Yeah, I'm a big believer in finding 2-way decisions and starting fast, but even for 1-way decisions there's a pretty pervasive problem at a bunch of places of meetings that are arguments instead of decisions. Ego stroking for engineers instead of getting something done.
The majority of arguments I’ve seen at work turn out to be people taking past each other because they are using different definitions for the same words or they are starting with different assumptions. Eventually someone says, “When you say X, do you mean Y?” And “Are you assuming that Z?”. Suddenly the argument goes away or is greatly simplifies. But it takes so much to get to that point. I don’t know why humans are so poor at communicating.
Communication is NP-hard and the difficulty scales exponentially with each added layer of complexity.
On top of all that, people in specialized roles tend to invent jargon, then use it as an excuse to treat others as inferior or outsiders instead of putting their ideas to the test by explaining them to the rest of the world. People who do that tend to be interested in maintaining an upper-hand status-wise rather than actually getting shit done.
Communication is only NP-hard if you have zero prior context.
In most cases, you already have 99.9% of the common language, including an acceptable common metalanguage embedded into it. Coming up with mutually understandable definitions is a bit of work, but it's far from unsurmountable.
Note how many legal papers and even scientific papers start with definitios. Other technical communication should, too.
One of the best things I ever did was to come up with a straight-forward definition of UI components in our CMS, so our designers and front-end developers could speak to each other and be on the same level. When new features were developed, and new components introduced, we would all agree upon what made up that component and document it.
