What I keep thinking about underneath your four points is the question of why this pattern is so persistent in technical leaders specifically. The over-reliance on details, the caveat before every claim, the inability to leave context out these are not communication failures. They are survival behaviours that worked in a previous context.
Most technical people were rewarded, for years, for comprehensiveness. The person who caught the edge case. The one who flagged the caveat nobody else had thought of. The one who never got caught out. That pattern was reinforced in code reviews, in architecture debates, in every room where being technically correct was the highest form of credibility.
Then they get promoted. And suddenly the room needs a different thing. Not completeness. Momentum, the skill that made them indispensable now makes them difficult to follow.
The "well, technically" impulse is not bad thinking. It is good thinking, in the wrong room. The hardest part is not learning the new skill. It is unlearning the identity that the old one built.
I really appreciate the call out of storytelling being a craft that someone really needs to hone over time and to not put yourself in the position where you need extensive storytelling skills that you really don’t have.
I used to read a lot of books about fiction writing and one model about plot that stuck with me was a diagram of a set of branching paths moving from left to right. The start of the story is on the left and the end of the story is the tip of one of the branches on the right. The point of this model was that, viewed from left, the plot appears unpredictable with suspense, but viewed from the right, when the reader is closing the book, the plot feels inevitable. There is only one path back to the beginning. The satisfaction of the plot comes from the experience of moving from suspense to inevitable. (I can't find where I read this originally. Janet Burroway's excellent textbook on fiction writing maybe?)
What I keep thinking about underneath your four points is the question of why this pattern is so persistent in technical leaders specifically. The over-reliance on details, the caveat before every claim, the inability to leave context out these are not communication failures. They are survival behaviours that worked in a previous context.
Most technical people were rewarded, for years, for comprehensiveness. The person who caught the edge case. The one who flagged the caveat nobody else had thought of. The one who never got caught out. That pattern was reinforced in code reviews, in architecture debates, in every room where being technically correct was the highest form of credibility.
Then they get promoted. And suddenly the room needs a different thing. Not completeness. Momentum, the skill that made them indispensable now makes them difficult to follow.
The "well, technically" impulse is not bad thinking. It is good thinking, in the wrong room. The hardest part is not learning the new skill. It is unlearning the identity that the old one built.
I really appreciate the call out of storytelling being a craft that someone really needs to hone over time and to not put yourself in the position where you need extensive storytelling skills that you really don’t have.
Great piece.
I used to read a lot of books about fiction writing and one model about plot that stuck with me was a diagram of a set of branching paths moving from left to right. The start of the story is on the left and the end of the story is the tip of one of the branches on the right. The point of this model was that, viewed from left, the plot appears unpredictable with suspense, but viewed from the right, when the reader is closing the book, the plot feels inevitable. There is only one path back to the beginning. The satisfaction of the plot comes from the experience of moving from suspense to inevitable. (I can't find where I read this originally. Janet Burroway's excellent textbook on fiction writing maybe?)
Let’s just kill 90% of adverbs
This is great. Definitely need to cut out the backstory but that’s the meat of the pitch 🍔