[Sigia-l] Defusing Techies?

[Andrew McNaughton]

On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, Jody A. Hankinson wrote:

> I am reminded of Tufte's Space Shuttle Challenger example. Super smart
> people weren't able to communicate a terminal flaw. Whenever I have problems
> with engineers, I remind myself of the anecdote. Then I try another method
> of communication.

I don't know what Tufte had to say about the Challenger, but I have read
what Richard Feynmann had to say after his involvement on the challenger
enquiry team.  The problem as he describes it was not that the Engineer's
weren't communicating the problem, but that management didn't really want
to hear it, and more importantly didn't want to convey it to their own
senior management, so that the story got progressively sweetened up to the
level where it got ignored.

I tend to find myself coming from the technical side of this communication
issue.  People talking to me often find themselves getting a lot more
technical detail than they want from me precisely because (ie when) there
is an important point that needs to be gotten across.  There are better
and worse ways to explain things, and a lot of room for judgement in what
gets said, but sometimes its just not easy stuff to take in and has to be
said anyway.

Andrew McNaughton