Corporate jargon:
We all hate it, so why do we all use it?

The next time you feel the burning desire to take it offline, not boil an ocean, feedforward, herd some cats, shift a paradigm, hold an ideation session or open the kimono, by all means knock yourself out. Just don’t use these phrases when doing it.

Firstly, you will, in all probability, sound ridiculous but more likely you will sound like someone who has just come back from a leadership course. And we all know how welcome that can be.

My theory is someone takes a simple word or action that we do at work, and then seeks to elevate it’s importance, or more likely their own importance, by using a more obscure word that means the same thing or by turning it into a half-baked metaphor. In this way, making improvements becomes moving the needle and doing the easy stuff first becomes tackling low hanging fruit. You can see the allure.

But the recipe for a great metaphor is that it makes the everyday or mundane strikingly different yet truly parallel. It gives a vivid picture or brings a surprising new insight. A bad metaphor fails to do any of that.

And on that definition, in the corporate world, we fail miserably.

As these phrases become substituted for plain English, the long-term effect becomes hypnotic - almost comforting. And, therefore, induces dreamlike states. That’s why poets use metaphors - they eliminate the specific and stifle action. The very opposite of what they were intended to do at work. So why do we all play this weird game?

Well, sociology says that if we all use the same language in a community it helps build identity and a sense of belonging. We feel like we are all in the same tribe. It maybe also gives us a shorthand for our work so we can understand each other quickly.

The dreaded acronym and initialism, are also adding fuel to the fire of confusion. If we all know what they stand for like FYI or CEO then maybe we can justify their use. But FOMO? I don't have a fear of missing out. I have FOBI, a fear of being included in the desire to make everything an acronym. I was going to describe all this as bull****, but that's NSFW.

So, at a time when the competition for people’s time at work has never been fiercer, what do we do? We speak in ways that over elaborate, take too long and impart no information. No wonder no one has the bandwidth to take on anything new.

Maybe that’s why there is this constant fight for meaning in the modern world of work and demand for improved productivity. We are simply hypnotising ourselves out of being able to see meaning or being able to focus on getting the job done.

How can people have meaning in what they do if they are focused on changing the game with a silver bullet?

The bus is red is unquestionably easier to understand than the urban passenger transportation vehicle is vermillion in colouration. In the same way that we have to reduce the size of the workforce is obviously preferable to there is a strategic need to rightsize and reallocate resources to business areas where synergies are more effectively realised. But haven’t we all heard the latter, one way or another?

Businesses use this type of weaponised language and obfuscation to mask a harsh reality. They also think that longer words and sentences help show they have thought deeply about it. But employees feel they are being lied to or taken for fools. Surely this is the best example of a circle that needs squaring.

Even as someone who works with language all day long, I am regularly confused by all this. As I had never seen it written down before doing research for this article, I thought drinking the Kool Aid, meant people were sitting back after a successful piece of work drinking a cold glass of fizzy pop in celebration. When, in fact, it is an expression used to refer to a person who believes in a possibly doomed or dangerous idea because of perceived potential high rewards. Who knew?

The recent explosion in unintelligible job titles is also to blame. Everyone knows what an accountant does, a doctor, a writer, a pianist, a bricklayer, a lawyer, an auditor or a programmer. But a ‘next gen talent acquisition vice president’? An as yet unborn person who buys skills and is also in charge of a woodworking tool, perhaps…

Maybe the solution is if you cannot describe your job in one word then it’s probably too confusing for even you to know what it is you are supposed to be doing.

Job adverts often start causing problems right from the outset. Saying that you are seeking to hire a self-starting, laser-focused, project management ninja who can hit the ground running is either going to attract those who should be under supervision, or put people with any intellect right off even considering your organisation. And, even if you were brave enough to put this nonsense aside, imagine joining a new company or team weighed down with such corporate guff. You'd feel excluded from what was going on and your only choice would be to join in.

If native English speakers are left in the dark, spare a thought for colleagues who have English as a second or third language. In a world of work where global working is now commonplace, this just adds to the problem by excluding people who simply don’t understand what is being said or, worse still, infer something entirely different.

After all, doesn’t let’s circle back on this really mean I don’t want to talk about this now? Doesn’t we’ve decided to pivot mean we’ve made a mistake? And doesn’t it is what it is really mean I know I should say something, but I can’t think what to say? No wonder people are confused.

You might think that this flimflam is the preserve of consultants trying to wow us with just how bright they are and how much value they will add. Probably to justify their exorbitant fees.

However, now it seems, we have all been infected with this nonsense.

And the prognosis isn’t good.

Twenty years ago, I worked in a construction company and was seconded for a few weeks to help with a special project in Scotland. The team was made up of a bunch of specialists from within our own company and those from our partners.

While I was there, I learnt a new word – outwith. It’s a Scottish term meaning outside or beyond. As in ‘this bit of work falls outwith the scope of the project’. I like learning new words so I put it in my memory bank.

In my next job at a different company I raised the issue of corporate jargon as the business was rife with it and people were struggling to actually understand what was happening. Or, indeed, what they were expected to do. In fact, there was one colleague who never seemed to use verbs at all when you spoke to him. ‘How was the meeting?’ I would ask. ‘A discourse on synergistic deliverables for ecommerce’ would be the response.

So, I decided to do an experiment to see how quickly new phrases or words would spread. I inserted the innocuous ‘outwith’ into this new company by using it in my conversations and writings. Within three months I was hearing it being played back at me from every corner of this business.

My mischievous experiment proved just how readily people at work pick up new language and add it to their vocabulary. It all seemed very normal. But it was highly contagious. A face covering wouldn’t stop it and neither would a two metre social distance.

So, what’s the harm? In this instance, no harm.

But what of the more flowery metaphor-rich phrases we hear every day such as thinking outside the box, giving 110% or getting everyone on the same page? Does anyone really know what these things mean or what they should do when they hear them?

Bringing the best version of yourself to work is one of the latest phrases of meaningless drivel to surface in our workplaces. I first heard it about a year ago and now I hear it several times a week. It’s my personal favourite, as I often decide to leave different versions of myself all over the place.

Now, having said all of this, it would be unwise to eliminate all technical language from organisations.

I worked down a mine in Africa at the start of my career. The whole crew was focused on chasing the fuchsitic siliceous dolomite a mile underground. Why? Because that’s the rock that contained the gold and if the mine captain caught us referring to it as FSD or any other name, he went ballistic. He was like a surgeon in his demand for precision as he literally cut the veins of gold from the ground.

If a mining engineer has to have technical words to get the job done, then, of course, so must people in a whole host of other work environments.

But we need to learn to recognise the difference between this valuable language and the bunkum that simply fills up corporate airtime.

It’s time we let the latter go. Because if we don’t, reputations are at stake. Not only our own personal reputations, but the media likes nothing better these days than shaming a company for wheeling out the corporate codswallop.

Let me finish with a recent and quite frightening thought.

Tom Whipple, Science Editor at The Times newspaper, recently reported on the findings from a study looking at 64,000 dissertations within the academic community, with the headline ‘Big Words Are A Front For Little Knowledge’.

In a nutshell, the research showed that the lower the status of the university, the more acronyms and jargon their PhD students used in their theses, in an attempt to jostle for recognition. Concluding his piece with ‘the preceding dialectic provides a metacontextualisation of the academic linguistic gestalt. Or in other words, it suggests that, often, big words are a load of tosh.’

Perhaps we would all do well to consider that if we can’t express our idea without buzzwords, maybe there isn’t an idea there at all.

If you would like to make up your own jargon, why not use the Gobbledygook Generator from the Plain English Campaign. Literally, minutes of fun.