Why Everyone ELSE Does It Wrong

How Business Processes and Human Language Don’t Mix

Why Does Everyone Else Do It Wrong?

• Business processes as communication systems

• The structure of normal language

• Language, thought and perception

• Normal language vs. business processes

Processes as Communication Systems

• Business processes are somewhat like assembly lines, but what moves through is information, not objects

• Most companies need to create a service which behaves as the customer requested. This means turning the customer’s information about his needs into information describing what the company will technically deliver. This is communication.

• Communication, of course, is done with language. Because of this, business processes use a lot of language – or do they?

Processes as Communication Systems

• In reality, processes use something that LOOKS like language.

• Process designers need to understand

– How language works

– How business information systems and processes handle information

– How these two DON’T MATCH

Structure of Normal Language

• The linguistic sign

• Context and meaning– linguistic context

– extra-linguistic context (real world)

– metaphors and analogies

– shared and unshared context

– multiple meanings from multiple contexts

We don’t say what we mean.

We don’t mean what we say.

The Linguistic Sign

• Signifier and Signified (signifiant and signifié)

• The “signified” almost always covers a wide range of different real-world entities or events

• Examples– “dog” represents large dogs, small dogs, toy dogs, hunting dogs, etc.

– “play” represents using a musical instrument, participating in a game, etc.

• We also use non-verbal things or events as signs– gestures

– clothes

– hairstyles

– actions

Context and Meaning: Linguistic Context

Is this colour “red”?

Is this colour “red”?

You probably said No – but the question was out of context:

red hair

red cabbage

Context and Meaning: Linguistic Context

• “He scored a goal”

• “He crashed into the goal”

• “His goal was to score a goal, but he crashed into the goal instead”

We understand the third sentence effortlessly, even though “goal” has three completely different meanings.

Extra-Linguistic Context

• What does this sentence mean?

“It was a bomb”

Extra-Linguistic Context

“It was a bomb”

Suppose that the person saying it is:

• walking out of a movie theatre?

• watching a football game?

• standing across the street from a building on fire?

Extra-Linguistic Context

• Time is also a context which changes meaning:

– “gay”• the meaning has changed from “cheerful” or “happy” to “homosexual”

– “mugger”• the original meaning was “crocodile” (a direct borrowing from the Hindi language)

– “gymnasium”• the original meaning was a type of school

Analogies and Metaphors

• “They’ve all drunk the James Levy kool-aid, and they believe they can operate this way”

– James Levy to Lynn Curle

• “Two years ago, I was ignorant of the reality of our processes. Why can’t I just drink the kool-aid and be happy again?”

– Doug Pepino to Steve Finlay

Did anyone really drink kool-aid, or is anyone planning to?

What do these statements mean?

Why do they mean this?

Shared and Unshared Context

• What does “That was bad!” mean when said by:– a white accountant from Point Grey?

– a black drug dealer from Newark?

• If George W. Bush calls American intervention in the Middle East a “crusade”, what does this mean to:

– “WASP” Americans?

– Middle Eastern Muslims?

• “optimization”– What does this mean to an industrial engineer?

– What does it mean to a group of workers who are being studied by an industrial engineer?

Multiple Meanings

Clint Eastwood in the movie Absolute Power:

“Doctor Kevorkian, I presume?”

Multiple Meanings

“Doctor Kevorkian, I presume?”

• It meant a lot – but NOT what it said

• What it said:– “I believe your name is Dr. Kevorkian; am I correct?”

• What it meant:– “I see that you’re going to inject my daughter with a lethal chemical”

– “You’re doing it to murder her, not because she wants to die”

– “I don’t have any doubt at all about these two statements”

• In normal language, we understand multiple meanings like this (and throw away the literal meaning) effortlessly and unconsciously.

Language, Thought and Perception

• The nature of meaning in normal language– Sophisticated

– Flexible

– Complex

– Imprecise

• Thinking and understanding– “Understanding” an entity means knowing what its attributes are, how it

compares to other entities, and how it interacts with other entities

– “Thinking” means mentally manipulating entities, their attributes and their relationships

– What we “understand” and “think about” is not the external reality, but the linguistic signs that we use to classify and simplify that reality

Language is not how we express our thoughts. Language IS our thoughts.

