Business

There is a view that it is crucial for every part of a business to understand what the next part is doing. There is an opposite view by which the only priority is for every part to just do what it’s told and know as little as possible about everything else. But on either view, accurate understanding is crucial, in health care and aviation at least as a matter of life and death. This can be difficult where cultural traditions conflict, where there are different notions of exactness, between say programmers and designers.

This applies particularly in finance. Sums can be specified down to the smallest unit of currency. But actions may depend on perceptions of risk, trust, and credit-worthiness. These can be quantised, but not exactly.

Setting aside obvious imprecisions like small, large and soon, it might seem that dates, times, RGB values, and words like next, are precise and unambiguous. But precision can break down if an intelligent system is in the loop.

Words can have definitions in dictionaries. But these are by the settings of human editors at some point in time in some context. Meanings are also given by personal experience, context, momentary attitude and emotion, writers’ tone, assumptions and expectations.

Good reliable communication may be a process in two directions, a matter of negotiation, by checking, adaptation, redundancy, and non-verbal cues.

But also, there are simple, very important, very well understood things like trust, appreciation, and regret, which should never be taken for granted.

On such matters, I can help.