[Sigia-l] Defusing Techies?

[Jody A. Hankinson]

> 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.

Against my better judgment, I'll venture off on this tangent. First, please
read Tufte's "Visual Explanations," p. 39 to 53. It is were he discusses the
incident, including visuals. For the time being, here is my abbreviated and
bastardized retelling.

Tufte says the engineers weren't compelling. The charts and diagrams did not
communicated the imminent failure of the O-ring. The diagrams for the
Presidential Commission couldn¹t even get it right. It took Feynman's
compelling, but technically weak demonstration. He puts a C-clamp on the
rubber O-ring and shoves it in his glass of ice water. Then he takes it out
to show the rubber has lost its elasticity. Low tech and got the point
across. 

I confess, I'm not sure how I would have responded if I was in the
engineers' shoes. But I try to use that awful event to keep me honest when
I'm trying to communication with technical folks.

Lastly, Tufte has one paragraph I find priceless:
"Thus, in management schools, the accident serves as a case study for
reflections about groupthink, technical decision-making in the face of
political pressure, and bureaucratic failures to communicate. For the
authors of engineering textbooks and for the physicist Richard Feynman, the
Challenger accident simply confirmed what they already knew: awful
consequences result when heroic engineers are ignored by villainous
administrators. In the field of statistics, the accident is evoked to
demonstrate the importance of risk assessment, data graphs, fitting models
to data, and requiring student so engineering to attend classes in
statistics. For sociologist, the accident is a symptom of structural
history, bureaucracy, and conformity to organizational norms."



Jody A. Hankinson  
   Information Architect ......| Interpreting strategy and processes
e: hank99 at bway.net             | into Internet applications.
t: 917.749.0910  
w: www.bway.net/~hank99