Week 2 - Storytelling for communication, consensus

Aug 26, 2022

August 26, 2022

Although I had not arrived in Thailand by the moment, I have attempted my best to curate the materials and class guidelines from various sources and tried making an understanding out of it.

Instructors(s):

Asst. Prof. Dr. Nuttanart Facundes
Aj. Tarntip Liuchalermwongs

Coursework (the 'what?') 🤷‍♂️

Storytelling

Storytelling was the starting topic of this session. Storytelling is involved passing the context and communicating the relevant facts and figures with empathy. It is a great skill to portray the significance of something valuable.

Richard Turere: My invention that made peace with lions
He delivered a very convincing talk on the TEDx platform about the solution he built to keep lions 🦁 away from his father's cattle 🐄 at night. Rather than keeping this to facts, numbers, and statistics, the presenter took a step ahead and provided us with a sense of the relevance of his technical solutions.
His talk was very successful since he has been personally connected with his audience and laid down the context.

About Freytag's pyramid:

This gives a structure for storytelling:

Exposition - background plot
Inciting incident - keystone incident (like a plot twist)
Rising Action - how situations escalate
Climax - a place where wonders are at the peak
Falling action - now, things start to become clear
Resolutions - the final message is successfully developed

Consensus decision

We won't be making good decisions based on assumptions, sense of feeling, or judgment. Therefore, while agreeing to a technical decision conflict-management techniques like voting or compromising should be discarded. Instead of such measures, the decisions should be agreed upon by all the decision-makers involved and centered on logic, facts, and rational thought (like conventional wisdom).

Unlike other kinds of work (as opposed to engineering), being open to participating in healthy conflicts brings the best in the solution we develop.

Basic guidelines:

Everyone must agree (not accede)
Center on logic discussion (no opinion)
Encourage conflict (bring information and facts to light)
Avoid voting and tradeoff

Impact (the 'so what?') 🚀

Communication is one of the inseparable parts of the engineering role. Storytelling either in verbal or written form is a must-learn skill in order to improve communication skills and leverage our collaboration with others.

A consensus decision is a widely adopted means observed in technological development trends. We can find them from as simple as hackathon projects to the large consortium making technical decisions (like IEEE, and W3C developing universal electronics and software standards). Decision input there involves logic, rational outcomes, and the test results obtained from experimenting with various setups or designs.

Reflections (the 'now what?') 🤔

Using storytelling as a start, while we present technical solutions will surely leave a convincing positive impact on the audiences. We can also use such measures at the end of our showing to build a hook, which makes our solution to be remembered more strongly. I look forward to improving my presentation of this technique.

I've learned that partial agreement in technical work is a self-destructive move to make. It has to be avoided at any cost. I've exercised consensus decision quite a lot of times in my previous projects and looking forward to learning the best technical groupwork practices more along the course.