Story telling is an important method of communication. I’ve been guilty of being too abstract in some of these blog posts. There are times when I’ve not used enough real-world examples, or told stories to help bring to life the recommendations. Use story telling to drive your message home.

I can recall talking to my team about important best-practices in engineering that I knew we needed. I wanted my team to implement practices like automated builds and good version control. My first version of this talk sounded more like an abstract lecture. I realized after previewing it with a few people that I hadn't effectively communicated the vision.

I added stories to bring this vision to life. I talked about an instance where we missed key steps in our release because the build wasn’t automatic. I shared a circumstance where we made a change without version control, and couldn’t track back to the changes made causing the problem in production. When I gave the new talk, the best practices weren’t the compelling pieces - the stories of their pain had my staff nodding and agreeing.

I recall leading a team and communicating the performance expectation for pages to load in under five seconds. This benchmark came across as arbitrary. In order to make it real, I walked the team through our user’s real-life scenarios in the application. “Imagine your boss asks you for the answer to a question that you must get from our system and you log in and make a request only to …. wait….” and I waited five seconds, then ten seconds. It feels excruciating. “Now imagine you didn’t get the right answer the first time, and you make another request and you wait….” another five seconds…. and ten seconds…. It is uncomfortable. And the story is unforgettable.

The team understands immediately why performance is important to our users. The stories themselves are instrumental to the way we listen and learn. Use them to improve your communication.

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