Anecdote: my oldest brother studied electrical engineering in college and, within 2 years, was promoted to a management position. Why? Because he was an excellent communicator (within an industry notorious for underwhelming communicators) and knew how to give presentations both to peers and to executives. Jump-started his career by 5 years at least, getting him to executive level by his early 40s.
He’s not particularly remarkable, technically-speaking. But his people still like and respect him. Ask about communication (which, for Homo sapiens, generally means “storytelling”).
I recognize the two sentiments you describe very well when it comes to communicating results in technical settings. You might have some lofty ideal that your audience are only interested in "facts" but if you don't explicitly think about what emotions you want elicit you can be pretty sure that the emotions you *do* spark won't be to your liking. I personally get really expasterated when senior people produce presentations that don't consider me as an audience - your lack of effort is just so plainly visible, so why should I stretch myself in order to understand you?
Hey Claus, it's an interesting read. I feel like people who are teaching subjects at the university level should also look at this, will create much more interest in subjects that students otherwise find dull !
Yes, agreed. As a university teacher myself, though, I will say that sometimes it can be difficult to have a great story prepared for every single lecture. I'm trying my best but I'm not sure I succeed every time. There is just too much material to present and not enough time to prepare. When I give a scientific talk I often prepare for 10-15 hours for a one-hour talk. I cannot put that amount of effort into every lecture I give in the classroom, when I teach several hours a week.
I find that when you teach the same topic many times you get the chance to build stories into the material over time. I teach in industry where I also don't get to spend as much time preparing as I'd like, but once you have a big enough backlog of stories from the trenches it becomes a lot easier to weave them in where they fit.
Hi Claus. Another interesting piece. IMO, this would better have been a discussion in the comments. It would have had more appropriate context. Accurate context. The people reading wouldn't have to follow a link to get the sense that what I wrote is being misrepresented here, which would necessarily be uncommon on a blog post. I suppose that's really what I'm trying to discuss here. Accuracy.
Anyway, I actually do come in peace. I might not see the topics you blog about the same as you, but to me that just means I've got a great opportunity to learn. And, if I provide critical feedback, I'm doing so because I hope others might share that ground with me. It's going to take a me a few days to find the time to provide critique here in a way that respects the audience. Feel free to reach out. I'm happy to discuss things and your thoughts could easily influence my own.
My post was not a response to your comment, as can be seen from the fact that I don’t explicitly refer to what you wrote or in any way need the background of your comment for my post to make sense. My post can stand on its own, and therefore it deserves to do so.
Also note that I don’t even attribute any specific claims to your post, other than saying it brings up themes related to what I’m writing about, which it certainly does. Your comment is clearly about manipulation (“A fairly standard axiom of institutionalised comms is they aim to manipulate the intended audience”), and I’m referring to your comment in the section about manipulation.
If you want me to move the footnote to right after “manipulating the audience” to be more precise in what I’m saying I’m happy to do that.
I think it's quite reasonable to describe your comment here as utter bullshit, indended to effectively gall the development of any substantive common ground or take any responsibility for what I described in my initial comment here. It sucks. The posts you've written on this blog are in areas I'm quite interested in. I have expertise in some of them. I really quite enjoyed your post describing differences between Python and R (I think that was here), and since it was enjoyable I'll give you props for writing a good story, but more so for saying something that was legitimately *useful*. That post was outside my expertise, but I trusted what you had to say. I still do. Key to that, I'd say, is that it contained *explanation*.
I'm not trying to beat you up here, nor have I in any other comments. I'm critical of ideas, but not of people. I've generally tried to be helpful, but in saying that, my help is towards a particular end--informing an audience and doing so respectfully. Respectful both to the audience here, and in how they will apply what they're told. There's always going to be some fuzziness found around common knowledge in forums like this. Some people know what is being said and can parse it for themselves, some do not know, and can't. This is obviously recursive--the extent to which someone has insight into what someone else knows and does not is far from certain. So, you can only explain what you can foreseeably expect others require, and it's a balancing act in any heterogeous audience. Too much explanation, you risk losing many of those more knowledgaeble on the topic. Too little and you're going over people's heads.
In the context of me trying to help (not necessarily you, but the general audience here), this fuzziness manifests as uncertainty with respect to you and your intentions. As in, are you actually trying to help people? What does helping others mean to you? The problem above applies here, but I expect this is a simple case. You have intentions, but I now feel like we don't have much common ground on that. So be it.
I think this can be effectively be captured with the cliche, “everything is political.” If that’s unclear, I’m happy to elaborate. If I’m clearly wrong, I’d love to be enlightened and corrected.
Stepping beyond that fundamental stuff—story is a super useful tool in communication. Engaging emotion is fundamental. There’s been no substantive discussion of why on either of these points. A dabble into how, sure, but *why* is where it’s really at. If we’re working in post-secondary education or research, there’s really nothing without *why*. We’re not programming automatons. We’re passing on *understanding*.
I feel like I have some idea of what’s going on here, and to me it’s ugly as fuck. I’ll leave it at that unless someone wants me to detail things.
