There's one thing about (professional) communication that I find hilarious. Over the last 15+ years (until approx. 2023), the importance of writing (as a skill) in software engineering craft has gradually declined. I've written about that already - https://no-kill-switch.ghost.io/generation-of-illiterate-developers/. It's not that this ability was not useful anymore - I attribute this devaluation mainly to the misunderstanding of Agile principles and the overheated job market (companies were looking for whoever could write code, the natural language was nice to have ...).
But the situation has changed: first of all, the global supply vs demand situation (regarding engineering jobs) has shifted & employers can afford to be much more picky. Secondly, we have LLMs, and prompt engineering has quickly skyrocketed on the skills-in-demand ladder. It is now actually essential to be able to phrase yourself correctly, accurately, and concisely. If you haven't acknowledged that fact already, you should act promptly (pun intended ...).
And if I had to pick one particular "sub-skill" of writing worth your attention and focus (if you think seriously about career development), I'd go with "storytelling".
What is storytelling?
I've asked Claude to define storytelling as a skill (in business) concisely, and it did a pretty good job (disclaimer: I don't use Gen AI tools for writing blog posts, but I do use them for research/fact-checking):
Storytelling is the ability to structure information as a compelling narrative that creates emotional connection, drives understanding, and motivates action.
I'd also add something about building alignment, but it's a minor detail. Engineers, and especially engineering leaders of all sorts, do need storytelling to:
- "sell" their ideas (I've written about that as well ... https://no-kill-switch.ghost.io/were-all-sales-wo-men/)
- communicate the "why" (or deeper context in general)
- express the real problem behind the potential solution
- traverse our highly abstract domains that may have no physical representation; hence, it's hard to imagine them
OK, but why "storytelling" then? It should be possible to communicate comprehensibly w/o a need to craft "stories", right?
It's not hard to spot that human cognition is wired for narrative. It's easier to memorize anecdotes (that trigger some emotion), "crispy" personas, and good naming than general (theoretical) concepts - frequently, these things just get stuck in our memory without effort. Besides, a typical structure of the story (intro, development, summary/punchline) is nothing but the implementation of the most basic logical flow constructs, like a "cause-and-effect" relationship.
How to build good stories?
Oh, there are tons of good practices/heuristics one could use, but they all require fundamental awareness & some deliberate practice. Let me bring up some from my own repertoire:
The most important beginner's trick is using an adequate arc pattern for a given story. Here are some examples:
- STAR: Situation -> Task -> Action -> Result
- CCCR: Context -> Conflict -> Consequence -> Resolution (Proposal)
- PEEL: Point -> Evidence -> Explain -> Link
- AIDA: Attention -> Interest -> Desire -> Action
- BRIEF: Background -> Reason -> Information -> End -> Follow-Up
- Before/After/Bridge
- etc.
The choice depends on the scenario: do you want to explain what happened, influence a decision (just about to be made), or get a buy-in for your plan? Well-chosen general structure provides a proper framing.
Even the best arc is not enough if you mess with the level of detail. That should always be tailored to the audience and their expectations. The typical tricks I use on a daily basis are:
- The nested doll heuristics - start at a high level and keep diving deeper subsequently so the audience can stop at will (without losing the point).
- The chain-of-thought/step-by-step reasoning, amplified with the correct use of signposting. This concept probably deserves a separate blog post ... Signposting is a method of adding clarity to a written text by using particular words that have uniquely clear structural meaning - they act as visual anchors (in your text, seriously) and make the story easier to follow, e.g., "for example" , "because of", "in order to", "as the next step".
- Favoring the structure that either starts with a hypothesis and ends with a thesis or begins with a thesis and concludes with its confirmation/rejection.
Wait, there are more tricks in my sleeve:
To make the story more real, either anchor it with real events/situations/data or keep referring to what's already acknowledged/confirmed: like agreed cultural values, established principles & tenets, or communicated strategy. Starting with such axioms makes your statements more solid & harder to undermine.
Question (yourself) what you've already written - after each paragraph (or even a single sentence - in short forms) - ask yourself: "And so what?". What is the value of this paragraph? What did we just learn? Does it push the story forward? Or prove anything? Aren't we repeating (or even worse - diluting) anything here?
Use both examples ("show, don't tell") and analogies ("so, the technical debt works a bit like a financial debt, because ..."). That's the best way to introduce your mental models to others (who may have developed their own).
Use the ancient modes of persuasion to make a deliberate decision on what you want to appeal to (with your story): logos (logical reasoning), pathos (emotions & topics your audience has a personal stance towards), ethos (authority, sense of responsibility/duty), or even kairos (use the opportunity window, due to some event the has enabled/triggered it).
Don't neglect the visual composition (yup, I've written about it as well ... https://no-kill-switch.ghost.io/tagri-they-aint-gonna-read-it/) - it's easy to discourage the reader/recipient simply by attacking them with unstructured/unformatted wall of text.
Prompting people (& not only)
We are all born "instinctive" storytellers. It means that we follow our guts and simply tell what we know. Even worse - many people believe that the more words they spill, the more right/correct/smart they are. But such an unstructured knowledge dump is frequently just pointless, annoying and tiresome. We've all seen discussions halted to the full stop just because 2+ parties have overflown others with non-parsable junk that's impossible to follow/untangle. The main problem thread has already been completely watered down in a plethora of meaningless details and (wannabe-smart) digressions.
We can do better than that, but that requires practice and preparation. Respect others by communicating the way you'd like to be communicated to. Make every word count (by having its purpose). Build stories that are not only logical and comprehensible but also memorable and stand out of the everyday noise.
P.S. I've mentioned tons of techniques above. TBH, I think they are pretty common or you should figure out how they work based on their names or a simple web search. BUT, if it's just my bias kicking in and you feel that some examples would help you understand these recommendations better, let me know - I don't mind creating a subsequent post with just examples.