#81 - The Rosetta Stone Strategy

Writing of the week

The vast majority of you here will be familiar with the Rosetta Stone, that key artefact for understanding hieroglyphs, as the priestly decree is inscribed three times in hieroglyphic, demotic and ancient Greek, this last one being key to the understanding of the rest.

But how can we use the Rosetta Stone to our advantage, how can it serve as a communication strategy?

When we want to explain something, and this happens a lot when design talks to business people or stakeholders, we have to take the design terminology to something more mundane, more understandable, but how can we do it?

As with the Rosetta Stone, we need to take technical explanations into a receiver-based understanding framework (like from hieroglyphic to Greek), so we will use different “keys" to bridge the topic so that it can be understood.

We will use these “keys" during our discourse constantly to always guide the receiver; an example would be to talk about the complexity of a solution by refactoring a flow, translating this into a metaphor, an analogy or a simile, saying that it is like removing the popcorn ceiling from a house, it looks easy, but it is costly and time consuming.

Here the key of this example would be "complex=popcorn ceiling"; so if the conversation progresses, we can comment: "There are certain parts of the code that cannot be touched because of the different dependencies of technology and teams, like I said before it is like removing the popcorn ceiling".

Now writing about this makes me want to explain the differences between metaphors, analogies and similes, but that will be in the next issue ;)

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