An engineer got his white paper unstuck by figuring out the story

Do you ever get stuck writing in an unfamiliar format? Drop the template for a while and concentrate on saying something interesting.

E.C. had a marketing white paper to write. Of course, an expert semiconductor engineer like him should have some interesting things to say about the company’s products. And so his boss had set this white paper as an objective.

He read some other white papers to get an idea of the genre. They looked great. Polished words and elegant layouts told how other people were doing wonderful things.

How would he start his own paper? He tried to follow the format and language of the other examples he’d seen. All that came to mind was clichéd phrases. Nothing that fit together or filled more than half a page. He was stuck.

I, as the communications coach, was asked to help. How was I supposed to do that? I knew little about semiconductors. The closest I’d got to chip design was choosing ketchup or salt & vinegar.

But if one trait has helped my career more than anything else, it’s being curious about stuff. “What’s the current project?” I asked.

The project was to make chips for security cameras, for example in buildings or parking lots. These cameras have a challenge. They need to show you what’s going on across a scene that could be partly dark, partly light. And the lighting could change instantly, for example if the sunlight is going in and out of clouds.

Cameras don’t do very well with such varied scenes. Either detail is lost in shadows, or burned out in overexposed areas. Now, what even phone cameras do is cleverly blend a number of shots taken at different exposures. They increase “local contrast”. That is, they make sure that the details in each area are clear, even if the overall picture isn’t entirely true to life.

If you have an iPhone and take a picture of a high-contrast scene, you’ll notice it takes maybe half a second to process. Back when I worked with E.C., phones didn’t do that yet. Software was way too slow. (Photographers would carefully line up multiple shots in Photoshop to get the same effect.)

Now imagine trying to do all that software processing, on security-camera video, at many frames per second, over a decade ago. Impossible!

Still, what’s faster than software? Hardware. If a chip is specifically designed to do a task, it will be way faster than the equivalent software running on a general-purpose chip. But designing a chip takes a lot of time and investment. For new applications like the security cameras, where the design might need tweaks, and the volume sold might be low, it would be way too expensive.

Enter E.C.’s company. They were one of the few in the world that made programmable chips: almost as fast as the regular, non-changeable kind but capable of being made in small batches and tweaked as designs improved. And E.C.’s team had seen the chance to make smarter security cameras that would pick out all the details of a scene in real time video.

This was interesting stuff. The kind of interesting stuff that makes people want to read a white paper. A story, in the sense of a believable problem with a clever, practical solution.

I pointed out to E.C. that he had an interesting story to tell. He perked up. The task to “do a white paper” became “tell a story that happens to be in a white paper format”. So much more approachable than the framing of filling some template with professional-sounding words.

That was the turning point for E.C. He relaxed and got into the project. I won’t say it was smooth from then on. Later we had a lot of back and forth to get the phrasing OK. But the piece got written, and I think the boss was pleased. E.C. was glad to meet the objective, and I saw that he went on to do some other interesting pieces of communication later.

When you’re intimidated by a particular genre or format, or even audience, you can go back to the basic message you want to communicate. Think of the problems you’re tackling and what they mean to real people. Then you can feel free to talk through the way you solve those problems. In fact you have to tell the solution, to finish off the story. To resolve the tension you created when you raised the problems. That’s what “storytelling” is. Not some artificial drama, but highlighting a real life solution in an interesting and useful way.