A number of years ago, I had a job that required getting a bunch of different groups to agree to a common approach to working with our customers. Each team had designed a process that was centered around their particular role: pre-sales engineering, sales, professional services design and delivery and post-sales services delivery. Each process was similar but not identical and each had its strong advocates.

What I found was that no single person or group could understand the details, advantages or disadvantages of all the competing processes.

We didn't have time, nor would it have been productive to get everyone to understand the details, advantages and disadvantages of all the other processes. So, rather than try to get everyone to understand every other process, I created what I later called a 'Rosetta Stone'.

The Rosetta Stone is an Ancient Egyptian artifact which was important as a multilingual stele that allowed linguists to begin the process of hieroglyph decipherment. Because Egypt's historical records and monuments were inscribed with hieroglyphics, a language no one could read, the secrets of Egypt's past were hopelessly lost. That is, until the Rosetta Stone was discovered. The stone went through a number of ownership claims before it came into British hands and was finally translated and realized for the important ability to decipher hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree), demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the administration). By using the Rosetta Stone as a translation device, scholars revealed more than 1,400 years of ancient Egyptian secrets. Today, the term Rosetta Stone has become idiomatic as something that is a critical key to a process of decryption or translation of a difficult problem.

Back to my modern example of a "Rosetta Stone" for managing through a problem. Our group defined 6 phases of the customer project life cycle and then asked each team to organize their process steps and deliverables to each phase. By organizing to this neutral and indisputably important “Rosetta Stone”, we were able to align all 4 independent processes. We were could able identify overlaps and eliminate duplication by picking the best of similar processes. We were also able to then better serve customers by understanding and sharing knowledge from group to group and phase to phase.

Ever since, I've become a big advocate of creating “Rosetta Stones” to take a difficult problem, find the common language and find meaning. I think as we get more and more specialized it may be the best way to find our commonality. For example, the English language has become the “Rosetta Stone” language for the world at this point in time.

The reason I've been thinking about this lately is that we are working with a number of institutions and different academic and research disciplines around some common problems. Last week, I met with people from the U.C. Berkeley Media Vault Program. The U.C. Berkeley Media Vault applies proven curatorial archiving and preservation methods with services available to the campus that address the needs of those who manage and want to provide access to digital media collections. The staff was explaining that how art historians describe paintings is entirely different and incomprehensible to the ways of how we laymen would describe a painting. The question was, how could we agree on a common way to describe the descriptors (meta-data)? Consider the number of objects in a physical museum and the number of disciplines that need to know from their unique perspective what is in that museum. The problem spins exponentially out of control very quickly when you consider the number of digital objects produced and recorded each day on the internet.

In thinking about this issue, for U.C. Berkeley, its affiliates and for the different academic and researchers Sun meets with everyday, I can't help but advocate to think “Rosetta Stone”. For institutions must learn to think of how their stakeholders differing processes, definitions and beliefs have commonalities. Once we decipher the commonalities, we can find the hidden language that will reveal the solution to cataloging long-term digital storage as a crucial hurdle for any civilization trying to act for multi-generations. This, of course, is only one example. Building communities also benefits from common purpose. Communities become a living entity that help us decipher meaning from our interactions with others in similar situations, with similar challenges but perhaps different processes. Looking across the educational, political and societal structures, we must determine a reliable way to transmit and store knowledge with our own “Rosetta Stones”. Communities can help take us there by starting valuable conversations that reveal our commonalities.