What is the "missing glue"?

Years ago the CEO had an ambitious vision, and stakeholders, analysts and developers had been building that vision for nearly two years. There was a new agile process in place and they were seeing more iterative results. Still, everyone had trouble fully bridging the technical / non-technical divide. 

The teams were building a generic tool that would enable analysts to create data models with partially constrained solutions that anyone could then configure into end products. I asked the database guru for a comprehensive example to illustrate what they were trying to do, and he did so using a simpler domain. This was exactly what I was looking for, so I captured his idea in the form of a step-by-step tutorial illustrating the entire process from start to finish. 

When he was satisfied with the end result, I took that tutorial to the rules engine architect (who few understood), and asked him if this was accurate. A few more fixes and additions, and then surprisingly, he said: yes, that's it! The lead business analyst agreed and also said: this is helpful, I didn't know you could do that.

I squirreled the tutorial away on the local wiki; barely 24 hours later, the CEO whizzed into our department, waving the tutorial. He said: for two years, I've had this vision, and for two years, you've been building this tool. Today for the first time, I understand what you have been building, and now we can talk...