Use words to bring change. Or to reinforce the good

Since I always like to read things that agree with what I was already thinking I was pleased to stumble across this post from Michal Pisarek over at sharepointanalysthq. In his article he covers the topic on why it's a bad thing to use the standard "team-site". TL;DR: People don't know what a "team-site" is.

I agree. But let's not stop at these words, let's go one step further.

If I talk to people about what I do I usually tell them I work with SharePoint. Then they (almost always) ask me "Whats that?". Perhaps someday I will learn that SharePoint is a word without meaning if you never used the platform before. What I ought to say is that "I make you find the stuff you need to get stuff done. Like that document you and your colleague was working on last month, or that piece of news from the HR department about the new process for getting your vacation days approved". Thats simple, and most people can relate to what it means.

In the same manner no one of sound mind would come and tell me that they need a SharePoint document library set up to store pictures of products. They would say "We need a replacement for the products gallery". So that means that we should always refer to the new document library as the products gallery to be consistent with the business language, right?

Well not quite.

See, words are powerful things. We imbue them with meaning that goes above and beyond the individual letters. The product gallery might be a place of dread and horror which no one ventures into today due to fear of getting lost or the risk of suffering tremendous amounts of headache.

This is a golden opportunity to use words as a way to bring change. Don't call the new solution the products gallery. Perhaps call it the Inventory Portfolio. This gives employees the chance to associate new experiences with the word, perhaps even positive ones.

Now the same goes for the opposite. If everyone in the business is talking about the CRAD, and everyone knows that when you talk about the CRAD you mean business, don't go changing it to "the team-site".

It will loose it's value.

And yes, I claim that even small things like a document library can have power.

Now engineers usually don't want to care about this. Engineers wants to solve problems and move forward.

But. It is my true belief that even engineers will have to care about words to provide tangible business value in the long run. The days of code-monkeys in the cellar are going away. Now if we need pure, very detailed requirement driven development we outsource it. The only chance we have of providing continuous business value is to know our customers and help them going forwards.

Conclusion:

Words define our world and tools define how we live and work in the world. If we can find a way to make the tools more closely resemble the world, we will have a better chance of getting the people who live there feel more at home in our solutions. After all, it's hard trusting something that doesn't make you feel at home.