An ideographical language framework is disclosed that is designed to enable the description and communication of a series of workflow steps. An ideogram is defined as a character or symbol representing an idea or thing without expressing the pronunciation of a particular word or words for it, i.e. not dependent on any specific natural language representation. Further, an ideogram may further be culturally independent as well. A workflow is defined as the activities, e.g. tasks or procedural steps, entities involved, i.e. participants, such as people, organizations, machines, etc., inputs and outputs, states, requisite tools, and the relationships therebetween, for each step in a process. The various activities, entities, inputs, outputs, tools and relationships are referred to as workflow elements. The disclosed embodiments represent workflow elements of a given workflow using ideograms meaningful to workflow participants, i.e. entities, and composed according to a syntax that enables easy recognition and use of a set of workflow instructions.