More than a few years ago, bordering on the “many”, I was invited to take part in a graduate selection weekend for Ford in the UK. It was a battery of tests ranging from one-on-one interviews and team-working simulations to presentations and problem-solving “incidents” – all nicely wrapped up in dinners and coffees in a pleasant hotel in the countryside.

One of the tasks – maybe there were twelve of them, I didn’t count – was to decide what equipment should be offered as optional, standard or not at all for a sporty Ford Escort model (these were the pre-Focus days), to meet a budget. We then had to write a report explaining our choices, needing to meet a most important deadline (lunch).

Being a bit of a car enthusiast, I made what I thought was a decent selection (including ABS and airbags as standard equipment), whilst keeping some budget for a few luxuries as standard (a CD player, I think), to differentiate Ford from, say, BMW, whose cassette tape decks were one optional extra, speakers to hear music from seemingly another…

Being a well-drilled undergraduate engineer, I wrote the subsequent report in the only way I knew how - with an introduction, a summary, a body and conclusions.

When I was given the job offer a few weeks later (which I took - a decision point that remains with me to this day, and is definitely worthy of a post of its own), Ford gave me some feedback over the phone. My presentation had been borderline terrible, but the report I had written was excellent.

In fact, it turned out that I had been the only candidate to actually write a report. Everybody else had written prose.

So, in honour of that, and in recognition of the possible fact that report writing remains for me, over emails and presentations, the main recipient of work related keystrokes, here’s my report on report writing in engineering.

TITLE

An Investigation into the enduring and endearing constraints of report writing

Author

The Literal Engineer

SUMMARY

The act of reading a technical report involves a certain mental effort. This effort should be rewarded with increased knowledge. In order to minimise the effort and to maximise the potential for knowledge extraction, the report writer should generate the report in as standard a way as possible.

The act of writing a report invokes a particular and peculiar mode of language, which itself requires a mental switch and effort to maintain, the passive voice. Writing in the passive voice lends the report an appearance (but no guarantee) of objectivity. A potential pitfall of the passive voice is the risk of the writing becoming stilted and unreadable. Yet this pitfall is deemed to present a lower risk to knowledge transfer than chatty and poorly applied novelistic writing.

Deciding on the tense remains difficult. The report should be written with history and evidence in mind; a report is a snapshot of the status of whatever is being investigated at the time, in this case – report writing. Using the passive voice is, overall, a positive constraint.

EQUIPMENT

Mid 2012 MacBook Air

2006 Rain Recording PC workstation with Logitech keyboard and mouse

Microsoft Word 2013 and Online

Microsoft Office 365 / OneDrive

Typepad blogging platform

Evernote note taking platform

Firefox and Safari browsers

1. INTRODUCTION

A technical engineering report can be understood as a window to a complex and meaningful event (or series of events) that took place within an organisation. The intended goal of a report is that its findings be understood. For this goal of understanding to be even remotely achievable, the report writer must describe the event in sufficient detail with sufficient brevity and clarity to form a synthesis of the outcomes of that undertaking. A report should therefore be  logically structured and legible.

Ideally, the summary and conclusions from a report should add to the great body of human knowledge. It is recognised, however, that, more often than not, reports must be produced to describe small-scale and often painfully regular events.

Regardless of where a report lands on the scale of import (or lack thereof) to humanity, the form and language follow traditional structures. Report writing in the technical fields is designed to enforce (the impression of) objectivity. The passive voice depersonalises the investigation and can be construed as an attempt to prioritise facts over individual actions.

I did not post this report on 30^th Sep.2014

rather:

This report was posted on 30.09.2014.

The tradition of using the passive voice imposes a constraint on the writer, which forces upon him or her (the passive voice at the very least enables authors to avoid the awkward distinction of the sexes) a mental switch and effort to make and to sustain the passive voice. This is an appropriate cost of entry, as the reader needs only recognise one style, whatever the source of the report.

