Down with predictors of beaconicity
The Local Government Association has issued a list of around 200 words that are to be banned as the worst offenders. These include ‘benchmarking’, ‘seedbed’ and ‘procure’ among others.
As an aside, it is interesting to see that even in this area the recession manages to make a Hitchcock-like appearance, sneaking in just when you least expect it – apparently in a time of recession it is all the more important that councils make it clear to people what they’re doing with their money.
There’s just no escaping it and I do wonder whether we need a new term for the practice of relating everything, no matter how random, back to the recession somehow.
It’s hard to see how anyone could object to simplifying language and being clearer about what’s meant. But this announcement and list of banned words (a reassuring reverse of the doublespeak in Orwell’s 1984?) possibly highlights a larger issue, which is this.
How often do organisations forget that their communications must be a conversation?
A conversation is two-way, it’s someone talking, but it’s also someone listening and it’s a chance for those roles to be reversed at various times during the dialogue.
An approach to communications which forgets this devastatingly simple and fundamentally important fact rapidly becomes like that stable of comedy, the English person abroad talking louder and slower but still in English and expecting to be understood.
We’ve all been bored to tears at some party or social occasion at some point by the person who comes over and has no interest in what we’ve got to say or what we think or even who we are. All they want to do is talk at us about what interests them, in the misguided belief that because it’s so utterly fascinating to them, how could anyone else possibly fail to be interested in the toilet habits of the Romans?
It’s easy enough to laugh dismissively at these two characters (maybe it’s one and the same person), but how comfortable is that laughter when your own communications are examined? How genuinely can you say that you are engaged in listening as well as talking, and how much effort to do you make to start conversations that are based on finding some shared ground on which to build connections?
Talking in a common language is a good start and the move by the LGA is to be applauded, providing it shows to have been more than just words and real action is taken.
But dialogue goes deeper than just the words themselves, and thought has to be given to how they’re used to create a conversation that establishes a genuine connection. And there is something in this story to prompt all organisations to look at the language they use and the way in which they talk – councils are by no means the only offenders in the impenetrable jargon camp.
Otherwise, like the bore at the party, you might as well be talking to yourself.