Social cues are extremely powerful. “Dinosaurs!” is one of my favourites, because it is simple and effective. It also defeats one of my greatest nemeses: ambiguity.

In a recent retrospective at Cronofy we spoke about the need for all of us to have more than a surface-level understanding of why we’re building what we’re building, and why we’re building it the way we are.

We encourage people to ask questions with the likes of “if you don’t know, ask”, “there’s no stupid questions”, and similar. But it was raised that sometimes it’s hard to know what the question is, only that you haven’t fully followed what is being discussed.

And so I explained, not for the first time, the cue of “dinosaurs!”

I first came across this 15 or so years ago when working with Neal Johnson. We had a great working relationship with candor, disagreeing about ideas, committing to the outcome; all that good stuff. One thing that made this work well was we were both humble enough to flag “I’m not following” early.

At some point Neal said, “hold on, can we go back to the dinosaurs?” I’d started the conversation with an assumption of context on Neal’s part, and he needed me to instead build up to it so we were on the same page.

I think because of the phrase being so orthogonal to any subject it stuck with us. “Can we go back to the dinosaurs” eventually being truncated to a simple “dinosaurs!”

When “dinosaurs!” is invoked you don’t literally go back to the dinosaurs each time. Recounting the history of humanity and computing that led to that point would take quite some time.

Instead, it sets the ground for an exploration. The “dinosaurs!” caller gets a break from trying to follow the conversation to formulate a question. The speaker, or speakers, can also help discover the question that needs to be answered to bridge the context gap. They can do a mental scan of the context and spot something they may have missed. They can ask questions like “do you know X is?”, “would it help if I explain Y in more detail?”

Often there’s one nugget of information the person is missing and the rest falls into place. Once they’ve got to the same level, the discussion can move on with everyone on board.

This time is never wasted. The secret is that whilst one person called “dinosaurs!”, there’s almost certainly at least one more person who should have called it already or was about to. Everyone present learns a little more about the “whys” at play, if only how to explain them better.

The reason “dinosaurs!” works is that it is easy to remember, simple to invoke, and puts the group in a known mindset: one of support, curiosity, and discovery.