2. THE STRUCTURE OF A REPORT

Reports are constructed around a common set of elements that may vary in style, format or order from organisation to organisation, but nevertheless ensure swift navigation to the pertinent sections or level of detail for the experienced reader - from an overall summary (usually to be found near the beginning), to detailed descriptions of equipment and methods used, via a logically structured body of evidence and discussion. The report at hand loosely follows such a typical structure and does not purport to set any standards with its own form.

It is also based on very little evidence.

3. THE CONSTRAINTS IMPOSED ON LANGUAGE IN REPORT WRITING

Actions and analyses leading to conclusions and summaries – no matter how breathlessly exciting at the time of their experiencing – are, in translation into a report, passed through a mental filter that compresses them into the passive voice.

This imposes a constraint on the author, which, similarly to the imposition of a recognisable structure on a report, lightens the burden on the reader (see Section 3.1 for more considerations on the reader’s role).

As in so many cases, especially in the arts and in engineering, this constraint can be viewed as overall positive: few physicists or engineers have been recognised as possessing the gifts of novelistic writing (or even spelling); honing the craft of the passive voice relieves these authors of many grammatical pitfalls.

The key to the passive voice, and the difference to novelistic writing, is that there are no characters or personalities to deal with. Someone or something does not do something to some other thing or person. Rather, some action is done to some object.

The strut was loaded into a tensile testing machine and its stress-strain curve was determined.

The sample was subjected to 60 cycles of cyclic corrosion testing according to specification X

The tea bag was placed into the pre-warmed cup. The cup containing the tea bag was filled to just off brim-full with boiling water. The assembly was left to stew for 4 minutes.

Humans act in all technical investigations, but the passive voice strips them out as being extraneous information. Whilst this is not always to be considered positive in most human relationships, being able to divide out the common denominators is, just as in arithmetic and mathematics, key to understanding the basic signals of what is being investigated. Humans, then, are a form of noise – in technical reports, at least.

Writing in the passive voice is a skill that must be honed with practice. For as long as the passive voice does not come naturally to the author, each sentence needs to be reviewed to ensure that the reader is not forced to stumble upon a person or a character rather than a description.

The implication of objectivity is valid. It doesn’t matter who did the test (especially in the sense of Professor vs. technician, or he vs. she): it’s not a diary. That information can be captured in lab notes, engineers’ notebooks, or the famous case notes from AT&T Bell.

3.1 THE BENEFITS OF THE PASSIVE VOICE

The passive voice is intended to portray the investigation as being impartial. This:

• enforces a certain mental discipline
• requires a certain mental “Umstellung” that brings the author into a standardised frame of mind.
• Permits the reader to read reports from any source in a similar frame of mind.
• Avoids “War and Peace”-style questioning of who was doing what to what other thing – no need to buffer names
• Personalities and their status are largely avoided
  • The facts and conclusions come first

3.2 DISADVANTAGES OF THE PASSIVE VOICE

• It is easy to “hide” the contribution of laboratory personnel, lower level engineers, and so on, to attribute the report to one “star” player. This is more likely to be an issue in the world of university, where academics are forced to publish on a regular basis – a quality investigation on a returned part is less likely to be the cause of professional envy.
• Can be stilted, can become impenetrable,
• Enforces the use of some awkward words or constructions

4. SELECTING THE TENSE

A key decision that needs to be made early on in writing the report, one which generates some confusion, even within one report, is the tense. Some decision aids are suggested as follows:

• Tests are described in the past tense: they were performed (“the samples were tested using the tensile testing machine at yy mm / minute”)
• Results are described in the past tense: “the stress-strain curve Fig. x.y was generated”
• Findings may be either in the past or in the present tense:
  • If a test was performed on a particular sample, e.g. investigating a failure, then the findings may be presented in the past tense:
    • “brazing of the joint was found to be incomplete”
• If a result was fundamental, then the findings may be presented in the present tense:
  • “the maximum tensile strength of the xx joint is YY MPa”

5. CONCLUSIONS

The technical report remains its own art form. Its art is knowledge and its form shall minimise the resistance to knowledge transfer. I really think that the passive voice helps to – oh, damn!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/ei/internal/forstudents/engineeringdesign/studyguides/techreportwriting

Why read this post? To find out why you should buy this fabulous "biography" of Bell Labs, and to consider how a monopoly set itself up for extreme innovation.

Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation is tech reverie, business book, political thriller and a superbly researched history into how some of mankind's most profound technical innovations (semiconductors and the transistor, solar panels, lasers, communications satellites, cellular mobile and Unix...) developed from fundamental ideas into production and into normality.

It is an exhilarating and – to this engineer, at least – humbling read with an appealingly comfortable feel to it of the book almost having written itself.

A history of people, biography of a formula

The narrative follows the giants of Bell Labs from their induction into AT&T to their passing: insightful Claude Shannon and incisive William Shockley, the genial instigator John Pierce, the politically adept scientist Bill Baker and a cast of thousands working within the innovative innovation structure constructed by the angular visionary Mervin Kelly.

Kelly’s formula is the leitmotif running alongside those histories. Both culturally and architecturally, it was about ensuring happenstance. Scientists were meant to be unable to avoid engineers, chemists were meant to bump into physicists and the men who “wrote the book” to interact with those who “read it.” It was a theory of ivory corridors and canteens rather than towers.

Hearteningly for small-fry like me, those who shared lunch, labs and projects with the Giants are also called out by Gertner for their contributions as lab technicians, metallurgists, engineers, project managers, chemists or physicists. There is always that sense of perspective that the products initiated by the Shockleys and Shannons of the Bell Labs world really needed input from each and every member to take them to production.

He didn't mention the cooks, though.

The invisible enthusiast

Jon Gertner is a journalist who has written for the New York Times and – less promisingly, perhaps – is editor-at-large at Fast Company*. This is his first book, up to now his largest undertaking by far. He spent five years building up this story - and it doesn’t show.

Not once did I feel the weight of his research, nor the burden of history, whilst reading The Idea Factory: the research and painstaking editing behind it is transparent. Gertner writes precisely yet lively, reflecting perhaps both the industrial-academic environment he describes and the local aspect of his endeavour: he grew up near the slightly mysterious, legendary Bell Labs headquarters at Murray Hill and his need to write this story comes across as being personal. Thankfully he found the energy and made the time to write it.

A monolith of innovation

AT&T enjoyed and, in pushing the boundaries of legislation, abused its monopoly position to maintain its role as “The System”. Those researchers and developers thrived within a massively integrated firm with the manufacturing might of Western Electric (which lovingly crushed or bought up many competitors in the past), the financial momentum of the phone operator (equally crushing), and the laboratories that drove the organisation to higher margins as well as higher callings (in not just the telephone sense…)

The calling to innovation as a justification of monopoly is the fascinating twist on our perception of this otherwise shimmering paragon of development. Teams that innovate need to get grubby, they need to ensure they have the best people and should “Never underestimate the importance of money.”

Without mass production, sales and distribution, no product may be considered to be innovative – so all of those tedious tasks surround, and can occasionally swamp, a product as it moves onwards to the market.

Notational Philosophy

The story behind the invention and development of the transistor would be worth the price of entry all by itself. But Gertner embellishes it with such lovely, pertinent little details that the reader can find thoughts spinning off in unexpected directions. One gem is the rigorously maintained notebooks used at Bell Labs. Each team member was required to write down thoughts and events relating to a particular case (or project, as we would call them now). Walter Brattain's notebook, number 18194, relating to his work on semiconductors (case 38139) continued on page 40, after 4 years of interruption through the Second World War, with: "The war is over."

