A technique for catching hidden misalignment that hides behind shared vocabulary: stakeholders often assume they agree because they're using the same word (e.g. "archivist") without ever having compared what each of them means by it.
Ask each stakeholder to explicitly define the term, then reflect the differences back to them directly — "yours seems quite specific, yours seems much broader — is that right?" — turning an invisible disagreement about meaning into a visible, discussable one. A specialized case of Mirroring, applied to definitions rather than whole positions, and a way of mining for conflict that apparent consensus is often hiding.
A team didn't realize they disagreed about a project until each stakeholder group was asked to explicitly define a single word: "archivist." To US stakeholders it meant a library, museum, or brand-heritage role; to stakeholders in Asia, Japan, and Europe it meant something closer to "records manager" or systems administrator. The disagreement had been invisible because everyone assumed the word meant what it meant to them. From Bruce McCarthy and Melissa Appel's Align; see also Cultural and Departmental Context Shapes How Disagreement Is Communicated.
At Wiz, the technique took the form of pushing past a high-level problem/solution pitch to ask for granular detail on the product itself — "what exactly are we building." Asking this of both the internal team and of prospects surfaced that neither side actually shared a real, specific understanding of the product; the pitch had been working as a plausible-sounding abstraction, not a shared mental model. That gap directly preceded Wiz's pivot from network security (as "Beyond Networks") to cloud security — see Affirmation Bias vs. Disconfirming-Feedback Bias (Customer Discovery) and Vulnerability / "Tell Me What It Does, I Don't Know".
Из тем: Stakeholder Power and Trust