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Features

Author: Lee Smith
 
A survey undertaken recently by YouGov and Investors in People highlighted some of the negative consequences excessive use of corporate jargon can have inside organisations. The poll, of 3000 UK workers, found that jargon can result in employees feeling inadequate and may actually undermine their trust in managers and leaders. Far from being a petty issue about semantics, the battle to stamp out gobbledygook and mumbo jumbo cuts to the very heart of our role as communicators.
 
The word gobbledygook was coined by Maury Maverick, a Texan lawyer and Congressman. It first appeared in an internal memo in 1944, when Maverick complained about the obscure language used by his colleagues. He stated: “anyone using the words activation or implementation will be shot”. The quote makes me smile, not least because implementation is a word much favoured by our profession.
 
I know lots of communicators who, like Maverick, get pretty worked up about jargon. They huff and they puff, and they bang on about clarity and plain English, but many of them are guilty of perpetuating the problem. I’m one of them. As a communication professional I abhor jargon and management speak, but I sometimes find myself slipping into it. Like a recovering alcoholic trying to resist that tempting glass of vodka, I can’t help peppering my prose with the occasional ‘drill down’, ‘walk the talk’ or ‘big picture’. I know I really shouldn’t, but it’s just so damn tempting (go on, admit it – I bet you’re the same). 
 
But, rant as we may, jargon itself is not the issue. It is its over use and misuse by employees at all levels that causes real problems. No matter how obscure or complex they are, words are acceptable so long as their meaning is known and understood by the intended audience. As communicators we are in the business of sense-making – of building understanding and of changing behaviours. Words and phrases that mean little or nothing to employees, or to particular audience segments, get in the way of that task. They block communication and, instead of making sense, create nonsense. 
 
Communication consultant and educator Liam Fitzpatrick makes the point candidly: “Everyone has technical or specialist language at work. Why can't people admit it's not the jargon that cheeses people off? It's having colleagues who are either total wallys or who don't care about communication that cause the problem. The crime is not slipping into shorthand vocabulary – it’s failing to consider whether you're understood or not.”
 
I agree with Liam. There's nothing inherently wrong with jargon. It becomes problematic when it's used as a kind of psychological power play inside organisations. There are many people, particularly in middle management roles, who like to demonstrate their corporate prowess by blinding those around them with jargon and gobbledygook. I've come across lots of IT and finance people who are expert at this. Rather than telling it straight and explaining themselves clearly, they decide to talk in a foreign language and dazzle their colleagues with fancy words, acronyms and fluff.
 
The problem with this sort of behaviour is that it inevitably results in the creation of a two tier society - those who understand the jargon (the haves) and those who haven’t got a clue what their colleagues are waffling on about but pretend to (the have nots).
 
This is often nothing more than a irritating diversion at work, but in some cases it can be a matter of life or death. Earlier this month state police in Virginia, US, abandoned their much loved ‘10 codes’ in favour of plain English. Used by generations of officers, firefighters and other emergency personnel as shorthand for radio conversations, 10 codes had begun suffering from multiple meanings. In Arlington, for example, the code “10-13” means “officer in trouble”, but in Montgomery Country, Maryland, it means “request tow-truck”. You can see the danger. 
 
The system worked fine until the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon at which point emergency crews from different states discovered they were speaking a different language. "You didn't know what they were talking about," Captain Richard Slusher, communications officer for the Arlington Fire Department, said of other responders. So, to clear up the confusion 10 codes were banned in Virginia and, in its place, is the new ‘common language protocol’ (ironically that’s jargon for plain English).
 
Many organisations suffer from the corporate equivalent of 10 codes. On his Corporate Hallucinations blog Steve Crescenzo tells the comical tale of two US communicators who decided to take action against excessive jargon inside their organisation. By way of an experiment they invented a new word – refarkel – and began dropping it into conversations. The meaning, like all good jargon, was slightly ambiguous but it equated roughly to ‘reinvent’. Of course, it wasn’t long before the word entered the corporate lexicon and the pair began hearing it played back at them. Worse still, one of the organisation’s most senior executives actually used the word in a press interview.
 
This little experiment proves that jargon, like disease, is viral. Spread via the grapevine and transmitted by people who want to appear knowledgeable and ‘with it’, it doesn’t take long for meaningless drivel like this to take hold. That why we, as communicators, must stay alert and ensure our bullshit radars are in good working order.
 
Here in the UK the Plain English Campaign fights against the use of jargon and gobbledygook in internal and external communication. Its website is a treasure trove of poor written communication and a sober reminder of how not to write. It also includes a range of useful guides and resources to help you improve your output. 
 
Every year the Campaign hands out Golden Bull awards to those organisations and individuals that use the most impenetrable language. Its awards archive contains a few classic examples of how not to communicate internally. Here’s a wonderful excerpt from an Agenda for Change document produced by Central Manchester and Manchester Children’s University Hospitals NHS Trust.
 
'Where the combined value of the above payments before actual assimilation remains greater than the combined value of the payments after assimilation, the former level of pay will be protected. These protection arrangements apply to the combined value of payments before and after assimilation, not to individual pay components, excepting the provision relating to retention of existing on-call arrangements.'
 
It should come as no surprise to learn that this paragraph scooped a Golden Bull award in 2005. You can only imagine the confusion it caused. Employees should not have to put up with communication like that.

When it comes to jargon, internal communicators can be part of the problem or part of the cure. If we try to shroud our roles in mystique and pseudo science (like our friends in IT and elsewhere) we're as guilty as the rest. If we focus on translating mumbo jumbo, keep a watchful eye on our own and our leaders’ linguistic excesses, and if we stick to plain English in the content we create, then we can help show the jargon-touting wallys for what they are.
 
 
 
Copyright (c) Lee Smith, Gatehouse Consulting Limited.  First published on Simply-Communicate.com, December 2006.