Ditch the jargon

Communications / 14 September 2011

Going forward. Touching base. Taking things offline. Paradigm shifts. Cascading information. When it comes to workplace communication, why don’t we just say what we mean? Tim Phillips asks why we can’t all just talk normally

I was talking to an expert on productivity recently. He told me I should “embrace the infrastructure that supports your collaboration journey.”

It’s one of those statements that you can’t help but agree with. I’d be foolish not to embrace the infrastructure. It supports my journey. On the other hand, I wasn’t entirely sure what journey I was on, or what I was embracing. When you put your arms around something, it’s good to know what you’re squeezing.

Our ability to explain what we do, and why it is useful, has not kept up with the complexity of the products we produce, or with the increased number of people who have to do the explaining. Anyone can make a complicated thing sound complicated. It takes insight to make a complicated thing easier to understand.

Some jargon is useful as an efficient way to communicate inside a group. But using jargon to sound clever is a way of excluding other people from the group. Our guilty secret is that it gives up pleasure to do this. It reinforces our self-image and makes us seem irreplaceable. It also makes us into tedious, incomprehensible windbags.

Tim Phillips, author

There are plenty of incentives for us to do that. One of the obvious ones is that it’s our job to help other people explain what we do or what we need, and not just if we have “communications” in our title. Mushroom management (where your employees are kept in the dark, covered with dung and canned when they grow) is generally considered a Bad Thing. Often, however, we practice it without realising: jargon excludes most of the people who hear it. Buzzwords obscure what you’re trying to do, leaving your audience to try to work it out for themselves.

Overloaded with jargon

At the end of 2009 I started the Talk Normal blog because, having written about business and helped train the people in that business to speak, write and present clearly, I felt like I was failing. I felt as if I was trying to hold back a tide of jargon and gobbledygook. Either I had to let the tide wash over me, or get some help.

I offered three principles based on my experience of trying to make things easier to understand. The first is that, when we are communicating, we should aim to be understood by everyone in our audience. It seems obvious, but the majority of English-speakers today use English as a second language, often because it’s an essential language for business. It can be confusing and infuriating for non-native speakers when we reach for large words when small words work better, or make our sentences pointlessly complex. 

Modern business English has a ready supply of euphemisms that might have been designed to confuse. For example, “problems” routinely become “issues”, which are “actioned”, instead of “fixed”. We hardly notice. But when an issue has been actioned, what has happened? It could mean that the problem has been solved, but equally that someone in a call centre has sent an email to someone in another call centre.

Second, that there’s no excuse for trying to sound clever for the sake of it. Surveys regularly report how much we despise buzzword bingo, but we never seem to do much about it. A statistical analysis of newspapers and press releases that I made for Talk Normal demonstrated that phrases like “world class”, “low hanging fruit” and “going forward” suddenly became much more common in the late 1990s. I think that some of that was a result of the dotcom boom, and how much we wanted to be like the hip young MBAs who fronted it, and some was the result of easy communication the internet created. Few of us have been trained to communicate clearly – it’s assumed we have the skill when we enter the workforce. The evidence, I suggest, doesn’t support this conclusion.

Fast talking

Some jargon is useful as an efficient way to communicate inside a group. But using jargon to sound clever is a way of excluding other people from the group. Our guilty secret is that it gives up pleasure to do this. It reinforces our self-image and makes us seem irreplaceable. It also makes us into tedious, incomprehensible windbags.

The final principle: it’s about your attitude, not about rules. We have rules of grammar and syntax, but also corporate communications policies, delivered in big documents and designed by committee, that tell us what to say. Managers often delegate the task of being understood to a cadre of professional communicators. They, naturally, want to please everyone and demonstrate their skill by mandating a single version of the truth, which creates consistency. On the other hand they have little in-depth experience of what the company actually does day-to-day.

Expanding your marketing communications department is a wonderful mechanism for imprinting uniformity and creating control. It’s not often good for inspiring conversations with staff, customers and journalists that have integrity and insight.

That’s because good communication is difficult, and because we’re often not as good at it as we pretend to be. If companies can be strict in eliminating jargon and waffle, treating it the same as they would treat any other unproductive activity, we could make a start. There’s a problem though: in the last ten years corporate culture has encouraged it. We have millions of poorly-trained amateur communicators, hundreds of thousands of websites, uncounted bad documents, presentations and reports, and you’re about to go on a conference call where all this comes to life while you put the phone on mute and scream in frustration. It’s not a simple issue to address – sorry, problem to solve.

The first step has to be training and trust in our managers, who need to know that better communication isn’t just worthwhile, it’s one of their most important skills. In short: they need to embrace an infrastructure that supports a collaboration journey. I think.

Tim Phillips is the author of Talk Normal: Stop the business speak, jargon and waffle, published by Kogan Page, £12.99