There are other notational quotes in the book: from Morry Tanenbaum, as he closed in on discovering how best to manufacture layers of p-type and n-type silicone for the transistor: “will try direct approach…” (he melted an aluminium wire through the top layer) “This looks like the transistor we’ve been waiting for.”

These notebooks are - handwriting permitting - legible now, and are exceedingly well archived and organised. Will we be able to say the same of our loosely-managed files and cloudy projects in another sixty years? On the other hand – how searchable are those notebooks? Who can extract the knowledge that they contain, as well as the narrative, without knowing them intimately?

John Pierce – my new role model?

Although less well known (to me, at least) than the “transistor guys”, I felt an immediate affinity to one character that was totally new to me, John Pierce, of Telstar Satellite fame. “An instigator is different from a genius, but just as uncommon,” writes Gertner. “It was probably accurate to say that Pierce had too many ideas to actually pursue on his own, and too many interests… to focus on any single pursuit.”

Ah, I know this feeling only too well.

“’I tried to get other people to do things, I’m lazy,’ Pierce once told an interviewer.

‘Do you think this has helped your career?’ the interviewer asked.

‘Well, it was my career,’ Pierce replied.”

Pierce was a catalyst within Kelly’s formula of deliberate entanglement – wandering into offices with a bit of an idea and “just” starting things. It’s something that really should be encouraged, and perhaps remodelled in the virtual world, given how few offices are actually connected back in the real, normal world.

Moving on (looking wistfully back)

The book ends naturally with the passing of the golden generation and the fading into normality that is more poignant than any dramatic burn-out and crash. Gertner offers his thoughts on the meaning and lessons to be extracted for today’s Googles and Microsofts, for the myriad of startups gunning for their lunch – and for mere mortals like me.

Firstly, he considers whether swapping a factory of ideas (Bell Labs) for a geography of ideas (e.g. Silicon Valley) can match the muscle provided by monopoly. It’s close, perhaps, but, for all the advances that Silicon Valley has given us, in comparison with Bell Lab’s output, it has been largely incremental.

Secondly, he wonders if there is a way of escaping monopoly and government involvement in basic research at all. Here, he points out that “77 of the 88 U. S. entities that produced significant innovations were beneficiaries of federal funding.”

The concept of government involvement in anything brings with it the perception of incompetence, but Gertner summarises research into research with this:

“Creative environments that foster a rich exchange of ideas are far more important in eliciting important new insights than are the forces of competition."

White shirts and ties - the key to innovation?

Amidst all the deeply scientific and creative thinking going on at Bell labs during the “wonder years”, one constant appears to have underscored the whole process – everybody wore white shirts, and ties. Some eccentrics were known to go sockless in their shoes, but the fundamental aspect of Bell labs appears to have been the shirts.

My wardrobe consists of perhaps three white shirts, one of which is my wing-collar concert shirt for orchestra: it hardly brimming with scientific rigour.

So, when knocking on other peoples’ doors we should clearly be wearing crisp white shirts.

Hmm… a hint of sartorial determinism there? Perhaps Kelly has a better take on innovation:

“It’s the interaction between fundamental science and applied science, and the interface between many disciplines, that creates new ideas…”

This book is simply worth reading, and is worth reading again. So once you’ve got it, read it and lent it out, make sure you get it back…! 

*(5 amazing lists on the habits of 8 of the most productive ’10 of’ list writers in business today, to click you cleverer” would be a headline, even if that's only four lists)

Terracotta Warriors photo from romainguy on Flickr

As an Englishman living and working in Heidelberg, I am often asked if I work for SAP, the business software giant based down the Autobahn in Walldorf. I don't, of course. If I did, I'd be writing about software development, the management thereof and how utterly astounding their legendary canteen is.

The question is not a daft one, though: around 10 thousand people work at SAP in Walldorf, forming a more or less willingly thrown together (or at least well-paid) melting pot of 80 nationalities with English as the working language. It’s easy to assume, then, that a middle-class, technically minded foreigner living in Heidelberg earns his crust and her Grauer Burgunders at SAP.

