Meaning

Full Title or Meme

Before people can start any sort of management or design process, it is important that they have a common umderstanding of the meaning of the words that are important to the process.

Context

A vary large percentage of disagreements between team members seems to boil down into a difference of meaning that each assigns to critical works that are used to describe the system.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass

Solution

• Before the any design or other collaborative process starts, create a work list of those terms that are critical to the process.
• If there is to be any sort of categorization of components try to create a taxonomy that separates the components into distinct buckers, called taxa.
• The other words can go into an alphabetic glossary.