If I say that a thing costs five dollars but I don’t specify if that’s Canadian Dollars, US Dollars, or Australian Dollars then we might all think we understand the price but we don’t, because I used language that sounded precise and yet was actually ambiguous. What I think I said and what others think I said were substantially different.
Just in the last two days, I’ve had conversations with people who are having this exact problem in their companies, although with different words than “dollars”.
Management at one company is pushing hard for “efficiency”, which everyone thinks they agree on. Except some people think they’re talking about Resource Efficiency (keeping people busy) and some think they’re talking about Flow Efficiency (keeping the work busy) and so they’re coming into conflict because they don’t understand that they’re talking past each other. They both say “efficiency” while meaning very different things.
At a different company, estimates for work are being given in hours and everyone thinks they’re talking about the same thing. Yet, one group thinks they’re talking about actual clock time and others think they’re talking about ideal time (how long it would take if I had no interruptions), and in my experience, those two are often different by a factor of three.
These problems can cause significant conflict, while being difficult to unpack. We think we’ve clearly stated our position, yet we really didn’t.
The hardest part to fixing this is to even recognize that we’re talking about different things. If we think we might be talking past each other, it’s worth digging a bit deeper into our assumptions and the language we’re using to see if we’re actually talking about the same things.