Why More Engineers Are Learning Storytelling
Civil engineers, systems engineers, software engineers… you name it.
All types of engineers are learning more about storytelling.
The reason that more engineers are learning storytelling is because they understand who their machines serve.
Humans.
Engineers are meant to solve problems that make a human’s life easier.
How do humans process information?
Through raw facts and data or through narratives?
The answer is the latter.
An engineer who wants to move up needs to learn basic storytelling skills.
The Inability to Tell Stories
For my first-ever internship, I was getting invited to a lot of meetings with the big boys in the company.
Project managers, business analysts, quality assurance, etc.
I was surprised to see these meetings in my notification calendar.
These meetings are for the head engineers, not for a rookie intern like me.
Why was I being invited?
One day, I asked the project manager why she kept inviting me to these events.
She smirked, paused, and said:
‘It’s because you speak in a way that we understand.’
And that’s when I realized why I was being invited.
It’s because I knew enough technical details, while still being a beginner.
The other engineers in my team were way too detail-oriented.
They couldn’t explain engineering concepts to humans.
Instead, they would talk to humans like they were machines.
Since I had just learned what certain parts of the system would do, it was easier to communicate the message in plain language.
It paid to dumb it down.
Why Engineers Struggle to Dumb it Down
Engineers struggle to dumb it down for 2 reasons:
- Ignorance and pride.
Ignorant engineers think that everyone should understand technical details like them.
That’s a silly mindset to have.
Imagine if you go in for a routine checkup and your doctor is talking your ear off with all these fancy chemicals you never heard of.
The doctor’s common sense is not your common sense.
Another reason that engineers refuse to dumb it down is due to pride.
They worked so hard to get their degrees.
When they simplify what they do, it feels like they are simplifying who they are.
That’s why they make the concepts detailed and profuse.
The Little Kid Looking for a Story
Imagine the following scenario…
Find the project that you are a master in.
This is your system.
One day, you’re walking around the building and see a little kid who is asking different engineers questions.
He asks you:
‘Hey mister, what do you do in this company?’
Can you explain the system to this kid?
This kid needs content.
He’s interviewing different engineers for his school newspaper.
A lot of kids in the school want to be engineers but don’t know what their profession is like.
Your interview can inspire the future generation.
What are you going to say?
Showmanship
Engineers are scared of showmanship.
It feels wrong.
The facts should speak for themselves.
But that’s not how the real world works.
Spicing up a story is about finding what is important.
When we know what is important, showmanship is a byproduct.
We don’t have to include details like:
-Rebooting the computer.
-Server restarts.
-Ticket management.
Focus on the big ideas.
What’s the most important stuff?
Focusing on the big stuff is about sweeping the minuscule details under the rug.
When we know the big details, that’s when we can get our showmanship on.
We include analogies, a strong tonality, and imaginary scenarios to help this kid understand what we do.
Now we are delivering a story to the little kid’s newspaper.
Talking & Clicking Buttons
I’ve noticed how much the engineering field has changed in 8 short years.
When I first started there, a lot of manual tasks were involved, like installing printers.
After the cloud became a thing, we didn’t really install too many things physically.
We’d do a one-time physical setup, and the rest was about dragging and dropping relevant files from the cloud.
Before, engineering was all about finagling with wires.
Nowadays, engineering is more about talking and clicking buttons.
We talk with others to see what the problem is.
Then we talk with others to solve the problem.
In the process of solving the problem, a lot of buttons are being clicked.
Every now and then, there is a crisis.
I don’t know about your organization, but my organization calls a crisis a P1.
- Priority 1.
Take care of this asap!!
During moments like this, we have all types of teams on the call.
People who deal with the payments, people who handle client services, managers, QAs, engineers, etc.
The other teams have no clue what the engineers do.
They only have a clue what their team does.
This is a high-pressure moment.
If the engineer is babbling away in technical speak, the problem will never get solved.
They need to be able to simplify their message.
Hard Skills & Soft Skills Meet
There was a quote that once said:
“Software is eating the world.”
It implied that the real world was being infiltrated with software.
There is software to order food, book a ride, rate a service, etc.
My remix to that idea is:
“Soft skills are eating hard skills fields.”
The fact that engineers are nowadays getting rewarded for automating menial tasks shows that a lot of tasks will be automated.
Soon, it will be all about clicking buttons and making the problem go away.
A lot of time will be returned back to the engineers.
In this free time, management will assess what type of people they want in their teams.
Do they want highly technical people who are hard to get along with or do they want moldable folks who can learn to strategically click buttons?
Many managers will go with the latter.
Smart engineers are picking up the trend.
Soft skills are eating their field.
And one of the soft skills doing the most damage is storytelling.
