Forty minutes into the call, two senior engineers are still disagreeing about whether the new service should own the customer record. Both are clearly right about something. Neither is moving. Everyone else has gone quiet and started reading email.
Very often, arguments like this are not really disagreements. They are two people holding different pictures of the system in their heads and describing them in words. One imagines the service sitting behind the billing system. The other imagines it beside it. Every sentence each of them says is correct in their own picture and wrong in the other one, and neither can see the picture they are arguing against.
Words are a slow way to transfer a shape. A rough drawing is fast.
So when a technical conversation starts going in circles, stop talking and draw. Share a blank whiteboard, or turn your camera to a sheet of paper. Boxes for the parts, arrows for who calls whom, a line where data is stored. It does not need to be neat, and it should not wait for a proper tool. Say, I want to check we are imagining the same thing, and put your version down.
Then hand over the pen. Ask the other person to fix what is wrong. This is where the real conversation starts, usually within a minute. No, that arrow goes the other way. Oh, I thought the queue sat in front of it. Half the disagreement often disappears, because it was never about the design at all. What remains is the genuine question, now visible to everyone in the room, including the people who had stopped following.
A few habits make it work. Draw the current state before the proposed one, because people often disagree about what exists today. Keep it to what the decision needs rather than the whole architecture. Label arrows with what travels along them. And before the meeting ends, take a photo or a screenshot and paste it into the notes, because next week somebody will remember the picture differently.
You do not have to be good at drawing. Clumsy sketches are often better, because nobody hesitates to cross them out.
Monday: in the next discussion that circles twice, be the one who says let me sketch what I think we mean.
– Asael Shinder
