Envelope #14: How to get your point or idea across to “non-engineers”

Good morning! This is Back of the Envelope – a weekly newsletter to help you sharpen your structural engineering chops in 5 minutes or less.

In today’s email, I am going to share three frameworks on ‘how to get your point or idea across to non-technical key stakeholders’ (e.g., architects or owners).

I learned these recently from Episode 56 of the Structural Engineering Podcast (which I highly recommend checking out – hosts Max and Zach are both practicing structural engineers; they do a fantastic job dissecting various aspects of the profession on each episode).

In Episode 56, they interviewed a communication expert, Melissa Marshall (whose mission is to help level up the way scientists and engineers communicate with decision-making stakeholders).

Here are the three main frameworks:

1/ Move from “speaker-center” to “audience center”

2/ Filtering the technical details

3/ Tell the “so what”

Let’s dive in!

(Estimated read time = 3 minutes and 26 seconds)