Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Do You Speak Belbin?
Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].
Knös, Framstå, Vejmon. My tongue gets tangled in a beguiling clash of consonants and vowels. I am uncertain of their correct pronunciation. But visually--if nothing else--they give voice to an emphatic sense of Scandinavian efficiency and utility. Balanced against the opacity of their names, the flat pack, self-assembly furniture instructions that accompany Ikea’s products are a study in near perfect transparency.
Reduced to an almost cartoonish level of detail, any linguistic ambiguity--”Take panel A and rotate through 90 degrees until edge C-D aligns with the right-hand groove in panel B. Insert half inch barrel bolts at E and F then hand-tighten until panel is flush with edge.”--is purged in the step-by-step simplicity of the line-drawn assembly instructions. Freed of language, what could be a more effective and universally understood form of communication than a stick man leading us through thickets of cultural and technical misunderstanding in five easy steps?
Perfecting the communication channel
All written communication has its ultimate origin in pictographic forms wherein information is conveyed through a visual representation of the object or action depicted. If the context to which the information is to be applied is discrete, finite and fixed (as in, for example, the assembly of a book case), there can be very little …
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