What engineers, researchers, and data scientists taught me about communication
Early in my career, I followed the conventional advice for communication challenges: teach storytelling. I could usually capture a room's attention for a little while, but it didn't take long for me to notice glazed eyes and faraway looks on the faces of the manufacturing engineers and software developers I was talking to. I realized there was a disconnect between the process-oriented work they do every day and the ethereal world of storytelling.
I learned more about the struggles they were experiencing when it came to talking about their work and realized quickly that these are people who think in systems, not stories. So I took the lead and developed a systematic approach to help them frame their work within a rules-based system with guidelines and guardrails. They were learning how to develop a story, but in a language that was more familiar to them.
Delivering information clearly is a repeatable process that can be taught.
Fiction writers and the science minded have more in common than they realize: Novelists seek to win avid readers and great reviews, my tech-minded clients want to win believers and clients. So I started learning more about what makes people change their mind, and blended in cues from cognitive and behavioral science as well as information design to show them how people process information. Once technical teams understood why audiences rely on patterns, mental models, and cognitive shortcuts to make sense of complex ideas, communication became another problem they could solve systematically.
Our conversations changed naturally. We started by asking what decision the end-client needed to make, which information would help them make it, and which details could wait. Communication became less about presenting everything we knew and more about organizing information around client needs.
The results were encouraging. Feedback confirmed that reports became easier to navigate, presentations became more focused, and conversations with clients became more productive. The improvements weren't driven by better writing alone. They came from making deliberate choices about what mattered most to the clients. Technical experts discovered they could communicate with greater clarity without sacrificing the depth or accuracy that defined their work.
Read a recent ebook about strategic storytelling.
Visual communication supports deeper understanding.
A few years later, my business partner, Joy Panos Stauber, and I were asked to develop a training program to help consultants develop more compelling storylines and clearer presentations.
As we worked through the project, we realized we were approaching the same challenge from different directions. My work has always centered on writing, messaging, and organizing information. Joy's expertise is visual communication and presentation design. On the surface, those disciplines seem distinct. In practice, they depend on many of the same decisions: establishing hierarchy, determining emphasis, deciding what belongs first, and understanding what the client needs to make a decision.
Together, Joy and I developed a practical framework with repeatable methods that teams could apply immediately to the work they were already doing. Our training gave teams across organizations a shared approach for producing stronger executive summaries, clearer reports, and more effective presentations.
Technical professionals are often criticized for either communicating too little or too much. What Joy and I discovered, however, is that the underlying issue is usually much simpler. Most teams lack a shared framework for deciding how to organize their expertise for people who don't have the same background. Once that framework exists, communication becomes far more consistent across teams.
Building a shared communication system
That project became the foundation for Insight Story Studio, where we help technical teams strengthen written, verbal, and visual communication through practical systems grounded in the way technical professionals already think and work.
Joy and I have worked in the B2B space for a long time, and have wrestled through the “lost in translation” issues that occur so often between the technical and marketing/communications side of the business. Our expertise is in having the curiosity to understand the goals on both sides, and helping to bridge the gap so businesses can support their growth goals with clearer, outcome-oriented communication.
Do your teams struggle to communicate effectively? Check out Insight Story Studio and see how we help teams like yours.