What you share
Shared vocabulary and where it comes from
Every team has words that mean something particular inside it. They are made by pairs doing work, which is why a sparse team has eight private vocabularies.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The team's managerEvery working pair in this grid includes this person
- 02The designer
- 03The data analyst
- 04The product managerWrites the brief everybody reads
four people · 6 possible pairs · 3 of them have worked on something together · 1 has only been in the same meeting · 2 have never done either
Four of the eight, and only the pairs that run between those four.
When a team wants evidence without reducing people to a score, managers can read the implementation guide and connect time and project patterns to a transparent discussion about workload.
For further reading outside this collection, see material published by Fast Company.
On any team of a year's standing there are a dozen words that do not mean what they mean outside. A noun for the thing that keeps going wrong. A verb for the particular kind of rewrite everybody dreads. A name for the customer that is not the customer's name. "Done", which means something precise and different on every team in the world.
That vocabulary is one of the most useful things a team has. It compresses a paragraph into a word and lets two people skip the preamble. It is also, on a sparse team, not shared at all: it exists in pockets, and the pockets are exactly the pairs on the grid.
How a word gets made
A word gets made the first time two people need one. They are looking at the same problem, the problem recurs, and somebody calls it something. The other person uses the same word back. It is now a word.
Notice what that requires: two people, the same object in front of both, and enough repetition for the shorthand to pay for itself. That is a working pair, and it is the only process that makes vocabulary. Words do not get made in meetings, because meetings are where words get announced, which is a different thing — an announced word is learned by everybody and used by nobody, because nobody has the recurring need that made it necessary.
What a sparse team sounds like
Six pairs across eight people means roughly six small vocabularies, and because five of those pairs include the manager, five of them are dialects of one person's language.
The visible effect is a particular kind of meeting. Somebody uses a word; two people know it and six do not; nobody asks, because asking what a word means in front of six colleagues is expensive and the meaning is usually inferrable; everybody proceeds with slightly different guesses. Three weeks later a decision turns out to have been made on two readings of one word.
The less visible effect is that the people outside each pocket cannot tell the pockets exist. From inside, the team seems to be speaking a common language with occasional unfamiliar terms. The unfamiliar terms are the evidence and they get absorbed rather than questioned.
The word "done" as the standard case
It is worth taking one example properly, because the general argument sounds abstract until it is applied.
Two engineers who review each other's work constantly converge on a meaning for "done" within a month. They have to: one of them says it and the other has to know whether to start. The convergence happens through about thirty small corrections, none of them a conversation about terminology.
The designer, who works with neither of them, means something different, and has never had an occasion to find out. The product manager means a third thing. None of the three is wrong and none of them has ever stated their meaning, because stating it would require noticing that it needed stating.
The cost appears at a handover, at a deadline, or in a status report, and it appears as a surprise rather than as a vocabulary problem. This is why writing a glossary does not fix it: a glossary records the meanings people are willing to state, and the problem is in the meanings nobody knows they hold.
What actually spreads a vocabulary
Pairs, in the ordinary way, which makes this a consequence of the rest of the site rather than a separate subject. A team that adds four working pairs in a quarter will find its vocabulary converging without anybody having worked on vocabulary.
Two specific things accelerate it.
- Rotating who writes things down. Whoever writes the weekly note has to describe seven other people's work in words, which forces them to find out what the words mean. Over two months of rotation everybody has had to do this once, and the vocabulary flattens noticeably. It has its own note in the last part of the site.
- Asking in public. The single highest-value act available to anybody on a team like this is to say "what do you mean by that" in a meeting. It is socially expensive and it is almost always the case that four other people did not know either. It cannot be mandated and it can be made cheaper by whoever has the standing to go first.
What not to do
Do not write the glossary first. A document of agreed terms, composed in one sitting by one person, has the same fate as the handbook: it records the words somebody thought were ambiguous, which are not the ones causing trouble, and it occupies the slot where the real fix would have gone.
If a glossary is going to exist, let it grow one line at a time, each line added on the day two people discovered they disagreed.