On Precision in Language

Around the age of 10 or 11 I had an interaction with an English teacher that had a profound impact on me.

He gave us an example of how students would ask him "Wie schwer ist der Test" as opposed to "Wie schwierig ist der Test", "Schwer" meaning heavy, while "schwierig" means difficult. Now this is not exactly a grave mistake, and many German speakers would not only easily understand the intention of the question but frequently use this phrasing in different contexts.

The problem however arises when you now try and translate the sentence, which was of course the fundamental aim of the class. The more imprecise your use of words the greater the error upon translation. Precision matters in these cases.

Now, while I still translate across languages daily - we are a trilingual household - the reason I find this lesson so important has less to do with translating between languages and more to do with translating between different contexts and mental models.

As our world gets ever more complex, we rely more and more heavily on cooperation and collaboration across disciplines and cultures. These all come with their own vocabularies and mental models. And here we rely on similar acts of translation, with nuance and precision being equally important.

As a designer, I frequently encountered the problem of stakeholders having vastly different interpretations of what a prototype is. The majority expected high-fidelity artifacts, ideally clickable and highly interactive. The idea that a storyboard depicting a service delivery could be a prototype was utterly foreign. And suddenly expectations started to diverge, timelines were misaligned as a result, and relationships soured.

As participants in such cross-functional, and in some cases cross-cultural, collaborations, it is on all of us to ensure the right level of precision when communicating important ideas and concepts. Jargon is often much more specific to industries, job functions, or parts of organizations than one might assume.

In many workshops I had a glossary section on Miro boards or other shared spaces thereafter to allow people to refer back to commonly used terms and acronyms. This was just as important as ingesting different maps - be it journey maps, process flows, ecosystem maps, etc. Especially as a consultant across a myriad of industries, this became essential for me to reorient myself within possibly foreign vocabularies and mental models. And I'd like to believe that it helped my stakeholders and collaborators, too.

After all, much of facilitation is about alignment. and alignment means establishing a shared understanding with common language and mental models about a problem space and its possible solutions.

I will admit, being a non-native speaker in 90%+ of those interactions also felt like a great excuse to ask seemingly "stupid questions" about things people said and having them explain things like I was 5. But that's a different story.