Foreign.

Welcome luminaries.

Ian, today, what are we going to be talking about?

Mike, Today we are going to be talking about language, the language that we use in consulting, and in particular, the kind of language that descends into jargon and even, you might say, cliche.

We've talked about that in our main episode, and it's a very easy target.

Right.

It's something that our clients and our friends could probably give us a gentle roasting about any time, that is to say, if we were ever listening to them.

Right.

And our clients are paying a lot, and the byproduct that they get is a lot of language and sometimes, actually some finished tests.

But we're going to dive into that today and talk about where consulting jargon comes from.

In particular, how consultants might be using language as a way to say something to the rest of the world about who they are.

Yeah, we're going to be looking at the purpose, or rather purposes of consulting and the impact that that has on the choices we make about the words that we use.

Right.

And looking into some consulting cliches that have an origin story that's way more interesting than you might think.

Excellent, Mike.

Let's get into it.

Right, Mike.

To get us started, we both really enjoyed having discovered a video by a YouTuber.

The YouTube channel is called Good Work and it's a humor piece all about what consultants actually do.

And the final few seconds is a montage of consulting buzzwords.

So to remind us what we're dealing with, here's Good work and a little sample of us.

Align PL Project leader.

Unlock, used as a noun.

Oh, this is going to be really big unlock for the client.

Boil the ocean.

Let's not boil the ocean.

Circle back.

Oh.

Another one is double click, parallel process and then also turn into a pumpkin.

I don't know if that's a consulting word or just a.

Are you making these up?

Let's shake off the feeling of shame and existential dread here.

Oh, thank heaven.

Maybe we need to get just a bit of perspective by looking at where some of our consulting language comes from.

Now, let's not be in too much of a hurry to castigate ourselves.

If you're an occasional user of consulting jargon, then there is some encouraging news.

There are some kinds of this jargon that are actually useful, that are a recognized shorthand for something that needs a meaningful and unambiguous name.

Take, for example, there's a piece of IT consulting jargon that I hear a lot these days.

This phrase, use case.

Use case.

It's not a Bad piece of jargon, especially if your background is in IT or systems analysis.

The bad news is it gets overused.

And this is the same, I think, for lots of our consulting language.

It gets overused to the point where it's a cliche or even, heaven forbid, a shibboleth, one of those words that you have to use to show that.

Not that we'd ever fall prey to that, right?

Never for sure.

It is interesting you're talking about falling prey.

Perhaps consultants tend to want to use language to signal their identity, our identity, because we're not sure about that identity.

Our language is a mess.

For example, we might want to show that we're special, that we're experts that were initiates into this rare and arcane craft.

So we use language that highlights to clients, sometimes even inadvertently, this kind of rare and arcane stuff.

After all, it's really tough to sell the invisible all day long, right?

In the Middle Ages, there were alchemists that had rare and arcane language.

There were only a handful of them, and each king had to deal with one or two.

Mike.

These days, there are millions of consultants.

The snag is there are so many of us, and we're not that rare anymore.

Now we then, I think, sometimes miss the chance to use language that is like unifying the language that brings us together, that shows us as trustworthy insiders for clients.

And maybe there's an even worse combination of the two, a combination of being an arcane insider and also cuddling up close to the client with our language.

I've been in situations where consultants use language that allies us to just a particular group of people inside the client who think and talk like we do, with the result that, for example, you get the clients, IT people and some IT consultants sitting in a room talking increasingly impenetrable jargon to each other and making each other feel smart and feel like they're in a team at the same time, or the clients in house, strategy team, who've all been to business school and all have the MBA jargon talking the same kind of language to the strategy consultants on the consulting side who've also been to business school and also overuse the same kind of MBA jargon.

So who we are and who we're close to and who we're affiliated with, I think is a big part of some of the choices that we make about language.

Well, I absolutely agree with you.

And I know for me personally, I found myself in situations in the past where I'm drawn increasingly to focus on people in the client who do speak and interact with me some of those times, giving that big presentation, a little bit anxious.

And I'm kind of looking for a friend in the audience.

I'm looking for somebody to reduce my anxiety.

So I'm trying to find out who's connecting to my language, especially when it's a little bit quiet out there.

And sometimes I would interpret one person's nod or their yes or agreement to mean that everybody in the room is now understanding or agrees with what I'm saying.

That everybody, if you will.

Got it.

So for me, this language and anxiety, this desire to make this connection sometimes was a particularly bad combination.

Even additionally stress when I was working cross culturally, just looking for somebody in the room, right?

Absolutely.

We should get into culture again in a minute.

I think that's a really interesting seam for us to mine a little bit here, if you'll forgive me using a badly chosen metaphor.

But also, I just want to come back to this idea of being together.

You know, the amateur anthropologist in me is pretty sure that we had spoken language before we had written language.

And one of the things that we did as humans with spoken spoken languages, we established who is in whose tribe.

And I think it's really understandably a really deep need that we have to feel that we're connected to somebody for some special reason, not just because they are the same as the generality of all the humans.

So it's a really natural, forgivable thing for us to want to do, to say, who's my friend here?

