Collaboration is multi-lingual

Every discipline speaks its own language. This sounds obvious, but I think we underestimate how much it explains when collaboration breaks down.

A clinician tells you their patients keep calling the after-hours line for things that aren't urgent. What they're saying is: I'm overwhelmed and this workflow isn't sustainable. But if you relay that to leadership as "nurses are frustrated with call volumes," nothing happens. It sounds like a complaint. If instead you frame it as a utilisation pattern that suggests a gap in daytime anticipatory planning, suddenly it's actionable. Same underlying reality. Different language. Different outcome.

Being a good translator requires something slightly uncomfortable: you have to accept that faithfulness to someone's exact words is sometimes less useful than faithfulness to what they meant.

Clinicians think in patients. Policymakers think in populations. Finance thinks in margins. They're often looking at the same problem and not recognising it, because each side is describing it in a language the other doesn't speak fluently. Most failures in cross-functional work aren't about people not listening to each other. They're about people listening perfectly, then repeating what they heard to an audience that operates in entirely different terms.

This is what I've spent most of the last decade doing — sitting between the ground and the system, translating in both directions. I've come to believe it's the atomic unit of collaboration: it is the building block to big strategies and the requirement for clever frameworks. Small, repeated act of reshaping what one side is saying so the other side can actually hear it.