Misunderstandings arise when people use different words to convey the same meaning, or when the same word carries different meanings. The concept of "shared language" involves people establishing a common understanding through spoken / written communication, enabling more effective interaction. (Thomas and McDonagh, 2013)
Each member of your organisation brings their own life experiences and professional background. Varied exposure to industry-specific terminology, roles, and organisation-specific jargon results in diverse interpretations of words and often communication styles. This article / series will not focus on communication styles but you can imagine that people and organisations with their own unique culture and behaviour have varying degrees of psychological safety in their environment, which will invariably influence how they communicate.
When applied to organisations, people work together to achieve outcomes and value for their customers / consumers. In order to do this more effectively over time, reducing the gap between "what is said" and "what is understood" has a real word impact on collaboration, communication and aligning towards the same broader strategy / goals.
This guide is the first instalment designed to get you thinking about your organisation's use of language for certain topics / domains:
You may also have other language / taxonomy in your organisation for roles, skills and related topics when it comes to workforce related topics.
In today's world the notion of having a "shared language" is more important than ever before. People work across timezones, locations and presence (physical or virtual) and even then, how often have you spoken to someone only to later realise that you were talking about different things?
Consistent understanding and usage of language can either fuel efficiency across the enterprise or present persistent obstacles to collaboration within and between teams, as well as throughout the entire organisation.
Some of the many factors:
Establishing a shared language can help with your communication and collaboration, however it isn't a panacea, and it requires a lot more effort in how change is managed and you may be up against the organisational sceptics who think you are giving new words to old things. Providing clarity on topics around: people, teams, planning, work processes, roles, goals, etc. can go a long way to helping bridge that gap. It is necessary but not sufficient.
It seems, we aren't alone in our thinking either, our chief TeamFormer Sam Yeats recently talked at the event Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit Europe 2024 and asked the audience wha they thought. There is a lot of ambiguity and across a broad set of organisations.
Creating a universally adopted "shared language" throughout an entire organisation may be quite challenging.
Organisations should develop a context-specific language, and the following table outlines the key components identified by TeamForm as crucial for achieving consistent understanding across the organisation. It also explains why these components are important to consider.
If new employees or individuals transitioning between roles struggle to locate this information easily, it is unlikely to gain widespread acceptance. This is even more challenging if your tooling is competing against you for language. e.g. one tool calls a team a Team, another a project and another a group.
Approach:
This can be quite a dry topic, in an effort to keep things fresh and consumable we will keep this article brief and further expand with real world examples over the coming weeks. To wet your appetite we have also recently launched a Miro Canvas (Strategy to Execution Map) to help you visualise your organisation/team structure, your strategy/goals and your work. Our very own Eugene Chung has created this and we cannot wait to see what you do with it.
Creating a shared language is a foundational element in adopting new ways of working. It generates a common understanding, resulting in easier adoption of your organisation’s behaviours, processes and practices. This helps to wire / thread language, data with behaviour into your tooling ecosystem. Your tooling should support your organisation and your language.
"...we had accurate data, that meant we had confidence around people mapped to value streams ... and importantly applied governance to the value streams to make sure that our tooling was consistent from Jira all the way to the financial ledger..."
adapted from from the incredible SEACon 2022 talk by Tony Caink "Nationwide’s Operating Model for End-to-End Value"