Who's my ally in this situation?

But it is a distraction.

It's going to take us towards people who share the same language with us, and we end up piling on jargon upon jargon.

And we've got a wider human task than just glomming on to the one person who thinks and talks like us.

So we started out with words of reassurance, but it still turns out it's going to be difficult.

There are things that are going to make us continue to use a misused language like this.

Now, you mentioned culture, and I'm thinking here about the work of Erin Meyer.

She wrote this really great book called the Culture Map that talked a lot about the impact of culture on language.

And I think you and I have both looked into this a little bit, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think this whole thing about culture and working all around the world and those differences make a real difference in language and interaction in coming together here.

Yeah, absolutely.

And one of Erin Meyer's ways of thinking about this is to talk about context.

Culture and context are important, as we know.

And the way she analyzes it, there are cultures, national cultures, and also working cultures where context is always assumed to be understood as the background to what anyone is saying.

So high context cultures where everybody is expected to know the context are maybe some European cultures, certainly many Southeast Asian cultures have this attribute where whatever you're saying is assumed to be alongside what everybody else knows about the background and the society and the politics and the atmosphere.

People sometimes talk about reading the air or even reading the room.

And then there are cultures where everything that's important is expected to be included in what's being said.

And she calls these low context cultures, and traditional Anglo American business culture is a dominant example of a low context culture.

You're not expected to know anything about the background, and therefore it's all meant to be in the language that you use or in the words that you write.

And it's a big handicap for us, I think, Mike, if we are speaking in a low context way to high context people or vice versa, there are some real big opportunities for misunderstanding.

Well, my go between running a consulting group underneath a very significant partner, one of the top two in our firm was that his aa, if you will, was at that Oriental, that Asian background, where it was kind of a nod and a wink.

And I am very much a low context culture kind of guy.

And I finally had to say, ping, Ping, here's the deal.

I know this is not your way.

Would you, as a way to help me, you give me so many signals that I miss and I really need to do well at this.

Could you.

Is what.

Is there a way we can work out where you can spell this for me?

Because the knot and the wings don't work for me.

And he was.

It was a great coming together and really changed the trajectory of my career, I think.

Wow.

I mean, it's great that you spotted that and it's great that Ping was smart enough to see the opportunity and play along as well and give you that.

Yeah.

And speaking of context, I think sometimes we and our teammates, our colleagues and members of the client team have different purposes in mind.

And different purposes lead to language that doesn't really fit or misunderstandings or poor communications, because context is so important.

So talk us through that.

What kind of different purposes might we be talking about?

It sounds like it could be very kind of high level, existential.

Let's boil it down to what it might mean for regular consulting stuff.

Well, for me, and perhaps it's because of my background in consulting, I go back to that classic 82 article, Harvard Business Review.

Consulting is more than giving advice.

And they talked to a number of partners across a variety of firms.

Author Turner the article author did and said, here is really kind of a high level summary of the purposes of consulting.

And it goes all the way from traditional purposes like providing requested information, providing a solution to a given problem, conducting diagnosis that may redefine the problem, providing recommendations, assisting in implementation up to what at the time was considered additional goals like building consensus and commitment, facilitating client learning and improving organizational effectiveness.

So you know, some people might say, wait a minute, I that sounds like a lot of management consulting to me and some others.

But just thinking at this fundamental level of purposes, you can see that if people are thinking, ah, we're at this purpose rather than that purpose and are talking, they might miss what they're trying to say and it might not come together very well.

It might not.

I love the visual.

There's this pyramid chart that we'll put out on our social media as this episode comes out with this hierarchy of different purposes.

It would be really easy for people to misunderstand.

I've seen it loads of times and I'm sure you have as well.

For example, the junior consultant wants to hand over all the information that they've gathered because they're working down at the bottom of the pyramid, provide information, but the client actually has a higher purpose.

They want to agree a plan for what to do next based on this information that's closer to the top of the pyramid.

There's probably also different levels of purpose within the consulting team.

The partner wants the client to agree the sell on which, if it belongs anywhere, belongs at the top of the pyramid while the client is still processing the meaning of what they've learned about their new situation, which is certainly lower, third, maybe middle of the pyramid.

And Mike, I'm reminded of our work a few episodes ago when we were looking at super communicators.

There's a really important question here.

What kind of conversation are we having?

Because generic language isn't going to cut it.

We have to use language that's specific to the purpose.

Yeah.

And I think it's really important as we think about language, human language is not a code.

There's not a one to one correspondence between words and their meanings.

And so context and relevance play a huge part in interpreting meaning.

So if we've got, you know, as you were just pointing out, Ian, consultants and clients and different members of the consulting team with different purposes in mind, that purpose is a large part of context and relevance.

So the chance for misunderstanding and poor communications are ripe, just as you pointed out in the example there.

Yeah, and it's funny, as you're talking about code, I can see how our industry has been influenced by technology and lots of us in consulting have a technology background.

It would be really easy, if your background is in it, to like the idea of one to one correspondence between ideas.

And I think also lots of us are scientists and we like the idea of being able to be specific and unambiguous and say X is equivalent to Y.

