Guy Reams (00:01.166)
This is day 213. Beware of the Synecdoche.
I'm fascinated by words in our language that we don't use very often. And more importantly, words that have pretty complex meaning. They represent an idea or a concept that has such a powerful meaning behind it that it can help you judge a circumstance or help you improve the way you react to your reality around you. So...
Syngnecticy is one of those words. Now, it's also very hard to pronounce. In fact, I mess it up all the time. But the reason I bring this up is because the meaning of this word is a bit elusive. But what it really means is that oftentimes we use figures of speech, and those figures of speech, we can represent entire concepts with a single word.
or a part of that concept. For example, today in a newscast, I heard somebody use the phrase, boots on the ground. Like they were talking about, they were worried that the United States would get involved in the Israel conflict in Gaza by putting boots on the ground. So boots on the ground is a small subset of a military engagement. So yes, soldiers do wear boots. I think they do, or at least I hope they do.
I don't think soldiers wear tennis shoes. So soldiers wear boots. And so that's a part of the whole. Now, we don't mean that we're actually going to put boots over there. What we mean is that we're going to put, we could potentially put the entire military machine over there. Not only soldiers, but all their support and supply chain and tanks and machinery and everything else to go along with it. So boots on the ground,
Guy Reams (02:03.662)
is a smaller representation of a larger whole. That is a synecdoche. Now, a more common thing we'll use is words that are locations or places. For example, the phrase Silicon Valley or the phrase Hollywood have come to represent, for example, Silicon Valley represents the startup community. Now, nobody really believes that startups have to be in Silicon Valley.
But it's an idea, an ethic, a culture. It's part of a representation of a larger thing. Another one, Hollywood.
We know the movie production industry is not Hollywood, but it is true that a lot of Hollywood, a lot of movie production occurs in Hollywood. So this has become a word to represent the entirety of that industry.
So anytime we use a word that's part of something to represent the entire whole is a synecdoche. I'm gonna go take out my wheels tonight. Well, I'm not actually gonna take my wheels out, I'm taking my car, but I call them my wheels if that makes sense. So I bring this up because in the technology business, which is what I'm part of, synecdoche can be kind of dangerous, or not dangerous, but can be unfortunate.
And that's because, you know, like, for example, they used if I were to say the White House as a term to represent the entire U .S. federal government, that's unfortunate. The White House is a place, it's a physical building, and it does represent the office of the U .S. presidency, but it by nowhere close gets to understanding or representing the entirety of the federal government.
Guy Reams (04:00.622)
The federal government is very vast with many, many different departments and organizations. So to just to say the White House would be unfortunate, you would not be conveying the full meaning. So in the tech business, this happens all the time. We use a small phrase or a tool name to represent the entirety of a process, and we just assume people know what we mean, but in reality, they don't. And so we'll nod our heads and agree.
when in reality we don't really know what the other person's talking about. But we want to sound important, so we use a word that represents a tool or a portion of the concept, but not the entirety of the thing. So in this case, a synecdoche is actually unfortunate. It can actually hurt or harm communication and sometimes prevent you from getting access to the entirety of the concept.
So I'll bring up an example from my past that illustrates this. So in the 90s, in the 1990s, when I got involved in technology for the first time in a major way, I had lots of leaders, because I was a young kid getting involved. And one of the leaders had recently learned about Kanban boards. So for those of you who have just recently discovered Kanban boards, they've been around a long time. So.
If you don't know this, Kanban comes from the Kaizen lean methodology method that was invented in Japan. And by the way, there's no one single inventor for this. After Japan, after World War II, there was kind of this rebuilding effort going on in Japan. And American consultants would come over and consult and provide lots of business advice. And various Japanese leaders, thought leaders started coming up with
using their teachings to also come up with great ideas. And so right around the early mid 80s or so, people started publishing lots of books on the Kaizen method. In my blog today, I talk about one in particular book that I read that was really good. You can look up the blog to see that one. But so the 80s started coming out with all these books on Kaizen about the Toyota production system. And then
Guy Reams (06:21.966)
And then, so sometime around the 90s, people started really incorporating some of these lean methodology methods into other areas of the business, other areas of the world, and one of those was the tech business. So I had a leader that wanted to use Kanban. Now, he understood that Kanban was this great tool for visualizing workflow on teams. So Kanban to him became the synecdoche of the entirety
of this cool new way of doing business, this Kaizen method. Well, unfortunately, he didn't get the whole entirety of the process. He only got the Kanban board. And here's where it got bad because part of the lean manufacturing method was that you needed to reduce waste. That was a big part of it. But also that you need to involve your people so that people could communicate with each other.
So you could speed up and go faster in your processes that you engage the people that were in the process. So this leader understood the Kanban, but didn't understand that other element where he had to involve the people in the process. So we weren't that successful. So in this case, Kanban was a synecdoche of this process. But just focusing on the tool wasn't good enough.
there was more involved in doing this than just the tool. So there is a danger of losing the original meaning of a very important process if you just focus on the synecticy or just the tool. And so if the original meaning gets lost and we oversimplify and we overgeneralize, then...
As we pass that down from person to person, communicate between team and team, then we forget the real meaning and the purpose behind the tool. I think a great example of this right now that I dealt with recently was the case of Scrum and Jira. So Jira is a tool created by a company called Atlasyn. Now Jira is a great tool, by the way. I think it's awesome. But.
Guy Reams (08:46.926)
It was designed to help implement Kaizen or Scrum, right? So that's why it was designed. And the tool does that. It does a pretty good job at that. But it does it really good if you know what you're doing, like if you actually are following the Scrum framework. So if you don't know this, Scrum was invented in the 90s as well. It's been around a long time. And Scrum has slowly, over time, become this very complex framework. But the...
The intent is for product owners to work with development teams in a very agile way. So that's kind of the intent. And tools have been developed to help with that. And JIRA is one of them. Well, I mean, you'll get on calls nowadays where people will just throw the word JIRA out to sound like they know what they're talking about. And that's good. Let's implement, let's implement, or using JIRA, or let's implement JIRA. Well, if you just implement the tool,
then you forget the whole framework by which the tool becomes useful. So in this case, yeah, the tool can help simplify project management, maybe. But if you're not following the Scrum framework, then you might as well forget it. You're adding complexity for the sake of complexity. So as I reflect on these examples of using Synecdoche, I realize that I'm
guilty as charged, right? I'll get on calls and I'll use fancy words to try to impress people. And I know that people do that to me and we do that back and forth. But in the tech business, we're propagating this very serious problem. We're trying to represent entire concepts with one word and or one tool. And if we keep doing that, what ends up happening is people adopt those tools without any really sense of purpose.
So you'll have people just adopting tools for no reason. It's like the form proceeds the function, right? Which isn't very good, right? So I've kind of learned this lesson to not allow myself to take a word that represents the entirety and use it carelessly to generalize a process. It's better to get to true meaning, right? Now, if two parties understand the real meaning of the word,
Guy Reams (11:12.302)
Then you can go ahead and use the abbreviated figure of speech and you'd be fine. But I would be very weary of allowing myself to rely on these without understanding the true meaning behind it. So there you go. That's my dive into a complex word, synecdoche. All right. Thank you.