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Bill Lucas

By Bill Lucas (November 2007 Issue)
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One of my favourite Dilbert cartoons has an important manager saying something like “People are our seventh-most important resource”, while the quizzical antihero asks: “So what’s our sixth, then?” To which the answer comes back: “Paper clips”. It’s a neat way of poking fun at the ‘people are our most important resource’ mantra which so often turns out to mean: “I think I ought to be saying something nice about people – even if we treat them like dirt!”

Increasingly, whether in public or private sector organisations, I find myself having to make sense of a strange language which, for want of a better name, I am going to call organobabble. This strange dialect is popular with many managers, including those working in HR, and seems deliberately created to obfuscate what is really going on at work.

An abuse of the idea of smart

Let me give you a current favourite of mine. It’s much used at the moment as organisations desperately seek to cut costs. In the business world it tends to emerge as: “Unless we start working smarter, we will lose out to our competitors.” In the public sector it is: “Given that resources are likely to be tight over the next few years, we have to start working smarter.”

The reason that this kind of language is potentially ridiculous is simple: it leaves unsaid the most important element of the communication, that there will be fewer people doing more work.

While it is always desirable for people to work more creatively and to challenge existing inefficiencies, to ask them for smarter working practices without explicitly being honest about the real imperative is disingenuous.

If, on the other hand, a leader is open about a change in resource levels and imaginative in helping create new thinking about how systems can genuinely be improved, engaging people in a dialogue about improved working practices seems altogether more real.

The concept, even the actual phrase ‘smarter working’, is fine – provided that it is not part of a failure to explain things openly and honestly.

Modernising tendencies

Another bugbear of mine is the word ‘modernisation’. Tony Blair was a ‘moderniser’, as, we are told, is his self-appointed heir-apparent, David Cameron. And ‘modernising’ is all-too often an indication of lazy thinking. Used as a synonym for ‘improving’, it invites derision as often as it deserves applause.

Sure, the boundaries of science and technology are constantly being pushed back, but being able to discover the details of DNA, for example, does not tell you how far it is a good idea to create artificially the raw material for human life in a test-tube.

There is almost bound to be a moral and social component to anything new.

The strange language of people management

HR and training are not immune to jargon, of course. I heard someone the other day talking about how they were going to “position” a particularly unpalatable new initiative. By “position” I think they meant, “making a statement that was not strictly untrue but which, by judicious selection of data, minimised the negative aspects of the situation”!

In organisational change programmes, I want to gag when I hear the expressions ‘low-hanging fruit’ and ‘being transparent’. The first tends to be used to describe proposed actions that are obvious, sensible and easy (so why not just say this?). And the second suggests (confirms?) that we are indeed in a world of double-talk, where to be true and honourable would be a welcome surprise.

And finally to my personal bête noire: the phrase ‘HR strategic business partner’. Hidden within it are the notions that those responsible for people are:

a) oblivious to the bigger strategy,
b) hopelessly un-businesslike, and
c) incapable of working in partnership.

Maybe I am being unfair. But, whatever your views, watch out for an outburst of organobabble near you and remember: even if what you have to say may appear to be unpalatable, the human mind is infinitely capable of coming up with something far worse. So you might as well say what you really mean!

Dr Bill Lucas is chairman of the Talent Foundation. He is a speaker, facilitator, strategist and the author of many books on lifelong learning, parenting and the operation of the mind. He can be contacted through his website at www.bill-lucas.com

 

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