The scene is familiar: a packed conference room with bad florescent lighting, the same staple of Danishes, slightly burnt coffee, and mini packets of creamer filling tables as attendees file in for yet another presentation.
At the end of a threeâday deluge of PowerPoints and stale air, two team leads have been asked to give project updates at a meeting organized by a major manufacturer.
One team puts together a presentation they think is clear and logical. Since their audience also funded the research, the team plans to detail exactly how they spent their time. Slideâbyâslide, they report every technical specification and graph consulted. As they progress through the slide deck, the team sees the audience's eyes glaze over, hears occasional sighs, and watches bodies slump with boredom.
The second team makes a different choice. They organize the material based on what the audience will find most interesting, omitting a portion of the technical details to be addressed during the questionâandâanswer period. The spokesperson for the team opens with only a few words on a slide and adds, âI will not bore you with details that you can read in the proposals and packets in front of you. Today, I want to share what was most interesting with our test and how our results can solve your problem.â The presentation ends with time to spare and questions from eager audience members.
In conference rooms and online meetings around the world, engineers are reading their presentations directly from textâheavy slides, cramming too much information into 20âminutes, and leaving audiences without a clear understanding of what is important. You have sat through your share of mindânumbing project reports, and, if you are honest, you have probably delivered them too.
In your experience you have probably asked yourself, why are some ideas chosen over others? Why are some projects given funding, while others grow stale? Why are some individuals hired or promoted when others are not? The answer to these questions comes down to communication.
The ability to present information in a clear and compelling manner conveys expertise, enlists support, and makes favorable impressions. The engineering profession is an âintensely oral cultureâ [2, p. 12] that includes a variety of public speaking occasions, such as team interactions, communication with management, meetings, project updates, and formal presentations [3]. We have worked with hundreds of engineers at various stages of their careers. This book is the outgrowth of years of research, practice, workshops, and symposiums. Through our roles at a major university, we have perfected the ability to train others how to clarify and craft their messages, cultivate dynamic delivery, and calm public speaking anxiety.
A great deal is at stake when we step up to speak. The ways in which we make our expertise known and ideas accessible is at the heart of this book. Our goal is to answer one essential question for engineers and technical professionals: how can I get better at sharing my ideas with a variety of audiences?
We want to make you better speakers, better communicators, and better leaders. This text was not written to be a compendium of thousands of years of communication research, or as an academic text on how communication is relevant to engineers. Rather, we aim to do what engineers love to do most: break something down and figure out how it works. To achieve this, we combined our expertise in communication with current research and firsthand information gathered through interviews with practicing engineers and technical professionals around the world.
By reading and working through this book, you will learn how to
- make the complex simple and the simple interesting,
- craft clear and organized messages,
- speak to what matters most to any audience whether technical or nontechnical,
- stay focused on the desired outcome/goal of your presentation,
- design effective visual aids that work to enhance spoken messages, and
- manage anxiety associated with speaking occasions.
1.1 WHY NOW?
People associate engineering with intelligence, technical skill, tools, machinery, and complex design and drafting calculations. However, left out of this definition is the human element involved in helping to make an engineering project successful. The top 10 countries who provide engineering education currently produce 1,831,699 graduates annually [4]. For those in the STEM fields, technical skill and knowledge is not enough to succeed. The ability to communicate ideas effectively to technical and nontechnical audiences is vital to a project's support and career advancement. Tracy Robar found that âengineers who communicate well stand out from others in their field and generally have more success in engineering pursuits, while those who communicate poorly often find themselves unable to advance, no matter their technical expertiseâ [5, p. 26].
Further, a 2003 study surveyed practicing and retired mechanical engineers about their oral communication practices and frequencies in the workplace [2]. Fifty percent of these participants named some form of public speaking as crucial to their work. Thirty two percent named meetings as the most important public speaking opportunity. While the types of oral communication varied, 70% of respondents identified career advancement as a result of one's ability to communicate effectively. In other words, engineers are required to verbally interact with technical and nontechnical experts in order to advance their professional careers.
Engineering and communication are not rivals, they are partners depending on one another for success. Engineering combines both argument and science. The English word for technology comes from the Greek words techne, or art and logos, meaning speech or principle of logic. The early Greek philosopher and godfather of communication Aristotle used logos to mean argument. Here technology might be better thought of as the craft of logical argument. By extension, the term engineering might be best conceived as technical management [6]. Moving beyond ancient history, the field of engineering has negotiated the tension between useful practicality and the need to communicate its ideas. We tend to think of engineering as the systemic design and development of products [7]. In Think Like an Engineer, author Michael Davis details the history and ethics associated with engineering. He writes that engineering is the knowledge of how people and tools work together [6]. While your own education and experience have prepared you for ingenuity in the field, most engineers woefully neglect the people aspect of their profession.
Think for a moment about your dayâtoâday interactions. You have, no doubt, sat thro...
