Overcoming language barriers between professions

When I started at Shell, a colleague took me with him to a regular meeting between experts in refining. This was an absolute eye opener to me: I sat in the meeting and did not understand a word and came away with a long list of acronyms. After the meeting I asked my colleague to summarise what had been discussed and explain some of the acronyms. I realised how important the special language and the use of all the acronyms was, as it essentially made it possible to convey an enormous amount of information to the whole group! So it is not useful to ban acronyms, or make people talk a simpler language all the time, it is however crucial to stay aware of the fact that you are using your own language when talking about your profession or with another professional from the same discipline!

In that situation in Shell I had actually several colleagues, who were patiently introducing me to the world of the language of refinining, and the group of people involved was rather homogenuous with engineers, chemists and physicists making up the majority of people involved.

In Unilever this was different as in R&D the group was much more varied, as in many of the projects I was working with nutritionists, biologists, psychologists, but also chemists and engineers — not to forget that in many cases our main stakeholders were marketing experts. This was actually a great environment to learn, as it was nearly certain that each new project brought together people that had no clue about the others expertise. This often meant that someone in a team had to try and translate between the disciplines. I, as the statistician or data scientist, had to anyhow translate the requirements and questions from the other disciplines into something measurable. Or I would see structure or correlations in the data that actually meant something to an expert in a field, which then allowed someone from another discipline to draw a conclusion impossible from within the same discipline.

An example of this was the project on iron fortification of margarine. When the nutritionist explained to me the general iron storage system in the human body, it triggered with me directly the memory from organic chemistry (and my rudimentary biology knowledge). I remembered that typically these reactions will only run until an equilibrium is reached. Eating, and therefore iron intake is a continuous process, and iron storage is changing all the time through growing and dying cells, and in women through menstruation. After checking this understanding with the nutritionist, I translated the clinical question “Has the iron status improved after increased iron intake over the study period?” to the engineering and chemical question, namely, “How does the process of iron intake and storage change over time, if iron intake is increased?”. This led to the new study design with measurements over time, which allowed to proof that increased iron intake leads to higher storage levels, but only up to a stable maximum.

Finally, I hope everyone will agree on the point with the “stupid question”. There are many reasons, why someone might ask about something people assumed they would know, or which had been explained earlier. Why it is important to answer the question properly, is because it might be challenging assumptions that actiually do not hold, or an earlier explanation may not have been clear enough, but most importantly it strengthens the teams openness to new insights and solutions! You may have heard the technique of the 5 Why that forces people to question assumptions to maximise the understanding. It works because it challenges assumptions, and ensures when correctly used, that eferyone in the team has clarity about, what the insights are.

In summary:

• Be aware that you are speaking the language of your discipline, and never assume that a new colleague is already fluent in the jargon!
• Always ask for clarification of a word or an acronym to ensure you and your team mates or collaborators are using the word or acronym in the same way you understand it!
• Make use of knowledge of other disciplines you may have from school, from working in other companies, your hobbies, or people you met and chatted with! It allows you to sometimes translate between disciplines!
• Play back your understanding of things to the people you are working with in your own words. The more you get feedback on your own internal translations, the easier it becomes to translate your knowledge for others!
• Translating from one discipline to another leads sometimes to a new perspective on a question and thereby to new insights!

I hope you found these musings about the language challenges between different professions useful!