Ask most people to picture an engineer at work, and they'll picture spreadsheets, CAD drawings, stress calculations. Precision. Logic. Not exactly the stuff of a good story.
But look closer at any engineering triumph: the moon landing, the first Concorde flight, and you'll find something else hiding underneath the technical achievement: a narrative arc as old as storytelling itself.
Design is creating something new
At its core, design is the act of bringing something new into the world. It's a creative pursuit, even when it's derivative or it's "just" reverse engineering someone else's work, the process still runs through most of the same creative steps as an original.
Narrative works the same way. Building a story is also an act of creation, not of a physical object, but of something that manifests as a new idea, a new connection, a new way of seeing the world. Different outputs, same underlying instinct.
And so, this raises a question worth sitting with: what if narrative isn't just a nice metaphor for engineering, but a genuinely useful lens for doing it better?
Why the hardest engineering always reads like a story
It's easy to assume Hollywood just likes the aesthetics - rockets, race cars, people in headsets. But look past the visuals and the same shape turns up every time: an idea nobody's sure will work, a stretch where the whole thing threatens to fall apart, and a hard-won breakthrough that only makes sense in hindsight.
That shape isn't something screenwriters invented and layered on top of engineering. It's already there, in how the hardest problems actually get solved. A screenplay just gives it a beginning, middle and end.
Underneath engineering lies narrative shape
This is where it gets useful rather than just interesting: if engineering problems naturally take a narrative shape, then thinking like a storyteller while you're in the problem - not just describing it afterwards - can sharpen how you tackle it.
A storyteller asks who the audience is and what they need to feel. An engineer asking the same question of their end user. An engineer needs to design something people actually want, not just something that technically works. A storyteller knows which ideas have enough momentum to carry a plot forward. An engineer with the same instinct is better placed to spot which problems are worth committing years to, and which will fizzle out.
And a storyteller understands that every character needs a reason to keep going when things stop working, which is, not coincidentally, the exact skill a team needs when a project stalls and giving up starts to look reasonable.
A lesson from the world's fastest tandem bicycle
This is exactly the territory our upcoming lecture with Neal Hartman will explore. Neal will share the story - and the engineering - behind designing, building, and racing the world's fastest tandem bicycle, a project that saw a rag-tag university team beat the fastest cyclists in the world at the time.
He'll talk about how narrative shaped not just the way the team approached the technical problem, but how understanding their own story, both individually and collectively, helped them face a life-defining challenge.
It's a lecture about engineering. But it's also, unmistakably, a story. Come and hear it.
Book your place at our upcoming lecture, 26 October 2026 @ NMITE Blackfriars Campus
