Foreign Languages

This past week, I've been working through Wendy Kennedy's program for expressing technical ideas as commercial opportunities.  I've written plays, short stories, lyrics, poems, technical papers, blogs, and am working on a screenplay with the boys.  I spent several years during high school working in a retail clothing store.  I've run a successful handyman business in New York City.  So I thought I had a pretty good handle on communication and communicating to customers.

I've learned that you can always learn.  There have been some "aha" moments as I was working through the nine questions that make up Kennedy's program.

It's a good reminder that for languages to be foreign, they don't have to come from different regional roots.  Different cultures abound; the terminology used by the guy in the next cubicle can be as opaque as a dead language.  One of the major challenges of integrating disciplines in design, in public policy, or in any joint endeavor, is to understand differences in terminology.  The onus is on speakers to remain mindful of the confusion that they can introduce by slipping into comfortable jargon.

Examine the word "task."  It can have different connotations and contexts if you are an engineer, a  manager, or an applied psychologist. To an engineer it is a job-jar element.  To a manager is is an item associated with resources that need to be tracked.  To an applied psychologist a task is something to be analyzed when assessing use characteristics.  Members of the INCOSE Human Systems Integration Working Group considered developing a lexicon to translate the lingo of each of the nine domains that made up the integrated discipline.  This would be a hefty task involving an evolving discipline, a hefty resource the value of which has not been expressed in dollars.

Acronyms are another mechanism of confusion.  Acronyms were developed as a writer's and printer's shortcut to save effort and print real estate.  With much of our publications transferring to on-line outlets, acronyms might be handily relegated to the landfill.  I randomly typed GCM into acronymfinder.com and was told there were 239 definitions for that acronym -- 43 definitions were verified, 196 were not.  My sometime collaborator, Dr. Robert Hoffman,  is very vocal about eliminating them from our work.

There are no universal languages.  I heard a Western musician talking about studying in China; he said his colleagues said they couldn't understand his music.  Mathematics has also been described as the language of the universe; but there are many to whom mathematical proofs are alien.  Those folks may need a good story to turn on their light bulb.

If the objective is clear communication, I would suggest including the following in your bag of tricks.

1)  Try to see the world from the listeners' point of view; stand in their shoes and cloak yourself in their backgrounds.
2)  Try to understand what is valuable to your listeners.
3)  Don't use acronyms or abbreviations.
4)  Keep jargon to a minimum.
5)  If you're going to introduce specialized terminology, define your terms.  Don't be afraid to repeat the definitions once in a while because it may take a few hearings for them to sink in.  If you're a listener, don't be shy about asking for clarification.
6)  Use analogies and metaphors for clarifications.  Stories can be great helps.
7)  Use simple figures, they are indeed worth 1,000 words.

I believe the 21st Century is going to be the age of integration.  Specialists will need to work more closely than ever before to solve problems.  The virtual world will need to more seamlessly integrate with the real world.  Sciences and humanities will have to be presented in a more holistic fashion for Education to meet personal and societal needs.  Skills for overcoming the foreign languages that were unknowingly encounter every day are more important than ever before.