TMN: An unknown three letter word, to check if people know what they are talking about.
Michel and Els brought it up. So many people in IT use words they hardly understand and when they do they don’t take the time to explain the basics.
TMN: stands for This Means Nothing. I use it in meetings where people use 3 letter words all the time and I have the feeling not everyone understands them.
When I get that feeling I say something like.
“I agree with you, but did you think about TMN? “
A lot of people just continue without loosing a beat, yes, that is not a problem because ….
After a little discussion I ask them what TMN means. When I explain it, they get my point.
In other meetings I will just bluntly say I don’t understand this or that acronym, even if I know it but suspect others don’t. In a lot of meetings I get different answers from different persons. Usually when they agree what the 3 letter word means, the other discussions are over.
I don’t mind making a fool of myself if that means I save the face from someone else. In my experience, TMN works better because people realize more there is a problem with using acronyms without explaining them.
That is why on the projects I coach, I ask to make a list of all the abbreviations. It gives a lot of discussions at the beginning of the project, but it saves a lot of anger afterwards.
I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project Coach and you can reach me @ Yves at my agile training company .net
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You know anymore classic ICT acronyms?
Most people don’t ask an explanation I guess. It happens to me all the time at school. If I say: “who doesn’t understand X or Z”, almost nobody will answer. I always pick someone to check if they do know the answer. At least 80% of the time, they aren’t able to answer my question.
I’m not sure we do have to understand everything all the time. Maybe that’s something we learned as well?
I agree that asking do yiu understand does not work. Especially not in a demanding environment like work or school. (With peer pressure etc)
When I teached .net classes I asked tons of questions.
Before I started a topic I asked who can explain me this or that. And I made it fun to answer, that is I gave a small reward (a package of post it’s) to the first answer.
Interesting question, “do we need to know everything?” As a teacher I do not need to know everything.
But when people discuss in a corporate environment, claiming to be the expert, when they actually don’t understand an acronym, I think that is wrong.
They might still be the expert. And they don’t need to know every abbreviation. But if they claim they do….
A lot of IT people can’t say the words “I don’t know”
and that is a problem.
Something most of us learned at school.
@ Els I invented this one.
I will try to put some more on my blog the next weeks
family time now
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@Els, @all it might be easier if you just ask me about a three letter acronyms. I will answer what I know (or ask my readrs to help me out)
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