(6.3.5) A customer want a time machine

When your opinion differ from the other’s, it is a chance to get new idea. Let’s take a concrete example for that.

Suppose, a customer says “I want a time machine”. Let’s say you thought “that is physically impossible”. This is a conflict of opinion.

It is certainly impossible to physically create “a vehicle for time travel.” But, does the customer’s “time machine” really mean “a vehicle for time travel”? When you think “It is impossible”, you implicitly put the hypothesis that “customers are using the word in the same meaning as mine”. This hypothesis has not been verified.

The customer had something he/she want to express. But he/she does not know the good words to express that. So, he/she chose the word “time machine” from words he knew, because he/she thought it was the closest to what he/she want to express. This “time machine” is a metaphor. This “time machine” is the customer’s personal private language just spoken (I wrote about it in (6.2.5.5) Public Words and Private Words.)

Since you do not know the meaning of the word “time machine” used by customers, you need to ask various questions to understand:

• “What kind of time machine is that ‘time machine’?”
• “What is it possible to do with that ‘time machine’?”
• “When do you need that ‘time machine’?” These question are similar to the clean question described in (6.2.4.2) Clean Language and Symbolic Modeling.

As a result of asking the customer, you found that the customer unintentionally overwrote an important file, and wanted to return to the past to get back the file. What he needs is “a way to get the file before overwrite”. That is the “time machine” in his/her language.

On the other hand, in language of programmers, that is “software to take back up automatically and restore past files when necessary”. Since the customer did not know the concept of “automatic backup”, he/she chose the “Time Machine”.

Apple offers software named Time Machine. This is precisely “software to take back up automatically and restore past files when necessary”. It is a good naming that is easily understandable to customers who do not know the concept of automatic backup.

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