How Words Affect Your Solution

As a facilitator leading a collaborative group in pursuit of a solution, the misunderstanding of words surfaces time and again as a velocity-killing pitfall. 

Ambiguity and uncertainty impede progress, whereas clarity and sureness accelerate it. Here is a simple and effective technique that I use to help avoid this predictable pitfall in the collaborative process.

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Risks and Delays Result from a Lack of Clarity

To describe this pitfall, imagine that you are leading a series of working meetings comprised of a dedicated group of people who meet regularly. You all are tasked with designing a solution to a problem and communicating it to stakeholders at specific points in time to vet and approve your design.

Here are a few examples of what the pitfall might look like:

• The Memory-Lapsed Facilitator
  You preside over a learning and discovery meeting comprised of the perfect collaborative tribe. Good natured, synergistic, well-read and knowledgable, every person is a domain expert who contributes openly and actively. It's a joy to lead this group because of their willingness to be present and fully engaged.
  
  As the meeting unfolds, the group discovers problems and envisions solutions at a rapid clip. There is high energy and a high pace of sharing. However, as you facilitate, you are struggling to record the key concepts being discussed. 
  
  At the end of your meeting, you find yourself in the unenviable position of having to use your own memory to reconstruct the conversations and record them somehow for the purposes of corporate memory. Despite your best intentions and efforts, you ultimately produce a summary document with unintentional omissions and a lack of clarity regarding what was discussed. When the document is distributed to stakeholders, it causes delays and additional follow-up meetings to reconstruct what was missing or inaccurately recorded.​
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• The Overwhelmed Reviewer
  Ashwin is a busy domain expert, a business stakeholder who represents an organization affected by your solution. Your team is engaging him in a socialization effort to help vet the solution you have envisioned.
  
  Ashwin is unable to attend a review meeting due to his demanding schedule. He has requested the solution documentation to review. The document contains jargon and colloquial phrases that have unclear meanings to him. After giving his only available 30 minutes to the effort of reviewing the document, Ashwin quits his review efforts, frustrated because he is unclear about the meaning of the words being used.
  
  At best, from a velocity perspective, he "approves" of the document without a high degree of certainty because he has no more time to allocate to reviewing your work. This introduces risk to your work effort because of the low quality of vetting. At worst, the work effort is delayed while the team and Ashwin find a meeting time in the future to work out their differences in understanding.
  
  
• The Disaffected Decision Maker
  Regina joins a review meeting as a decision-maker. As a cameo participant, she is uninvested in the words being bantered about in the meeting. As a result, she challenges their meaning and spends a lot of time seeking clarification. Various people from your dedicated group offer explanations. But, their meanings don't converge leaving Regina with more questions than answers.
  
  As the meeting proceeds, Regina's confidence in the group's understanding of the problem and solution is not reinforced. The work effort stalls. At best, a delay in progress occurs until mutual understanding is established in the future. At worst, the work ends permanently.

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Be Intentional: Build a Glossary

As a collaborative facilitator, if your approach does not emphasize the necessity of capturing key concepts and their meanings, you are unintentionally building in delays in the process of getting your work done.

A glossary is an effective accelerator in any collaborative design. It takes focused effort and intentionality to produce one.

Ambiguity and uncertainty are impediments to progress whereas clarity and confidence accelerate progress. 

However, in my experience, having a glossary available to collaborators is worth the effort because it serves as an accelerator an work effort accelerator whereas the absence of a glossary causes delays and other negative side-effects.

Here is an approach I use and recommend while facilitating collaborative meetings;  

1. Prepare: Make sure that someone (you or a designated person in the meeting) serves as a scribe to record words and their meanings. When meeting in a room, I suggest having 8" x 6" Post-it Super Sticky Notes and a Sharpie permanent marker available at all times. When meeting virtually online or over the phone, I suggest having the Evernote application open at all times.
   
   
2. Listen: While facilitating the collaborative conversation, listen for concepts or notions that might not be easily understood by others not as invested in the conversation. When the you hear a word or phrase, stop the conversation briefly, "Let's capture that idea as a glossary term."
   
   
3. Record:  Typically there is one person in the conversation who can authoritatively verbalize the glossary term. Have that person state it while the scribe records it.
   
   
4. Confirm: Have the scribe read it back to the group to get confirmation. Record any refinements and then move on with the meeting.
   
   For example, in a recent cross-functional human resources effort, our team came up with these terms. One of them had a single meaning. Another had multiple meanings stated in separate sentenced.
   
   exit interview – A final meeting to collect specific assets from the employee. A survey conducted with an individual who is separating from employment.
   
   involuntary – The condition upon which separation occurs that is not initiated by the employee.
   
   line management – A set of managers in the lower layers of the management hierarchy (e.g., team leader, supervisor) that manage employees who have no supervisory responsibilities.
   
   
5. Publish: Long after the meeting, because you were intentional you now have the corporate memory to reconstruct what was said by publishing the recorded glossary terms in whatever form is appropriate (e.g., appendix in a published document, page on a collaborative website or wiki).

Making your glossary accessible to all stakeholders provides a clarifying reference resource that accelerates understanding and positively affect the progress of your collaborative work effort. I hope this has been a helpful perspective for you.

​- Chuck

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