Sometimes We Need Something Between Us

A conversation can go on for twenty minutes with everyone seemingly in agreement. Then someone gets up and draws the problem on a whiteboard.

Almost immediately: “Wait, that's not how I thought that worked.”

Someone moves a box. Another person adds a connection. A third points out something neither had considered. The drawing isn't simply recording what the group already knew. It's helping the group discover what it didn't understand together.

Sometimes we externalize our thinking not to explain what we know, but to discover where our understandings differ.

Researchers sometimes call things like these boundary objects: a sketch, prototype, model, map, spreadsheet—something different people can gather around and work through together. Related research on distributed cognition goes further, suggesting that thinking itself can extend across people, tools, and the things they interact with.

I like the idea that a shared representation gives the group's thinking somewhere to live outside any one person's head. It doesn't even need to be finished. In fact, being unfinished can be useful because it leaves room for someone else to question it, change it, or add something we hadn't considered.

There is a social side to this too. When an idea exists only in my head, disagreement can easily become my view against yours. Once we put something between us, the disagreement has somewhere else to go.

Not in my head. Not in yours. On the table between us, where we can both work on it.

This becomes especially interesting with prototypes.

A sketch or mockup can make an idea visible. A working prototype lets us experience more of it. We can follow the path, try something unexpected, come back later, or ask what happens when the neat scenario we imagined meets a messier one.

Often, that's when new questions appear. The prototype may answer the question we built it to explore. But it can also expose questions none of us knew to ask.

And increasingly, working prototypes are cheap to make. With AI and today's development tools, something that once took days or weeks can sometimes be put together in hours. That means we can make things much earlier, while we're still trying to understand the problem rather than after we think we've understood it.

There is a catch, though. The more real something becomes, the easier it is to become attached to the direction it represents. So perhaps the important part is not how rough or polished the prototype is, but our willingness to keep treating it as something provisional.

A prototype can be something to think with, rather than something to defend.

As long as we're willing to revise it, throw parts away, or let what we learn take us somewhere entirely different, making something can become part of how we think together.

Sometimes we don't yet know the question we need to answer. We may need to put something between us before we can see it.

Further reading