Anecdote: my oldest brother studied electrical engineering in college and, within 2 years, was promoted to a management position. Why? Because he was an excellent communicator (within an industry notorious for underwhelming communicators) and knew how to give presentations both to peers and to executives. Jump-started his career by 5 years at least, getting him to executive level by his early 40s.
He’s not particularly remarkable, technically-speaking. But his people still like and respect him. Ask about communication (which, for Homo sapiens, generally means “storytelling”).
I recognize the two sentiments you describe very well when it comes to communicating results in technical settings. You might have some lofty ideal that your audience are only interested in "facts" but if you don't explicitly think about what emotions you want elicit you can be pretty sure that the emotions you *do* spark won't be to your liking. I personally get really expasterated when senior people produce presentations that don't consider me as an audience - your lack of effort is just so plainly visible, so why should I stretch myself in order to understand you?
Hey Claus, it's an interesting read. I feel like people who are teaching subjects at the university level should also look at this, will create much more interest in subjects that students otherwise find dull !
Yes, agreed. As a university teacher myself, though, I will say that sometimes it can be difficult to have a great story prepared for every single lecture. I'm trying my best but I'm not sure I succeed every time. There is just too much material to present and not enough time to prepare. When I give a scientific talk I often prepare for 10-15 hours for a one-hour talk. I cannot put that amount of effort into every lecture I give in the classroom, when I teach several hours a week.
I find that when you teach the same topic many times you get the chance to build stories into the material over time. I teach in industry where I also don't get to spend as much time preparing as I'd like, but once you have a big enough backlog of stories from the trenches it becomes a lot easier to weave them in where they fit.
Agreed, I was referring to ones who don't put much efforts into the teaching. Imparting intuition always works I feel.
Hi Claus. Another interesting piece. IMO, this would better have been a discussion in the comments. It would have had more appropriate context. Accurate context. The people reading wouldn't have to follow a link to get the sense that what I wrote is being misrepresented here, which would necessarily be uncommon on a blog post. I suppose that's really what I'm trying to discuss here. Accuracy.
Anyway, I actually do come in peace. I might not see the topics you blog about the same as you, but to me that just means I've got a great opportunity to learn. And, if I provide critical feedback, I'm doing so because I hope others might share that ground with me. It's going to take a me a few days to find the time to provide critique here in a way that respects the audience. Feel free to reach out. I'm happy to discuss things and your thoughts could easily influence my own.
My post was not a response to your comment, as can be seen from the fact that I don’t explicitly refer to what you wrote or in any way need the background of your comment for my post to make sense. My post can stand on its own, and therefore it deserves to do so.
Also note that I don’t even attribute any specific claims to your post, other than saying it brings up themes related to what I’m writing about, which it certainly does. Your comment is clearly about manipulation (“A fairly standard axiom of institutionalised comms is they aim to manipulate the intended audience”), and I’m referring to your comment in the section about manipulation.
If you want me to move the footnote to right after “manipulating the audience” to be more precise in what I’m saying I’m happy to do that.
I think it's quite reasonable to describe your comment here as utter bullshit, indended to effectively gall the development of any substantive common ground or take any responsibility for what I described in my initial comment here. It sucks. The posts you've written on this blog are in areas I'm quite interested in. I have expertise in some of them. I really quite enjoyed your post describing differences between Python and R (I think that was here), and since it was enjoyable I'll give you props for writing a good story, but more so for saying something that was legitimately *useful*. That post was outside my expertise, but I trusted what you had to say. I still do. Key to that, I'd say, is that it contained *explanation*.
I'm not trying to beat you up here, nor have I in any other comments. I'm critical of ideas, but not of people. I've generally tried to be helpful, but in saying that, my help is towards a particular end--informing an audience and doing so respectfully. Respectful both to the audience here, and in how they will apply what they're told. There's always going to be some fuzziness found around common knowledge in forums like this. Some people know what is being said and can parse it for themselves, some do not know, and can't. This is obviously recursive--the extent to which someone has insight into what someone else knows and does not is far from certain. So, you can only explain what you can foreseeably expect others require, and it's a balancing act in any heterogeous audience. Too much explanation, you risk losing many of those more knowledgaeble on the topic. Too little and you're going over people's heads.
In the context of me trying to help (not necessarily you, but the general audience here), this fuzziness manifests as uncertainty with respect to you and your intentions. As in, are you actually trying to help people? What does helping others mean to you? The problem above applies here, but I expect this is a simple case. You have intentions, but I now feel like we don't have much common ground on that. So be it.
I think this can be effectively be captured with the cliche, “everything is political.” If that’s unclear, I’m happy to elaborate. If I’m clearly wrong, I’d love to be enlightened and corrected.
Stepping beyond that fundamental stuff—story is a super useful tool in communication. Engaging emotion is fundamental. There’s been no substantive discussion of why on either of these points. A dabble into how, sure, but *why* is where it’s really at. If we’re working in post-secondary education or research, there’s really nothing without *why*. We’re not programming automatons. We’re passing on *understanding*.
I feel like I have some idea of what’s going on here, and to me it’s ugly as fuck. I’ll leave it at that unless someone wants me to detail things.