Yesterday, during an online session I ran for 350 people at a large telco, someone asked me:

Do left-brained people like engineers tell as many stories as right-brained creative types?

Before I could answer, a message popped up in the chat:

I’m an engineer, and I’ve been telling stories my entire career.

It made me smile because the idea that engineers don’t tell stories is a common misconception.

Years ago, I came across Julian Orr’s book Talking About Machines. Orr studied photocopier technicians in the US and found that they constantly swapped stories.

These weren’t formal presentations or polished speeches. They were quick accounts of what had gone wrong, how the technicians diagnosed the problem and what eventually worked.

They weren’t just conversations. They were knowledge in action.

One technician told the story of an E053 error:

I remember the first one of these I ever had. I got an E053 and immediately started replacing the dead shorted dicrotrons. They were blowing the circuit breaker. But as soon as I did this I created a 24-volt interlock problem, and you can chase that one forever and never find it. I happened to pull up the DC20 log and saw I was getting hits on the XER board. It was an XER failure. So I replaced it, then the dicrotrons, and stress-tested the bugger. Only then did the real error code display. You can’t believe what the machine tells you.

That’s not a polished anecdote for the stage. It’s a working technician talking through how he solved a tough problem and, in the process, giving his peers a roadmap for what to do when they encounter the same error.

I’ve found that engineers are happy to work with stories, but they’re often uncomfortable with the name.

Telstra’s chief engineer once asked me to help collect stories from his people. I said we’d run some story circles.

He stopped me straight away.

“There’s no way we’re calling them that. Let’s call them narrative focus groups.”

That moment said a lot.

Technical people use stories all the time, but many prefer to call them examples, scenarios or case studies.

The function is the same.

Engineers are problem solvers, and problem-solving is often social. You explain what you saw, what you tried, what didn’t work and what finally cracked the problem.

In other words, you tell a story.

The idea that rational and logical people use fewer stories simply isn’t true. In fact, engineers may tell more stories than most. They just give them different labels.

Think about your own work. How often do you start with:

“This reminds me of when…”

Or:

“Here’s what happened the last time we tried that…”

That’s a story.

And if you work in a technical field, you’re probably using stories more often than you realise.

So, do engineers tell fewer stories?

Not at all.

They just call them something else.

Photocopier operator with a mainframe-sized Xerox machine, c. 1970s.