11  Raising the status of soft skills

11.1 Key Message

đź‘Ť Consequence 1

Communication must be elevated from its diminished status, reinforced by the hard/soft hierarchy, to an essential, integrated, ubiquitous and considered feature of STEM projects.

  • Essential: Necessary for viability
  • Integrated: A part of technical work
  • Ubiquitous: Present at all scales (micro/immediate/personal to macro/archival/impersonal) and stages (planning to implementation)
  • Considered: Purposefully executed, when possible

11.2 Communication is the vehicle that transports any STEM project form inception to conclusion

Imagine the life cycle of a STEM project:

  • After inception, e.g. a research question, a data science project migrates across a landscape dotted by unsurpassable peaks and deep valleys.
  • The project must traverse the terrain, passing through stations, such as
    • Developing an MVP,
    • Updating,
    • Prototyping,
    • Design,
    • Resource assessment and allocation,
    • Plus other checkpoints & bottlenecks unique to the project.

  • The mountains represent stations, which are either inaccessible, acting as barriers to avoid or die climbing, or irrelevant useless distractions.
  • The valleys represent the actual stations that a project may travel along.
  • The actual path taken is:
    1. Defined by the available stations in the terrain,
    2. Typically the path of least resistance through valleys
    3. Limited to those stations accessible from the current station, and thus also the previous path choices, and
    4. Restricted by the mountainous barriers.

11.3 Communication is 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 Func Comm. e.g.
    • The current station must justify the project’s exit by demonstrating (encoding) 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 Func Comm may be considered (decoded) by the future selves of the same people who encoded the message.
  • The project may be segmented, and several segments may be in migration along different paths simultaneously. Eventually, these segments mush reunite, or at least share information. The process of segmenting and reuniting is also Func Comm, similar to exiting and entering stations.
  • When Func Comm fails, stakeholders have not been convinced that the project is migrating smoothly and it is brought to a premature end. In this way, communication is an essential (literally) and ubiquitous feature, not simply an afterthought, to a a project’s migration.