Stop Being Humpty Dumpty

 

There is an interesting duologue between Humpty Dumpty and Alice in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass” that goes something like this.

“I don't know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!”

If you start to talk like Humpty Dumpty in your projects, then you are in for some serious troubles. Every domain or community has its own nomenclature that people follow in communication. This can be a set of loosely defined names or terms that people use in daily conversations or a set of well-defined terminologies that the academics or professionals use in their typical channels of communication. The main objective for people within the same community to speak the common tongue is to avoid any unnecessary confusion in the communication.

Imagine in a class of twenty students, if I ask each of them to draw a ‘mouse’, I am pretty sure that I will receive twenty different versions of mice each in its own shape and size. In fact, I won’t be surprised that some would even draw me a picture of ‘Mickey’ or a computer mouse depending on what is in their minds at that moment. Now, instead of asking the students to draw their own imaginary mouse, let’s say I get them to draw a toy mouse that I have placed in front of the class. I am quite sure this time round I will receive twenty copies of identical illustrations of the same toy mouse with slight variations depending on the drawing skill of individual student. Comparing this with the previous scenario, it is obvious that this can only be achieved if the class has a common public reference point. Wittgenstein had illustrated a similar argument in his famous thought experiment – ‘Beetle in a box’ – stating that “It does not matter that one cannot experience another’s subjective sensations. Unless talk of such subjective experience is learned through public experience the actual content is irrelevant; all we can discuss is what is available in our public language.”

Don’t give up yet. There are things that you can do to avoid such language confusions in your projects. Here are some guidelines on how you could avoid being like Humpty Dumpty.

1. Use visuals: A picture beats a thousand words. Communicate more clearly with drawings as Dan Roam purported. Don’t underestimate your drawing skill. You don’t need to be Picasso to be able to express your thoughts visually with simple sketches (ironically, not many people can understand Picasso’s drawings). Grab a pen and a scrap of paper and walk your stakeholders through some complex concepts you have in your mind instead of just talking so that they can visualize your ideas.
2. Avoid jargon: Avoid jargon and acronyms by all means. It is not very cool to try to impress your stakeholders on how much you know by showering them with floods of jargon and acronyms. A sentence like “We will discuss the ACWP, BCWP and BCWS and review the CPI and SPI of the EVA report during the weekly CCB meeting.” definitely sounds intimidating to some. If you genuinely need to use jargon and acronyms, make sure you give a brief description before using them.
3. Add a glossary: It is not uncommon that your stakeholders may interpret certain words differently from you. A word like ‘float’ could be understood by them as something to sustain a person in water. Keep a glossary of commonly used terms in your projects. Share it with your stakeholders or attach it as an appendix in your project plans. Glossary helps to establish a common platform for communication between you and your stakeholders. There are a few good glossaries of project management terms published, for example the ones from Wikipedia and PMI, which you may use as a basic reference to build your own glossary.
4. Clarify, clarify and clarify: Leave no room for ambiguity. If you realize that your stakeholders are staring at you blankly or they have been extremely quiet for the past ten minutes, you know that you have lost them. Pause for a while and ask them if they have any question. Better still, randomly invite one of them to summarize what you have just said and check if anyone has any comment. Do the same whenever you are covering some complex topics.
5. Quantify, not just clarify: Sometimes words like ‘critical’ and ‘important’ can be rather subjective and mean different things to different people. Specifically, how critical is ‘critical’ to you? Is ‘important’ more important than ‘critical’ or ‘critical’ more critical than ‘important’? Drop the guessing game. Instead of saying ‘a large group of people’, try quantifying it if possible and say ‘a group of fifty people’.