The Elevator Storyteller

08/30/2011

I recently read FastCompany’s interview with John Lilly.

I knew John from my time at Mozilla¹, so it was interesting to hear him talk about the developments after my tenure at the Corporation.

One thing he said stood out to me:

[W]hen I was at Mozilla the activity I did mostly was to tell the story—tell the story simply, understandably over and over and over again.

… I’d feel bad about telling the same story 50 times, so I started to change it and embellish it from time to time. What I realized is that if I told a different story to 50 different people, then suddenly the whole organization will be slightly out of alignment. And so, my job was to tell the story in a simple way that was repeatable and amplifiable, not to make it all diverge.

This was an interesting insight to me.

I have struggled² to explain precisely what I do and why it’s important.

I’ve had varying degrees of success over the years, and the success I have had has been inconsistent.

As I thought about the above excerpt, I realized what I may have been missing: a simple, coherent, engaging way to accurately, yet consistently and succinctly tie it all together: the so-called “elevator pitch.”

***

I was phone screening a candidate recently, and they likened their role as a release engineer to that of a mailman: “She doesn’t write the letter; she didn’t drop it in the mail; she didn’t make the envelope; she’s not going to read it, but she’s critical to moving the contents around and ensuring it gets delivered.”

While I liked the analogy, longtime readers know I prefer a different one: air traffic controllers.

I’m often asked why I continue to find this analogy so relevant.

• Air traffic control is operational in nature: functionally, it involves a lot of planning and talking, but it’s fundamentally an exercise in scaling process to keep people safe and keep things moving.
• There’s a level of detail orientation that many other professions simply do not require.
• It’s an open secret that air traffic control towers are often understaffed and under-resourced; this can turn situations that would be small problems into catastrophes, which leads me to…
• No one pays attention to air traffic controllers until catastrophic events occur, and then (and usually only then) are they under the spotlight.
• Air traffic control is a service-oriented role, but to maintain sanity and ensure consistent outcomes in a complex environment with many actors with competing requirements and goals, they must do so within a framework³.
• It’s well-known that it’s a high stress environment⁴.
• Controllers’ (advertised) responsibility is the safe, expeditious movement of traffic, but they must prioritize that necessity with procedure and air craft emergencies and deviations; good ones know when and how to safely issue shortcut instructions.
• On its face, controllers’ work seems simplistic: “Move the blips around, make sure they don’t hit each other and talk on the radio all day? A chimp (or maybe a computer) could do that!” This prompts some interesting perceptions about their role⁵.
• A pilot won’t realize why air traffic controllers are useful if they only fly on sunny days with no turbulence in the middle of nowhere, by themselves.
• Controllers can be one of your best friends when something goes wrong with the plane and a pilot finds themselves declaring an emergency.

Replace “controller” with “build engineer,” “traffic” with “release” or “check-in” and “plane” with “project” and you’ll start to see why I find the similarities so compelling, at least when release engineering is approached the way I approach⁶ it. Now, to turn it into a narrative like Pushing Tin.

Or maybe Top Gun.

_______________
¹ I have more-than-a-few-vivid memories of interactions with him, including when he interviewed me
² Especially back at Mozilla
³ And expect pilots to do the same
⁴ [Never ending] Firedrills anyone?
⁵ And in many ways, informs how they’re treated
⁶ Pun intended