In a technological age, good corporate citizenship requires good communicating

For businesses that still may be slightly tech-adverse, I have some good news and some even better news: The future’s here and there’s no reason to believe you’ll be left behind – if both you and the tech industry are willing to scrap some unfortunate ways of communicating and meet each other halfway.

Fourteen years ago, I founded the Idaho Technology Council, whose board of 45 industry leaders and I shared a desire to represent the more than 120,000 employees of Idaho companies, universities, colleges and other organizations as they navigated their way through the currents and shoals of a vast new ocean of business opportunities.

We founded the council so we could have a unified voice from industry to drive an innovation ecosystem in Idaho. We now have a strong middle market that has created products to meet customer demands in many national and global markets – in health care, fintech, cyber, IoT and wireless, transportation, agriculture, energy, wood products and more.

From the early 2000s to today, we’ve had early-stage companies grow to be world leaders in their business category – thanks to risk-taking innovators.

These companies must continue to innovate – and that starts with their employees and how they communicate. Just as George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Oscar Wilde) remarked, “Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language,” we found – and continue to find, daily – that the brave new world of artificial intelligence and other mind-blowing innovations isn’t as good at explaining itself as in expanding its sphere of influence.

That sphere is shedding its outer skin as it takes on the proportions of a galaxy – with the known universe being its goal. Call it science non-fiction.

I’m therefore surprised as I’ve crisscrossed my state and country to discover that traditional businesses either fear or simply mistrust tech – even though, from the telegraph to fax machines to email to texting in its various forms, it’s been their road to the future and helped them sustain the present they worked so hard to build.

I see many innovations coming from Idaho citizens — from drones, GPS, cloud services, cybersecurity applications and education tools to precision agriculture, financial tools and many more. I see that we are growing closer because of the application of technology.

I think it’s the very language of progress that causes the discomfort. I also think that’s often a deliberate ploy, on both sides of the debate, to retain ownership of a certain way of doing things. Put simply: Jargon has no place in a conversation with people who don’t speak your particular brand of it. And when those people swallow their pride and ask, “What does that mean, exactly?” they don’t deserve to be scoffed at or condescended to (especially, as is often the case, by professionals a quarter- to half-century younger than they are).

This language gap is hardly new. As someone who’s worked for elected officials and coached kids’ sports teams, I’ve always tried to put myself in the listener’s place. For example, does the average voter know what “bundlers” are (people who gather campaign contributions from their network of business associates, friends and relatives)? Should kids new to baseball be expected to know that throwing cheese, fuzz, heater or aspirins means throwing fastballs?

Creation of a simple glossary to precede a tech presentation wouldn’t insult anyone’s intelligence and could go a long way to establishing a meaningful bridge from the past to the present and the future.

I’m talking about terms routinely batted around like “AGI” (artificial general intelligence), a relatively new term that predicts a more advanced version of AI than we currently know is in the pipeline) or “agentive” (systems can autonomously take action to achieve an aim, meaning it can perform without constant supervision – just like your best employees).

There are hundreds of other words coming our way and some are frankly meant to make us react with wonder and not ask questions. But businesspeople should ask questions about all forms of technology, just as they once marveled at how someone on the other side of the world could send them a cable or a fax. Since oceans no longer divide us, let’s make sure that language doesn’t, either.

As Matt Mullenweg, the iconic web developer and entrepreneur said, “Technology is best when it brings people together.”

Jay Larsen is the founding president of the Idaho Technology Council, where he spent 14 years connecting business networks to create one of the country’s fastest-growing tech eco systems.