Perception and Thought

We don’t see what is there; we see what we know:

Show this picture to four people for 5 seconds, then ask them to describe it from memory. The four people are...

Perception and Thought

• An architect

• An arborist

• An outside plant engineer from a hydro company

• A stylist from General Motors

Would their descriptions be similar?

Would you think they were describing the same picture?

Normal Language vs. Business Processes

• In business processes, communications must meet stringent criteria in order to work well:

– Precise, unambiguous (single) meanings (i.e., signifier-to-signified mappings)

– Explicit definition of all meanings so that changes can be recognized, analyzed and documented

– Constant meaning regardless of unshared contexts, outside knowledge, extra-linguistic context, time

– Strictly limited and defined relationships among “signifiers”, corresponding to the real world constraints on the “signifieds”

For business processes, we must say what we mean, and we must mean what we say.

When we communicate as if we are using natural language, information is lost and “the other guy” is blamed.

Business Process Brain Wrecks

• Example 1: from a set of order entry instructions:– “Place order ‘In Progress’ ”

• What type of order is it? SRT, DOCS, ECOPS, or __?

• The action which the rep must execute at this point is to click on a button labelled “Distribute”. The words “In Progress” are not present on the screen.

In business processes, the normal characteristics of real language (flexibility, context sensitivity, and so on) continually lead to “brain wrecks”

The author of this instruction had years of experience as a service rep (context, consisting of prior knowledge)

Because of this context, she unconsciously linked the signifier “Distribute” to the concept of the order being “on its way”

She did not realize that an inexperienced rep (the true audience) would not have this context, and would not be able to interpret “Distribute” in this way

Business Brain Wrecks

• Example 2: Response to an inquiry– e-mail from TNAC regarding an inquiry which had been stalled:

I'm not sure if this order is an example of something or a lack of process knowledge, TNAC added the following comments on Feb.12:

Not ON-Net

Issue a --- FIRM --- OSG request for Bell CDN.

TOROON29H23

40 BURNHAMTHORPE RD

DS3 / 10Mbps capable - spare sublink available at this time.

In other words: “I’m not sure what the problem was; we provided a complete answer”

– e-mail from Sales regarding the same inquiry:

The person who wrote this from TNAC can not explain in English what is meant by this and I get different interpretations from my colleagues here:

"Not ON-Net Issue a --- FIRM --- OSG request for Bell CDN. TOROON29H23 40 BURNHAMTHORPE RD DS3 / 10Mbps capable - spare sublink available at this time."

The exact same words are 100% intelligible to the sender, but 100% meaningless to the recipient – because unambiguous and constant

meanings (signifieds) have never been documented and learned

Natural Language vs. Business Information

Natural language Business Information

Flexible meaning, according to context

Fixed meaning, independent of context

Imprecise Exact

Multiple and ambiguous meanings

Single meaning

Complex Simple

Implicit Explicit

Unconstrained Constrained

The Linguistic Approach toBusiness Information

• Business information is fundamentally different from natural language

• Nevertheless, this information must be expressed in a “language” in order for people to use and manage it

• THIS LANGUAGE MUST BE UNNATURAL IN ORDER TO WORK– Users must say what they mean, and must mean what they say

The Linguistic Approach toBusiness Information

Creating this unnatural language requires us to:– Understand precisely the information and activities that happen in reality

– Understand exactly what each function does with each piece of information, and why that is necessary

– Explicitly define what is “signified” by every word, number, symbol and syntactic structure

– Ensure that the “language” can express all the real world content that is needed

– Explicitly document the meaning of all elements of the “language” and the syntactic rules, and provide guidance (in real language) on how to use the “language”

The Linguistic Approach toBusiness Information

All the goals in the previous slide can be reached, although it is hard work.

The key is to recognize that it takes deliberate, conscious effort to create a “language” which

removes ambiguity, achieves clarity, and ensures comprehension in a business process. Natural

language by itself will not do the job.