13  Raising the Status of Soft Skills

Take-home Message — Consequence 1

Soft skills, such as communication must be elevated from their diminished status — reinforced by the hard-soft value hierarchy — to an essential, integrated, ubiquitous and considered feature of STEM projects.

13.1 The Status of Communication

The hard-soft hierarchy relegates skills associated with communication to a rather low status. In this section I make the argument that, among STEM fields, communication skills need to be elevated to a higher position. There are four qualities of communication that justify this shift in thinking.

Essential

Communication is required for the viability, and indeed the existence, of a project.

Integrated

Communication is a part of the technical work of a project, no something separate.

Ubiquitous

Communication is present at all scales (micro ↔︎ macro, immediate ↔︎ archival, personal ↔︎ impersonal) and stages (planning ↔︎ implementation) of a project.

Deliberate

Communication is carefully considered and purposefully executed to ensure the success of a project.

Communication is the vehicle that transports any STEM project form conception to conclusion. We can imagine the life cycle of a STEM project. After conception, e.g. a research question, a project migrates across a landscape of peaks and valleys which hinder its progress. The project must traverse the terrain, passing through several station. These stations can be:

  • Designing and comparing strategies
  • Developing a prototype
  • Gathering input or feedback
  • Updating the strategy dependent on previous results
  • Resource assessment and allocation
  • Testing
  • Documentation
  • Implementation or Release
  • Other checkpoints & bottlenecks unique to each project.

Figure 13.1: Landscape of pits and peaks

A simplified version of this process is visualized in Figure 13.1. In this landscape, the peaks represent stations, which are either inaccessible, acting as barriers — avoid at all costs or die climbing — or irrelevant useless distractions. The valleys represent the actual stations that a project may travel along. The actual path taken is:

  • Defined by the available stations in the terrain,
  • Typically the path of least resistance through valleys
  • Limited to those stations accessible from the current station, and thus also the previous path choices, and
  • Restricted by the mountainous barriers.

It is within this landscape that communication acts as the entrance and exit token for all stations. To travel between valleys, effort is needed to both exit the current valley and enter the next valley. This effort takes the form of a functional communication. e.g.

  • The current station must justify the project’s exit by demonstrating (encoding a message) how their station contributes to the project’s overall migration. This is necessarily in a manner appropriate to and relevant for a specific stakeholder who considers (decodes) the message and permits exit.
  • The same process occurs as the next station receives information on the state of the project and their expected contribution.
  • and so on…

Some functional communication may be considered (decoded) by the future selves of the same people who encoded the message. Furthermore, the project may be segmented, and several segments may be in migration along different paths simultaneously. Eventually, these segments must reunite, or at least share information. The process of segmenting and reuniting is also a part of the functional nature of communication, similar to exiting and entering stations.

When this functional aspect of communication fails — when stakeholders have not been convinced that the project is migrating smoothly — a project is brought to a premature end. In this way, communication is a functional and essential (literally) and ubiquitous feature, not simply an afterthought, to a project’s success.