Which of your ideas will survive the cataclysm (or at least the end of the meeting)?

At the beginning of his famous Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman said something that is so important and so useful, it is worth quoting at length:

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling on being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.”

This passage not only conveys an essential piece of scientific knowledge, but focuses with precision on what Feynman considers to be the most essential piece of scientific knowledge, and expresses it using very ordinary language. I believe that there is an important lesson here for technology architects.

Technology architects often find themselves expressing themselves at length. We may have to explain something, or convince somebody, or justify a decision. In those circumstances, we may have to lay out our entire chain of reasoning, to create deep understanding in our audience, and help them realise the implications of that understanding. Explaining complex ideas in depth in a useful way without losing people is a skill in its own right (and, if you want to see that skill in action, I recommend reading the rest of Feynman’s lectures on physics – or, even better, listening to them: fortunately they were recorded, and if you can cope with the occasional muddiness of the analogue recording, it is worth hearing Feynman in the lecture room).

However, we do not always have the space, or time, or even the necessity, to lead our audience through a complex chain of reasoning. Sometimes, we just need to help people grasp the most essential facts with the most clarity in the shortest period of time.

In my experience, many technology architects (including me) struggle with this task. (Look at me right now: I’m explaining this idea in an article of several hundred words instead of using a tweet.) We feel that such brutal brevity does not do justice to our understanding, and have difficulty finding the one essential concept which leads to all the others. Sometimes we behave like students in an exam who, when faced with a question which we don’t quite know how to answer, just blurt out everything we know about the subject.

Yet this task is important. We often need to convey ideas to people who are not experts, but who are nevertheless intelligent decision makers. And we may not need those ideas to survive a cataclysm that destroys all scientific knowledge, but we do need them to survive the end of the meeting.

I believe that, when we find ourselves in such as situation, we would do well to draw inspiration from Feynman. By my count, there are 31 words in Feynman’s expression of the atomic hypothesis, from ‘all things are made of atoms’ to ‘squeezed into one another’. We are technologists, so let’s round it up to a pleasing 32.

What can we do with 32 words? Can we explain essential concepts in a way which is useful to our listeners? Can we boil down all those things we are bursting to explain into one idea from which the others follow?

I believe that we can, and that it is helpful to try. I also believe that it is important to do this with many of the new concepts which are of such importance to enterprise technology, but are surrounded by confusion and misunderstanding, often as a result of over-hyped marketing or sloppy analysis.

I do not claim to have the same clarity of thought or expression as Feynman, but let’s have a go (and feel free to tell me in the comments where I went wrong):

There is no single thing called ‘the Cloud’: Cloud is a business model in which companies run large scale computing infrastructure, managed through software, and made available for clients to share. (31 words)

The current generation of artificial intelligence comprises mathematical models which, trained using enough data, can make simple predictions with similar accuracy and greater speed than humans: they will get better. (30 words)

DevOps is a shared accountability model in which the same team owns the speed of change and quality of service, and has the autonomy, skills and ingenuity to improve both measures continuously. (32 words)

And, as we technology architects often struggle to describe what we do for a living:

Technology architecture means figuring out how to put technology together in interesting ways to meet our immediate needs today, and our expected needs tomorrow: it’s as fun and as difficult as it sounds. (32 words).

Or, if you need even more brevity, as we say in HSBC, technology architecture is Zang Jing Ge: technical excellence; communication mastery and leadership power. (13 words, three of them in Mandarin)