Nick’s Dad

The various blogs on workplace jargon have spawned quite a debate. Nick, one of the regulars in The Crisis Lounge, told his dad about it and dad has responded in magnificent style.

Not only has he itemised some real screamers, but he has done us all a favour by suggesting alternative usage. He works in a press office and when any of the offending words or phrases in the left hand column are used, a fine of 50p is enforced.

• Beacon - leading light
• Sustainable - long term
• Cross-cutting - working together
• Fast-track - move rapidly
• Output – results
• Step change - go up a gear
• Single point of contact - one person to help
• Facilitate - make possible / help / aid / assist
• Evidence based - proof / research shows
• Vision - idea / plan / report
• Scoping - researching / investigating / studying
• Early win - will rapidly benefit / help
• Quick win - will rapidly benefit / help
• Quick hit - will rapidly benefit / help
• Level playing field - give everyone an equal opportunity
• Capacity - ability / size
• Incentivising - spur / encouragement
• Scaled-back - shrink / reduce / cut
• Menu of options - choice
• Tested for soundness - ideas that work
• Income / funding streams - cash
• Revenue streams - cash
• Transparency - clarity
• Welcome - necessary and needed
• Multi-disciplinary - many groups working together
• Meaningful consultation / dialogue - discussing with people
• Empowerment - give people the chance
• Signpost - pointers
• Community engagement - talking to local people
• Improvement levers - ways to change people's lives for the better
• Streamlined - modernise / update
• Risk-based - carefully judged
• Slippage - delays
• Guidelines - plans
• Value-added - giving better value / more for your money

Don’t think of an elephant

The Lizard’s had his nose in a book recently called “Don’t think of an elephant” by George Lakoff. George is an academic and political writer and the title of the book is an exercise he gives his students.

The exercise is: ‘whatever you do don’t think of an elephant!’ Not surprisingly he says it’s impossible to do. When someone says elephant it immediately evoke a frame, a picture. Elephants are large, have floppy ears, big trunks and tusks. Even if you try to negate a frame you still evoke it.

So for example during the Watergate scandal when President Nixon addressed America and said, “I’m not a crook” everybody immediately thought about him in terms of being a crook.

So during a crisis when you are talking to customers, suppliers, the media or any other stakeholders don’t use their frames.

If a supplier calls up and says Acme Industries are clearly run by a bunch of incompetents don’t use the word incompetent and evoke the critical frame. Simply say, “That’s not true – we understand very clearly what we have to do.”

Exercising for Excellence

Interesting article on Continuity Central.

Three surveys published recently show that plan testing is not what it might be.

* A survey of 200 companies with between 250 and 999 employees by Vanson Bourne found that, of the 81 percent of respondents stating that they had a business continuity plan, 50 percent had only partially tested plans and 18 percent had not tested any aspect of their plans.

* A PricewaterhouseCoopers survey found that almost half of disaster recovery plans have not been tested in the last year.

* According to the Chartered Management Institute’s 2008 business continuity survey, 33 percent of organizations with a business continuity plan still do not undertake any form of exercise to test their plan.

The article then goes on to pose various questions to BC professionals as to why this is the case. The answers are interesting and illuminating and you should check them out. Many say it’s too daunting / costly / or just plain difficult to stage a plan test. Read the full article here

The Lizard can immediately come to the rescue with the following advice. Go on to the British Standards website and buy ‘Exercising for Excellence’.

If you have responsibility for planning and delivering exercises to test your organisation's incident management capability, then this book is for you.

Written by Crisis Solutions and published alongside the new BSI standard, BS 25999, Exercising for Excellence is available to buy here: British Standards Bookshop

Low-hanging fruit

First of all the Lizard would like to apologise for the lack of fresh blogs over the last week. He was on his holidays – at his timeshare on the Isle of Wight.

Now safely back at the bar in The Crisis Lounge – and taking a lead from the previous blog - the Lizard has been conducting an in depth and rigorously researched analysis of jargon in the workplace.

Using a tightly controlled group of no less than three of the regulars at the bar the Lizard can report the findings of this important study.

The survey suggests that management gobbledygook and work place jargon are baffling people and getting in the way of clear understanding – the Lizard would go so far to say that phrases such as ‘brain dump’ (how ugly is that?) and ‘blue-sky thinking’ are giving people the ‘right old hump’.

About a third of those questioned – all right his name’s Gerald - said they felt inadequate when they didn’t have a clue what old so-and-so was on about.

So as a public service to all Crisis Lounge personnel here’s the Lizard’s handy, but in no way complete, guide.

Yer what? A guide to workplace jargon
• Blue-sky thinking: Idealistic or visionary ideas
• Get our ducks in a row: Have arrangements efficiently ordered
• Brain dump: To tell everything you know about a particular topic
• Let's circle back: A follow up meeting or ‘I’ll get back to you’
• Escalate: Tell somebody important that something bad is going to happen
• Painpoint: A challenge
• Goat rodeo: A complete disaster
• A herd of cats: Another complete disaster
• Lipstick on a pig: Reworking of ‘Silk purse from a sow’s ear’
• Drilling down: Getting more detail about a particular issue
• The helicopter view: An overview
• Low-hanging fruit: The easiest targets

And in a complete conversation

Bill: "What are you doing, Jack?"

Jack: "I'm ramping up for the Acme Project. After I download this info, I am going to reach out to London and get some intel on the lay of the land. My fear is that London has no real energy for this, so we may need to all get on the same page and get our ducks in a row. Circle back with me after you've determined if we can really add value to this deliverable. If not it could be a complete and utter goat rodeo."

Send your pet hates to lizard@crisis-solutions.com

Word Up

Whenever I drive past a pub with a big plastic tree house in the garden I’m reminded of a line from Alec Guinness’s autobiography - “We stopped at one of those awful pubs for lunch; where every meal on the menu was preceded by the word “jumbo” or “sizzling”.”



Ever noticed how some words really grate? Here’s the Lizard’s top three at the moment:

A lady was doing a reasonable job trying to sell advertising space when she said, “In which sectors do you get the most traction?” Now, when a friend of mine rode a quad bike during a team-building event in Colorado he needed traction to get through the mud. When the bike toppled over and tried to rip his leg off he also needed traction not to mention painkillers and bandages.

The second word cropped up in the same conversation. In the old days you wrote articles and you placed adverts. Maybe you even provided content or copy. Not any more. I was asked to write an infomercial. As it’s a cross between an article and an advert it doesn’t have to be reasoned, unbiased or objective. I can just dress my advert up as an article, and the magazine or website doesn’t have to provide any content of its own. Everyone’s a winner.

But straight in at number one, right at the top of the Lizard’s list is coworkers. Years ago we had colleagues. I understood colleagues. Now in trendy business articles we get coworkers. As it’s obviously uncool to use hyphens these days my brain separates it into two words – cow orkers. It sounds like some terrible agricultural disease.

The Lizard also has some thoughts on jargon in the work place. What’s the most irritating word or phrase? Perhaps we need to take a helicopter view, think out of the box and really drill down to find out what it is.