 Hey, folks. Just wanted to give you a little bit of input on a concept that we've been working on with a number of folks over, well, decades. It comes up time and time again, whether you're working with a high-performance team and you come across a new customer, a new group inside your company, or whether you're trying to improve how things are just running and want to get to that high-performance state. It really, really helps. The concept really is that words matter. It sounds trivial, but it's one of these things, especially the engineering, more analytical type tend to think that some things are interchangeable, yet others are not. But those casual words we use to define our business, our customer's business, become really critically important. Wanted to give you just a couple of reasons for this. Getting those words and terminology aligned are critical. You can make catastrophic mistakes as an organization working on projects with customers internally, building a product, serving your customers. If you get things wrong, depending on the type of customer you're dealing with, you might actually, by using the wrong words, cause them to disconnect, disengage, and effectively lose the business. You may have finished a project, but you never actually won them over, and what you created won't really be adopted. These consequences can be absolutely enormous. The key here is to, if you're noticing it, if you're seeing it, if you're listening for these words when things get a little bit confused, don't waste time. Don't waste time waiting to make a change. But also don't waste time analyzing and doing death by committee to find a better term. Get someone who's really an expert in the domain to come in and pick something. One of the reasons we came up with this is our biggest video. We're not huge on YouTube or anything, but as I tend to transition into deep, deep client projects and stuff, we're using that as more of a channel to get the learnings out of the things we want to share with folks and give away. The stories and requirements video we have is by far our biggest learning piece. It's a really kitschy video. It was filmed in my basement in front of a whiteboard, but it's really taken off as far as use. It's not huge, but 25,000 odd views on YouTube or something. But one of the reasons behind it is it starts to address by using stories instead of requirements. You start to catch the incompatibility or different meanings of words that are being thrown around as opposed to just requirements because people do not embody requirements. We do embody stories. So recommend that. That'll be down in the show notes as well as the blog page that this video is showing up on. I want to give you an example, though, that's really drove this home. It comes from a terrible time in history. This is early May 1992 when we had the riots in LA following the acquittal of the four officers who had beaten Rodney King. In this particular case, the U.S. did something different. It was a very severe riots everywhere, but they invoked what they called Pasicometatus. In Canada, we don't have a similar, but the rule is basically that the American forces, the regular forces are not allowed to operate on domestic soil unless certain conditions are invoked. Whereas in Canada, they can just do this, help out with floods and whatnot with very little difference and no constitutional blocks. Key point there is the LAPD brought in the U.S. Marines. Two well-trained, arguably, certainly training had to be adjusted, but two well-trained forces dealing with, in this case, domestic disturbance. Officers were called. The shotgun was fired through the door at the officers. Officers were injured, so we're talking high stakes, high tension situation where everything matters. But what happened subsequently was the officer in charge yelled out the phrase, cover me, because he wanted to go find a different position to get a better idea of what was going on. And the police officer's on scene, you know, watched, covered. The U.S. Marines laid down covering fires and over a couple hundred bullets went through that house. Two distinct differences between the phrase cover me, one of them meaning watch me, I'm going to go over there and do something, versus I'm laying down covering fire and suppressing any activity of the enemy. Up actions came out of that with regards to, you know, the fact that you do have two professionally trained organizations well-trained, operationally using this phrase cover me all the time with totally different meaning. Very happy to say, you know, no one died in that particular incident, but it could have been quite severe. And I'd bring it up because it's kind of an extreme example, but it happens all the time in that people are beginning to talk past each other to start to ignore each other because terms are not lining up. You want to feel understood when someone else is using a word or term in a different way than you know, you automatically disconnect. Your brain just disengages. So how do we fix this? I mentioned earlier, you want to intervene soon. Do it quickly. Ideally do it gently. Just bring someone aside and say, hey, listen, the term we want to use here is this. And the reasons are, so if we said cover me, hey, cover me in police terms means somebody watch me. Do not engage. Is there a problem here? We need to use a totally different phrase because we both have sort of ingrained training where we will react with split-second decisions. Maybe you need a totally new term. But do it gently. Don't dive in and really pick a standard and don't go into a death by committee situation. Don't look for the optimum term unless the consequences are truly, you know, like it was with the LAPD and U.S. Marines. But pick a standard and stick to it for a while. You're going to encounter the normal physics, the inertia and momentum of an organization and change causes that to shift. And you may find it actually backpedal a little bit before you actually accelerate and move past it. Now if you know it isn't working and you have to intervene and fix it again, do so. But give it a little bit of time. It's like that fine balance of going too far too fast versus doing it just right. You have to find a balance point. There's no black and white on this one. And adjust as you go along. That's about it. Just wanted to share that out. As you know, we're deeply involved with some client projects and wanted to make sure that folks were getting that. Christine's got the newsletter, the blog going that she's been writing. And I want to just provide that quick little cover on why words matter so much. Thank you very much.