Human Bandwidth and Why Knowing Your Stuff Is Not Enough

Alastair is joined by David Duffett, an award-winning speaker, chartered engineer and author of "Be The Nerd That's Heard", who helps technical experts raise what he calls their human bandwidth so that their knowledge and ideas are not lost through ineffective communication. David's own path ran through pirate radio transmitters he built himself, the Civil Aviation Authority's telecoms engineering college at Bletchley Park, and a spell as worldwide community director for the Asterisk open source project. In this episode David explains why the IASM in his job title is capitalised, why the old model of the deep technical expert in the back room has been flipped on its head by AI, and what happened to a cohort of Bloomberg engineers who became managers without ever having given face to face feedback. He pushes back firmly on the stereotype that engineers are simply introverts who dislike public speaking, and offers a set of practical protocol matching tips for communicating across the generational gap in technical teams. David Duffett Takeaways: Knowing your stuff isn't enough. The skill that matters now is communicating just the relevant part of your stuff to the audience in front of you Engineers are not afraid of speaking in public. They are afraid of looking ill-prepared in front of their peers, and that is a fixable problem Communication is a muscle. Technical people have spent years building the technical one and ignoring the communication one, so the imbalance is trainable Encode the message in the audience's own language. Talking to engineers about rapport gets scepticism. Talking about the bandwidth of your human connection channel starts a conversation Younger engineers arrive ready to broadcast, having grown up sharing online, but they are not always set up for two-way communication. Human bandwidth must be open in both directions A generation of engineers came through university and into work during lockdowns and reached management having never given feedback face to face. That gap needs deliberately filling Protocol matching runs both ways. Senior engineers can learn some of the younger register, and younger engineers can offer more detail to senior colleagues The art of the unsolicited presentation: spot something two teams misunderstand about each other, offer a lunch and learn, and you demonstrate your value without self-promotion David Duffett Links: Let the Geek Speak: https://geekspeakhq.com David on LinkedIn:   / davidduffett   David on X: https://x.com/dduffett Generationally Speaking Links: Website: https://generationallyspeaking.co.uk/ LinkedIn:   / generationally-speaking-uk   YouTube:    / @generationallyspeaking   Instagram:   / ag.generationallyspeaking   Alastair on LinkedIn:   / alastairgreener