Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A professional colleague recently asked me how much technical knowledge someone should have before giving a presentation to senior management. My two-part answer was, “Twenty-five percent of what they know, and soft skills are as important as the facts they know.” Here’s six ways soft skills matter for engineers, technologists, and reliability professionals.
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FINESSE is a fishbone (cause and effect) diagram, a mnemonic, and a mental model. FINESSE stands for Frame, Illustrate, Noise Reduction, Empathy, Structure, Synergy, and Ethics. The FINESSE fishbone diagram is peer-reviewed and battle-tested. Most importantly, it works.
As applied to effective communication, systems thinking is the cornerstone of FINESSE.
A system is a collection of interrelated or interacting parts, each of which can affect the behavior or outcomes of the whole. One defining property of a system is that it provides a function that none of the parts can accomplish by themselves. The corollary is that a system is not the sum of the parts but the product of their interactions. [Read more…]
