Experience Map
- Empathy map — Thinking; Feeling; Saying; Doing;
Take not of what language they are using? Can you clearly articulate their pain point? Here are some additional links that will help you understand how to get the most out of this step:
- Questions to get you unstuck and help get to the heart of your customers problems.
- Frame a hypothesis and build a minimum viable product that allows you to test it.
- HBR — Don’t Sell a product sell a whole new way of thinking
Being aware of the three critical gaps of execution can help you close gaps in your communication. Is it possibly you are making assumptions at any of these stages that may result in a poor outcome. Being clear early in the piece about knowledge and expectations can help avoid these pitfalls.
Organise Ideas
Once you have a concept of what you are looking to share and the key details your audience is looking for, it is important to organise ideas so that they are easily digested. A terrific way to do this is via the Minto Pyramid Principle developed by Barbara Minto for McKinsey.
This short video helps explain the structure of the Minto Pyramid in 3 minutes.
The Minto Pyramid allows you to:
- Grouping facts logically enables memory and understanding of communication
- The Pyramid Principle refers to the structured and hierarchical grouping of ideas to improve analysis and communication
The Minto Pyramid is based on logic and cognitive science to most effectively get your message across. It is more than just grouping ideas — its about clear thinking and rigorous analysis.
This link also provides a good summary of the The pyramid principle.
A further important part of framing your argument is to decide on whether to use deductive adductive or inductive reasoning. Whilst we typically develop our thoughts through a deductive process, it is often far more effectively to present them inductively.
Surprise and Delight
Understanding your audience and structuring your argument all help reduce the cognitive load on your audience. This makes your message be more easily received as they can focus solely on the content.
Take this one step further — what are they going to want to know or do next? Can you provide this to them?
Pulling It All Together
Once you are clear on the seperate parts of understanding the task; understanding your audience perspective and getting all your key points, it is time to pull it all into a coherent narrative. This is true whether it is an email, a memo or a presentation.
Step 1 — Subject
- What am I talking about?
Step 2 — Key thought
- What do I want my audience leaving here thinking /deciding
Step 3 — what are the key points (key lines) I want to get across
- Importance, Relevance, opportunity
- Environmental scan
- What is your solution
- How can your audience get involved / help? What do they need to do
Step 4 — Supporting evidence for key points
- Fill out your argument with supporting evidence
A homework task
Think of a Uni project you have worked on in the past year. Think about if you applied some of these techniques when presenting. How would you change your project now? Come prepared with an example to talk about to the workshop.
Some case studies we will review:
- Bruce Highway centre line
- Liberty Ships and the problem with them cracking in half and sinking
- Challenger Space Shuttle and the seals that failed in the cold (also here)
Additional Reading
- 8 Classic story telling techniques — great link to developing a story telling framework.
- Mind tools — comprehensive reference site with lots of lessons and tricks to improve.
- HBR — Visualisations that really work — How are the graphics helping your communication?
- Want a better pitch Review of Elon Musk’s Powerwall keynote and the skills he uses to make an impact.
Go to the next parts in this series
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