Architect’s Essay · Open reading
An essay on why more information does not end a misunderstanding
A market town, long before anyone agreed on a meter. Cloth comes in from three valleys, and every merchant sells by the ell. Every merchant is honest. The trouble is that each valley has its own ell, a little longer here, a little shorter there, and each merchant measures by the one at home.
So every sale is correct by one measure and short by another. The buyer unrolls the cloth at home and finds it wanting. The seller swears it was full measure, and it was. Both are telling the truth, and the dispute has no end, because each is holding a different stick.
The town tries what towns try. More inspectors at the gate. More witnesses at each sale. Longer letters between the valleys describing the cloth in detail. None of it helps. Every letter is written in ells.
Then someone does something very plain. One rod is cut to one length and fixed into the wall of the market hall, where anyone can walk up and lay their cloth against it. The disputes do not vanish, but they change. They are no longer about whose ell is right. They are about the cloth.
Hold onto that rod on the wall. It is what most organizations do not have, where they believe they have shared understanding.
Every word has its valley
An organization runs on a few dozen words. Priority. Done. Risk. Alignment. Accountability. Customer. Escalation. Psychological safety. They appear in every strategy paper and every review. Everyone uses them, and everyone uses them in good faith.
Each of them came in from a valley. One person learned accountability in a place where it meant owning the result. Another learned it where it meant finding the name to blame. One group calls a piece of work done when it has been delivered; the next calls it done when it has been accepted; a third, when it has stopped coming back. Psychological safety arrives from a book in one corner of the building and from a workshop in another, and in the third corner it has come to mean being pleasant to one another.
Every one of these people measures correctly. By their own ell.
More letters do not help
When understanding fails, the remedy that comes to mind is more information. Another update, a longer brief, a clearer slide, one more meeting to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Two researchers of how organizations process information, Richard Daft and Robert Lengel, drew a line here that most remedies step over. Some confusion is uncertainty: information is missing, and more of it answers the question. Other confusion is equivocality: several interpretations compete, and more information does not settle which one holds. It often feeds them all.
The market town did not suffer from uncertainty. Every merchant knew exactly how much cloth was on the table. It suffered from equivocality. The letters between the valleys were long, precise and useless, because each was measured against a different rod.
Most of what organizations call a communication failure is the second kind, treated with remedies for the first. The update is sent. The brief is longer. The word alignment is used four more times. And each reader lays the new information against the measure they brought from home.
What the rod does
The rod on the wall did three things that no amount of letters could.
It was fixed. It did not get a little longer when a seller was in a hurry or a little shorter when a buyer was angry. A measure that changes with the mood of the person using it is not a measure.
It was public. Anyone could walk up to it. Nobody had to trust the other party’s stick, or the inspector’s memory of what the right length was.
And it was traceable. Everyone knew where it came from and who had set it. If it was disputed, there was a place to go back to.
A definition worth the name does the same for a word. It holds still. Anyone can check against it. And it carries its origin: who formulated the term, when, and for what. Without the origin, a definition is only another valley’s ell, presented with more confidence.
Operative, and operant
There is a fourth thing the rod did, and it is the one that matters most to anyone who leads.
The rod did not only describe a length. It changed what happened in the market. Merchants began cutting cloth to it before they set out. Weavers in the valleys began weaving to it. Disputes that had once been settled by the louder voice began to be settled by walking to the wall.
Good definitions in an organization work the same way, in two senses. They are operative: they say how to recognize the thing and how to check whether it is there. Not psychological safety is important, but what it is, what it is not, and what would show it in a group. And they are operant: once they are in use, they act. Define done as accepted rather than delivered, and the work changes before a single new instruction is given. Define risk with its limit stated, and the meeting that used the word to end a discussion has to continue it.
A word without a definition is not neutral. It leaves the work to whoever speaks loudest.
Watch it scale
Once you have seen the valleys, you find them at every size.
One person carries a private ell for half the words they use and does not know it, because nobody ever asked them to lay one against the wall. They are sure they were clear. They were, by their own measure.
A group agrees in ten minutes on a word and leaves with five meanings. The agreement was real. It was agreement on a sound.
An organization writes its words into targets, contracts, reviews and dashboards, and each unit fills them with its own length. The figures are compared across units as if they measured the same thing. They do not, and the comparison decides budgets.
And around all of them, a society that hands down borrowed words and borrowed figures with the origin worn off. They are repeated in training rooms and board papers, and they travel anyway, because nobody walks them back to the wall.
The trap inside the trap
The careful ones see the problem and respond. Each function writes a glossary.
Engineering has one. Finance has one. The project office has one, and so does the new program. Each is precise. Each is maintained. And each is a measure kept in one stall of the market, cut to that stall’s needs, with no wall in common.
Now the valleys are documented. That is better than before. But two glossaries that disagree on risk are two ells with labels, and the cloth still comes up short at the border between them.
The rod worked because there was one, it was in the hall, and it belonged to no stall. A shared vocabulary is not the sum of every department’s glossary. It is the measure they all agree to check against.
What it costs
The price of the misunderstandings is the smaller cost. The larger one is what people conclude.
After enough disputes that nobody could settle, people stop trying. They keep their own measure, privately, and add a margin of suspicion to everything they receive. When they say done, they mean almost done. When they say urgent, wait a day. The organization then runs on translation, everyone silently converting everyone else’s words into their own, and it takes that for experience.
When something finally goes wrong, the review finds that the information was there. It was sent, received and acknowledged. Everyone read it. Everyone read it against a different rod.
What to do instead
Put the measure on the wall.
Not for every word. For the few that decisions run on. Take the words that appear in your targets, your reviews and your last three decisions of consequence, and fix them: what each one means, how to recognize it, where it comes from, and where it stops applying. Make the definitions public, and make them the ones everybody checks against, at every level, in every unit.
None of this places the fault on one shoulder. The person who uses a word loosely, the group that agrees on a sound, the organization that compares unlike measures, and the wider world that hands all of them borrowed words each hold part of the problem, each in its own way and measure. So each holds part of the answer.
That is what a dictionary is, when it is made for work rather than for school. Not a list of words in alphabetical order. The rod on the wall: fixed, public, traceable, and in use. You are not short of information. What you are often short of is one measure that everyone agrees to lay their words against before they argue about the cloth.
Three valleys, three ells, honest merchants on every side. Every sale was correct, and every buyer came up short. They sent more letters, and the letters were measured in ells. Then someone fixed one rod to the wall, and the argument turned, at last, to the cloth.