Fables and Legends
One of my favourite diversions from what can otherwise be a ‘death-by-PowerPoint’ event when I facilitate a survey of requirements techniques is the telling of a fable. I take one person aside and read out a one page East Indian fable. That person is to recite the fable to someone else, and so on until everyone in the class has heard it. The last person gets the dubious honour of telling what’s left of the story to the class, and it usually only takes a sentence or two before the group is in stitches. It is the old campfire game (or telephone tag, depending on your childhood experiences), with a moral that applies to how we collaborate.
Usually the exercise takes place over a day, sometimes two, with anywhere between ten to twenty people. A short timeframe, and relatively few intermediaries. At one page long, the story is shorter in length than many of these blog entries, so let’s assume roughly the same amount of content. The fable ends up in a moral, as all fables should do, so the intent is to use a story to get a single strong point across, not to load you up with a ton of detailed information, as you might see in a technical specification. It is a philosophy I try to follow for this blog as well, pick a point or theme and tell a story to illustrate it.
As you might expect, it certainly doesn’t need ten people to completely screw up the results. Memories are horribly short, and personal biases and experiences soon influence the details in many ways. The intended moral of the story gets lost, often changed in hilarious ways, or worse, inverted to press the opposite of the intended point. Even if someone in the group recalls the actual fable from their childhood and snaps the story back to what they recall as a child, it soon falls back into disrepair.
A single key point, supported by a story to illustrate that point and reinforce its relevance. Simple really, but it still cannot survive being passed along by word of mouth. What gets recited initially in about two minutes soon becomes about a 30 second experience, as one person tries in vain to recall as much detail as they can. What amazes me every time we run the exercise is that when people fail to remember a detail, they very often make something up to fill in that gap!
Think about how we learn best-practices in our industry. Some of us will read books, even fewer will survey a range of different sources to understand all the nuances and perspectives of a certain topic. In most cases, our learning consists of an approach that looks similar to that fable exercise above. Word of mouth from a peer, a passive listening to an instructor in a course, at best the reading of one book on the topic. We can take that single perspective, use our less-than perfect to store away the key points, and use our past experiences to fill in the gaps, and seldom use feedback to reinforce our learning or confirm that our embellishments make any sense or even support the original hypothesis.
We then move forward with our newfound knowledge, apply it to our work, and even advocate these points to others, masking the fact that they are filled with misinterpretations and embellishments. The ‘gospel’ according to Alice has become the ‘gsoelp’ according to Bob, which becomes the ‘sogleuz’ according to Charlie, and Charlie often passes it along with the same conviction that Alice did.
Much of the original intended message easily gets lost in translation. Indeed, we can safely assume that our message will get diluted and polluted as it leaves our hands, unless we are careful to manage the propagation of this message to our intended audience. If our intent is to reach the masses and change the world with our gospel, we cannot tell a few people and hope that they will successfully deliver that message for us. It will mutate along the way. - JB
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