How I Make Technical Content Meaningful
Here's how I teach experts and technical people to share their work in a way that's meaningful for non-experts.
Through my education company Storytelling NYC, I spent more than ten years leading writing and storytelling workshops for technical teams: software engineers at Xaxis and Smartling, financial analysts at Bank of America, HR people at Boeing, healthcare people at Merck and Kaiser Permanente, and neuroscientists at the NeuroLeadership Institute.
Sometimes they'd want me to teach them how to be spellbinding in the room, and I'd teach the principles of suspense, curiosity, and narrative transportation.
But more often it was technical people who needed help taking their jargony data and making it comprehensible to others in the organization or customers.
Psychologists call it the curse of knowledge: when you have technical expertise, it's hard to conceptualize what it's like to be a reader who doesn't know what you know.
So I taught technical people how to make their ideas make sense by giving meaning to numbers and technical information by spelling out the cause and effect.
Sterile injectables: Baxter could potentially help fill gap from PFE plant
Written by a financial analyst
BAX has a roughly $1bn sterile injectable business with operating margins in the 20-25% range, well above corporate average. PFE and BAX sell many of the same injectables per their online product pages. Wednesday night Bloomberg reported that a Pfizer plant responsible for making a quarter of all sterile injectables used in US hospitals suffered heavy damage from a tornado in Rocky Mount, NC. The 1.4 million square foot facility produces over 400 million units annually. It’s not clear how much excess capacity BAX has in this business (BAX has not yet commented) but a 15% increase in this $1bn business would add 1 point to BAX’s revenue growth rate and would add roughly $0.05+ to BAX’s EPS. We maintain our Neutral rating on BAX as we see multiple expansion difficult this far before the renal spin.
Edited by Jay Dixit
Tornado Cripples Pfizer’s Injectables Production, Opening a Door for Baxter
A tropical tornado severely damaged a Pfizer manufacturing plant in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, disrupting production capacity at a facility that produces about 25% of all sterile injectables used in U.S. hospitals.
The plant, which previously produced over 400 million units per year, will no longer be able to fully meet hospital demand. This creates an immediate market opportunity for Baxter, a competitor with an overlapping product lineup.
With a $1 billion sterile injectables business, Baxter is well placed to capture Pfizer’s lost market share. Even a modest 15% increase would boost Baxter’s revenue growth by a full percentage point.
The complication is that Baxter’s renal care spinoff, expected by July 2024, may limit how aggressively it can move. Despite the market opportunity, we maintain our Neutral rating on BAX.
The principle I taught: Spell out cause and effect
In the “before,” 400 million units and $0.05 EPS float free of meaning.
I teach writers that they have to deliberately spell out the chain of cause and effect, using words like because, as a result, and which is why we decided to as a way to connect the dots for the reader.
WRONG — meaningless data points: 400 million units → 25% → $1 billion → 15% → Neutral rating
RIGHT — spelling out cause and effect: Tornado destroys Pfizer's factory → Pfizer can't manufacture injectables → hospitals have unmet demand → Baxter has an opportunity to capture lost market share → we maintain a Neutral rating
A story isn't a list
As E.M. Forster put it: “The king died and then the queen died” is a list. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a story.
Numbers alone don't tell a story. Causality does.
This is the problem I see whenever experts — especially the most brilliant ones — attempt to write for a lay audience. The technical details mean nothing until you clarify what they mean and why they're important by spelling out the chain of cause and effect.
This principle — connect the dots, spell things out for the reader with as much specificity and concreteness as possible — applies as much to AI engineering as it does to neuroscience, financial analysis, and drug discovery.