Hello, World! 🌍

We, humans, love our routines - it gives us comfort in having control and predictability over regular re-occurrences of activities throughout our daily life. But what are routines?

Well, routines are just cyclical habits we perform within a given context of society or community which are, in the end, just systems with their own processes, guidelines and rules.

To Engineers and Tech professionals, this might seem very familiar to how we normally build software given that it’s also a collection of patterns in a context with its own bounding rules. However, we (myself included) have failed many times in making these two worlds live in harmony, often creating knowledge and communication silos with people of diverse skill sets that are also living within the same contexts.

How can we lean into this and unlock a higher harmonious co-existence with our peers?

In spite of the similarities, we often lack the awareness to create a common understanding of a system, which is aggravated by the role attribution we give to professionals:

Oh, product requirements should be very well defined before I start to work on this piece of code

or

I don’t understand any of the technical gibberish these devs are talking about on why this feature wouldn’t work

I’ve seen or heard sentences and quotes of the same nature being said in previous work experiences and even outside of work when people either expect to go too deep or too shallow on something instead of both parties finding themselves in the middle.

So, in my opinion, what we should unveil is how to transform our organizations into more cohesive structures where knowledge silos only work if the knowledge is unrelated to the task at hand, and mixing it would be an unnecessary mental load.

More than ever, engineers and technical people have to learn how to communicate with human beings and not expect technical jargon to be automatically understood by every other stakeholder. The parallels with our society are also uncanny, especially in the age of short form content, where more complex topics often don’t get the dedicated attention span to fully grasp and develop a critical mindset.

More than ever, communication acts as a bridge between knowledge and ignorance

In this blog, that I’ve just started, I will dwell further into this topic - sharing experiences and experiments to inspire others, and to stimulate discussions that would help both readers and myself create better communication and knowledge structures in our professional and personal lives.