Leveraged cross-domain abstraction and analogical systems modelling to establish a shared conceptual framework, enabling collaborative interrogation of system dependencies, identification of the failure point, and development of a targeted remediation pathway.
Or, alternatively:
A coder was stuck, so we talked about a postal system until he wasn’t.
Back in the day, I had a role I affectionately describe as “den mother to the coders.” My job was to keep everyone fed, hydrated, vaguely on track, and moving towards whatever we were trying to build.
One day, one of the coders came to me completely stuck. He’d been going around in circles trying to solve a problem and was getting increasingly frustrated.
I asked if I could help.
He gave me a look that very clearly said: How exactly are you going to help me with my highly technical coding problem?
Fair question.
I wasn’t a coder. I’d seen code and understood some of the broad strokes, but I wasn’t going to solve his technical problem for him.
“Just tell me what’s happening. Maybe I can help.”
So he did.
I listened while he explained the problem in all its technical detail. I understood some of it, definitely didn’t understand all of it, and slowly built a picture in my head.
And something about that picture looked familiar.
We’d recently worked on an R&D project involving a postal system, and the problem he was describing reminded me of the way parcels moved through that network.
“Hang on. This sounds a bit like a postal network…”
So I started talking about parcels.
About two minutes in, I noticed he’d stopped listening to me.
His eyes had gone somewhere else.
So I stopped talking.
We stood there in silence for maybe ten seconds.
Then I saw it.
Lightbulb.
“I think I know what the problem is.”
And off he went.
He solved it.
I wasn’t his technical lead. I wasn’t standing over his shoulder waiting for him to finish, and I wasn’t interrogating him about why he hadn’t solved it yet.
More importantly, I wasn’t pretending I knew how to solve it.
He was the SME. The solution ultimately had to come from him.
For a few minutes, we were simply two people being curious about the same problem from different angles.
And now, fifteen-odd years of professional vocabulary later, I can describe what happened much more impressively:
I leveraged cross-domain abstraction and analogical systems modelling to establish a shared conceptual framework, enabling collaborative interrogation of system dependencies and identification of the failure point.
Which is technically true.
But look what I just did to a perfectly lovely human story.
That’s not to say jargon is useless.
In fact, I like jargon.
Professional terminology can be incredibly efficient. When everyone understands the underlying concept, one phrase can replace an entire paragraph.
Instead of:
“You know how we worked out who was actually doing the work, who had final responsibility, who we needed input from, and who just needed to know what was happening?”
We can say:
“RACI.”
Fantastic. That’s jargon doing exactly what it should do.
Once we share the underlying understanding, we don’t need to explain the whole concept every time. A good term can turn a paragraph into a word.
Stories can help us build understanding. Jargon can help us compress it.
But if I’ve never encountered RACI before and you simply tell me:
“We need to establish the RACI.”
…you haven’t actually explained anything. You’ve handed me a label for a model I don’t yet possess.
I think professional language sometimes gets this backwards.
You can understand a concept without knowing its official term, and knowing the official term doesn’t necessarily mean you understand the concept.
I’m not anti-jargon.
I quite like discovering that something I’ve been doing for years has a name.
But the term isn’t the understanding.
The coder didn’t need to know he was participating in cross-domain analogical reasoning.
I didn’t know I was doing it either.
The concept worked before either of us knew the label.
Problems start when we confuse the compression for the thing itself.
Or when knowing the password becomes more important than understanding the person standing in front of us.
Sometimes you need “cross-domain analogical systems modelling.”
And sometimes you just need to ask where the parcel got stuck.
Originally published on LinkedIn.