How a Language Made of Movement Moved me Forward in my Manufacturing Career

I wasn’t supposed to have a future in manufacturing, much less a past.  The future I had planned for myself – a future as a teacher of the deaf - began on a playground in Würzburg, Germany when I was twelve years old. Ever since landing in Frankfurt at the tender age of nine, I assumed the Germans were actually just like me. They really spoke English, and read English, and watched English-speaking TV.  They just spoke German to show off; to prove they knew something I didn’t.  This logic made perfect sense to a naïve preadolescent living on an American military base where everyone did, in fact, speak English, and paid for things with U.S. dollars, and watched American shows. I lived inside a familiar bubble that kept me largely oblivious to how much the outer world had dramatically changed: Different language, different customs, different highways – different everything. 

Today’s manufacturers may feel the same when it comes to digital transformation.  If they stay inside a familiar bubble of operational technologies, they miss how much the outer world of cloud solutions has dramatically changed the possibilities available to them to build cross-cultural understanding and think in new ways. The first step is simply understanding how vast the gap is, and becoming curious about what might be available “on the other side”. 

I certainly learned this that day on the playground at my English-speaking school.  During recess my best friend taught me some basic American sign language. I was enthralled. A language made entirely of movement! Of pictures in the air. Of symbols and gestures and facial expressions.  It felt magical.

Suddenly it hit me:  I thought in English! It had never occurred to me, until that moment, that my very thoughts, my decisions, my worldview – all of these were structured by the language that I had been swimming in since birth.  I somehow realized, on a very deep level, that there were things I could not know because I did not have the language to know them.

And then I had shattering revelation – If I think in English – I bet those German people think in German!  But how do deaf people think?

I absolutely had to know.  I was on fire.  For years I studied psycholinguistics and sign language and cued speech and pedagogy.  I graduated with a dual degree in German and Education of the Deaf and secured a Fulbright grant to study the German educational system at that storied institution of higher learning, Universität Heidelberg.

Little did I know that another future was being written for me even then, as I wandered the streets of Europe’s manufacturing powerhouse.  I was destined to work in manufacturing, whether I liked it or not.  And I could not possibly have known, decades ago and an ocean away, how that world would inform and shape my understanding of some of the biggest innovations in manufacturing technology of this century.

Looking back on my past

The tale of how I transformed from a certified teacher of the deaf to a successful manufacturing consultant with multiple patents and dozens of publications is a long and winding one. The short version is that a boutique consulting firm needed a resource with a background in education who spoke German, and I needed a job.  One thing led to another and over the years I’ve had the opportunity to help solve critical manufacturing and business challenges for some of the world’s largest companies.  

Those lessons from the playground have actually been some of the most impactful of my lifetime and in my manufacturing career.  I think in English. How do they think?  The more languages I learned, the more flexible my thinking became.  If I could not solve a problem in English, working it out in sign language often gave me a kinesthetic jolt that allowed me come to a surprising solution. And today I apply that flexible thinking to help manufacturers innovate with SAS Software and Microsoft Azure. To learn about that connection, please read part two: "3 ways new SAS, Microsoft solutions can change the way manufacturers think."