Can techies read a room ?

I'm taking this slightly out of context as to how this came up today in a meeting but it's a really great question. Can technical people read a room and see beyond their desires to create world class software/hardware solutions ?

In the past I've seen both sides of this, internally, externally, courses and through conferences/meetups. Technical people that come into a room (often pitching for investment or solution support) and will myopically present though their slides/approach and content to get to the end as it's a chore/means to an end and not recognising it as a decision and feedback point. These pitches more often than not fail as it's technology led and has little business/commercial support (at the conclusion) and will certainly miss the key signals in the room that they need to adjust their thinking.

The opposite of this is the technical team that are "people & commercially aware" and realise that the pitch is their first opportunity for feedback in the idea and look very carefully towards the room influencers to understand where they are on or off track. These are the technical pitches that generally work in the long run.

The question is why is it still quite hard for techies to recognise the need to read a room ? In a world where Agile has encouraged that collaboration and fast feedback loops to find issues sooner what does the technical team need to do to be more successful in their pitches ?

We all want to have the High Quality technical team in place, these are more often than not high IQ individuals who can do things with technology that most of us can only dream of. That does often come with a technical focus and a lack of investment in the softer side (dare I say lower EQ) that brings in the empathy for other viewpoints (business strategy, commercial viability etc). How often have your heard "but its way better technology, why can't they see that !"

So to my point. I've recently been through the Miller Heiman training, I loved it. I've always prided myself on reading people and understanding what they are trying to tell me either directly or through their body language. If I was to offer the Agile experts or say the Scrum Master and possibly even the Product Owner a technical course or something like Miller Heiman what do you think they would choose ? Yep, bring on my AWS or GCP training :)

So as a technical leader I'm constantly focused on trying to evolve both the technical skills of the teams I run and lead but also help them grow in the EQ space so they become more people aware. Commercial courses are much harder and for me probably not good for techies but exposure to commercial impacts of investment, business case and ROI is a must.

I'm interested though, what is your approach to ensuring that the techies can learn to be more people and commercially aware ?