I know a few people who work at SAP, and they are generally of a particular ilk (physicists and mathematicians, i.e., not my type) so I know that I don't need to yearn to work there, but there’s one thing I envy them: resources for R&D. Globally, (2011 figures) SAP has 16 thousand employees working in R&D (12 thousand work in sales…).

16 thousand in R&D...

(drifts into a reverie)



(Snaps back with a jolt)

I’m not in that place. I am a development engineer at an automotive supplier; my development activities really only skim the outer atmosphere of the unique world of R&D. Is this a surprise? Is it a disappointment?

Let’s think about the surprise factor first. When I consider my time at university, I don’t recall ever having heard the word “resource” discussed in any manner other than as a general term for learning material. We picked up the material, used the libraries and even the nascent internet; but I was never a resource myself.

Resource was always a “hidden” theme. We were aware of time pressures with the need to study such a wide range of subjects whilst maintaining sanity and health through extracurricular pursuits, but it was always a case of everybody finding their own balance.

My aerospace engineering course did involve one larger team design project that was formative, but as far as I could see, research projects could run in a business vacuum, free from excessive emails or telephone calls, requests for assistance from around the world and quality alerts to have to jump onto. Ah - there we go. Did you notice that word in there, mentioned for the first time in this post? Team.

Entering the workplace was a relatively soft jump for me: I joined Ford in the UK which at the time was recruiting heavily - and, crucially, I joined a team. By that I mean there were several of us who could do each other’s jobs, if necessary and we worked both on improving the product and on improving the ways we worked on those products.

Recently, I was part of a globally distributed team that developed a new procedure for drawing release and approval. The word 'team' in this case represents more a collection of perspectives than anything that could really work to fight the necessary fights. We had representatives from design, from quality, from manufacturing; but none of us were interchangeable in the way that my team position at Ford was.

Developing the process itself was the fun and interesting part. I managed to find a spare license for Microsoft Visio (alas only the 2003 version which is now looking very old indeed) and used it to create the workflow. As it is a cross-functional process, the workflow runs in lanes - development, manufacturing engineering and quality - so the visual aspect was initially quite appealing. Adding the "if… then" loops and the different entry points for product at the various stages in their drawing lifetimes certainly de-streamlined it, though.

But actually running the procedure has been no fun at all. The problem is that it was implemented as a project in itself without great consideration for the resource implications of centralising what was in effect a totally distributed (and therefore wasteful, if potentially evolutionary) process.

So the current situation is that I am currently the only person in a company of over 16 thousand who can create the drawings that those 16 thousand people need.  Imagine SAP setting up a system whereby those 16 thousand in R&D could only work if I finished one particular task amongst many. It wouldn't really make sense, and this is something that I'm struggling with at the moment.

And so to my second question - am I disappointed not to be part of that resource pool? In a word, no. It's harder to explain, but perhaps this is only because of a lack of imagination: I simply cannot imagine being able (or only being allowed) to work on one problem at a time. Whilst I am trying to relearn the art and discipline of focus, it doesn't come naturally to me. I thrive on bandwidth, even if the transmissions occasionally get muddled up and jam because of it. I'm a variety type.

Coming back to those cohorts of SAPlers, though: despite their numbers, there have been reports recently that even they are feeling pressured to breaking point in their jobs. Which means that you can spread even 16 thousand researchers thinly. R&D resources generally expand to fill the product lines a company is working on; even within the relatively low number of headline products SAP produces, there is a vast number of modules that require development and linking in to others, so there's plenty for lots of clever people to do. (Google has around 33 thousand employees, Microsoft 92 thousand, of which 35k are in R&D).

So today's R&D behemoths are commercial, distributed amongst the universities and amongst the startups that thrive or die on their findings; I'm somewhere in no man's land - where are you?

p.s. Happy 40th, SAP!