When I first started work as a systems analyst I knew nothing about business and nothing specific about systems, but I knew a lot about language. I realized early on in my career that technical and non-technical people approach problems so differently that they are, in many cases, not even speaking the same language. In meetings between the business team and the IT team, I would always either start the meeting, or steer the meeting toward, defining common terms for both sides to use to talk about the problem. It is a tactic I still employ a lot to this day, especially when people seem confused about what the problem is or when the conversation isn’t going anywhere.