The key to successful technical discussions is precise, unambiguous terminology.
Last night I had a phone meeting with the mValent senior technical team in Boston discussing the design of one component of the next major release of our software. The meeting was focused and progressed us forward tremendously in a common understanding of how the component was going to work. The key, I believe, was a clear vocabulary of terms that I insisted everyone use.
Previously, I'd been talking with another colleague about a physical representation versus a logical representation in our system. The problem was, "logical" was terribly overloaded and sometimes was used to mean just part of what was being called the logical representation. I suggested we use a new term without the word "logical". Because it is the representation surfaced to the user, I proposed "surface representation". So then we had a physical representation and a surface representation. But when talking about the surface representation, we were getting tangled up because different object hierarchies within the surface representation had different characteristics. So I gave each hierarchy type a number. Then we could talk about H1, H2, H3, H4.
So last night, I started the meeting defining what the surface representation was and what H1 thru H4 meant. From then on, the discussion was crystal clear. At one point it looked like there were variations of H4. So we decided to refer to them as H4a and H4b. That way we could talk about the characteristics of H4 in general as well as drill down into the differences between H4a and H4b.
(And yes, jokes were made about the names sounding like US visas).
So often I've found that technical meetings become burdensome when people are arguing about what they think is the same thing but are really two different things. Or are talking about two different things that are really the same. Having unambiguous terms (even if they are silly things like H4b) is a tremendous help in discussions.
Most people at mValent think I'm precise about my terms because of my linguistics background. I'm not sure it's just that. I think my interest in linguistics is correlative rather than causal. Linguistics, like many sciences, is about categorizing phenomena. I think at the core, it's the categorizing that I love. That's clear in my previous post on thinking like a pure mathematician. I've always been fascinated by taxonomies.
I've also had ten years involvement in the standards-writing world including a significant amount of implementation of standards. That alone gives one an appreciation for precise, unambiguous terminology.
Next time you're arguing in a technical meeting and the other person just doesn't seem to "get it", take a step back and both agree on a set of terms to use. It really does work wonders.