Hiding behind all that gobbledygook are poor bosses

WHEN Scottish Financial Enterprise's chief executive Owen Kelly wrote that his industry needs to explain what it does in layman's terms, he could have been speaking for any of the multitude of businesses or public-sector organisations that continue to blind us with jargon and baffle us with management speak.

After all, communication of any sort is a wasted effort if no one understands what it's saying – unless, as a cynic might suggest, that was the intention all along.

Yet the workplace today is awash with strategy documents, business plans, reports and emails that groan with the overblown but poverty-stricken language of modern management. One is left wondering how many "multidisciplinary stakeholder partnership consultation short-life project working groups" the planet can sustain.

Offices around the country are plagued by an infestation of clichs and pointless neologisms that range from the banal or the absurd such as "going forward" or "bolt-on spin-offs", to the downright sinister, "low-hanging fruit" for example.

On the high street, the same language, only partly filtered by the demands of the marketplace, leaves consumers scratching their heads.

But although Kelly deserves applause for suggesting that his industry finds simpler words for the offending jargon – "shares" instead of "equities", "house loan" instead of "mortgage", "high risk" instead of "sub-prime" – he is still only scraping the surface of a much more deep-rooted problem.

A new vocabulary, like a new hat, won't transform its owner's view of the world. For the use of simpler words to be more than mere window dressing, we have to rediscover our ability to communicate as human beings, rather than as the ciphers of organisations. That calls for an underlying intention to treat one another more "kindly", to use the word here in its original sense of being "kindred" or "of the same kind".

In short, we do well to remember when we communicate that we are all human; that whoever reads what we write will be another person probably much like us. It's this that the "short-life project working groups", along with marketeers and brand communicators, so often seem to forget.

As humans we instinctively communicate with colour, energy and emotion, using humour, metaphor and imagination to enliven what we say and connect with our audience. But far from enlivening and connecting, the language of most modern businesses deadens and alienates its readers. It's a patently useless way to communicate important ideas and facts that are meant to inform or influence people.

So where have we gone wrong and what can we do about it? Modern business language has been stewing a long time. It comes to us via the industrial revolution, the expansion of trade and empire, Victorian paternalism and love of litigation, the language of 20th century military command, the IT revolution and the explosive growth of management consultancy. At worst the result is a toxic cocktail of condescension, pseudo-science, deliberate obfuscation and veiled threat.

The most recent and baneful influence is the culture of measurement. "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it," goes the saying. It's a blinding denial of the fact that no organisation can ever be more than the people who drive it forward; and people tend to come with the full range of, inconveniently un-measurable, emotions. But there's nothing like an "outcome", or whiff of another box ticked, for banishing all trace of energy or humanity from a piece of business writing.

In Twenty-six Ways Of Looking At A BlackBerry, John Simmons, former director of verbal identity at Interbrand and the author of a number of books about business language, argues compellingly that the way for organisations to connect more powerfully with their audiences is to give greater value and attention to language.

One way to do this, he suggests, is to use constraints which, paradoxically, encourage expressiveness and creativity in writing. He rewrites a piece of bland corporate text in 26 different ways, ranging from a fairy tale to a US presidential speech, a Shakespearean sonnet to a text message.

His point is not that these are realistic alternatives to the original form, but that the exercise itself promotes deeper analysis of the content and shows how the strictures of different forms can bring new life to the tired expression of a dull idea.

Responding to the Turner review into the banking crisis, Owen Kelly recommends that his industry gets back to basics, language being a good place to start. He's right, of course, and other industries should take note. Because as John Simmons and others argue, it goes much further than mere words. Language is simply the best place to start putting the humanity back into business.

Jamie Jauncey is a business writing coach and trainer, and co-founder of the Dark Angels programme of creative writing in business courses. www.dark-angels.org.uk.

His novel The Reckoning is published by Macmillan, 6.99.