And that also means that Y is equivalent only to X.

And that makes life clean.

But you're right, Mike.

Language between humans is messy.

Yes.

And there's not a code book.

Otherwise translation and machine language would be easy and we'd have solved that technical problem many decades earlier than only just now.

It's funny, I used to be appalled when I joined one consulting firm and some of the real senior people in this firm had this mantra that said, I can present anything.

You put any slide in front of me, I can present it.

And it appalled me because I've always this whole idea of context and the relevance and all that.

These folks would think that doesn't matter who the audience is, doesn't matter what the slide is.

If it's a well written slide, poom.

I can walk up to it having never seen it before, and pull this thing off.

But even the same presentation on a different occasion, with a different audience, the context can be completely different.

And this thing can go off the rails pretty quickly because the language, not because the language on the slide is wrong, but because the presenter's choice of a language, the story that they end up telling, and the different meanings that are trying to be pulled from this, given the context and the relevance to different members of that audience, ends up completely disconnected and wrong.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I've been in the same situation, mate.

I've seen loads of people assume that the only thing we need to talk about is the language that's on the PowerPoint slide.

And almost everything that's important in the conversation afterwards is language that's not directly on the PowerPoint slide, or is a little bit implied or a little bit around it, or a little bit in the background of it.

And human beings need to go through question and answer and they need to hear the words and explore the words for themselves.

And it's a really easy mistake, I think, for us to insist upon only the words on the slide.

The words on the slide are great, and they should be meaningful and they should be worth their place in that kind of valuable real estate.

But we've got to let people have the conversation as well, because that's where they get to understand and that's how they get to make decisions and hatch plans as well.

Well, I think we.

We need to circle back on this, on another episode in terms of this whole idea of notions, like it's a great day in the life of a consultant when a presentation turn a conversation.

And of course, conversations are all language here.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So, Mike, while we're mentally ranking in our team rosters who's got a science degree and who's got an English literature degree, and maybe thinking twice about the value of those English literature majors, let's think about some other aspects of jargon and how we use it.

We talked about jargon in our main episode, and clearly some pieces of jargon really become cliches.

And I think they kind of get lost.

They get unmoored from their origins, from having a specific meaning.

Maybe it would be fun to pick a few of those and go back, like, where did this come from?

How is it used now?

How effective is it now?

Yeah, this could be fun.

There were some that occurred to us, Mike, and in our long list here, we had jargon like thought leader or thought leadership jargon, like thinking about the cloud.

Jargon like burning platform, which I still might come back to.

It slightly bugs me, but also some really common consulting words, Thinking outside the box, synergy and leverage.

Let's dig into some of those here.

Thinking outside the box is one of my favorites.

We talked about this a little bit when we were doing creativity a few episodes ago, right at the beginning of the show.

And I love this because it reflects something real and something quite specific, but its usage has exploded way beyond that.

So its original meaning was to describe the solution to a puzzle.

And the puzzle was described back in the 80s by famous author Edward de Bono as an example of lateral thinking.

Now, Mike, I think the puzzle that we're talking about here is the nine dot puzzle that actually predates de Bono by many decades, right?

Oh, it does.

Sam Lloyd was kind of first shows up in about 1907, but even Lloyd comes back and says this is inspired by an 1867 French chess magazine which had a 64 dot version of this puzzle, which Sam then turned into a nine dot version.

So we have this box of nine dots.

And the challenge in this puzzle is to link all of the dots by making a pencil line without ever lifting up the pencil.

And the solution comes if you let the line go outside the boundary of the nine dot box.

But the paradox of the puzzle is that most people will look at it and try ways of drawing lines within the nine dot square in the box here.

Hence the phrase, you get the solution by drumroll, please.

Thinking outside the box.

And this phrase these days is used as a general idea to come up with any innovative or unfamiliar solution.

Oh, we need to think outside the box.

And we just use that as a way of challenging ourselves to be even more puzzled about where our creativity might come from.

The use of the phrase as a business cliche has, you might say, led to even less real creativity in business problem solving, because people just stand there scratching their heads and tell each other to think outside the box without ever really going through the mental discipline that Edward de Bono and all of the precursors suggested for us.

Solving the nine dot puzzle is also just one example of a whole range of different creative thinking approaches that are important in business, not just the reframing technique that's implied by thinking outside the box.

And the nine dot puzzle.

Yeah, we might do better just to tell people, think creatively or approach the problem differently or consider unconventional solutions.

Those would be better ways than think outside the box.

What box?

What are you talking about?

Somebody who perhaps hasn't seen the nine dot puzzle or has no idea about how that applies to what we're doing now, for crying out loud.

Or is one of those people that says, wait a minute, what if I put a pencil down on a paper and the earth is spinning around and eventually that single line goes through all the dots?

Okay, now we're getting creative.

Here we go.

So, Mike, we've had a go at thinking outside the box.

One of our other pieces of jargon was leverage.

And there's gotta be somebody on the show who used to work in finance, right?

I think that could be you.

Yeah.

And it's funny because not only have I got a bit of a financial background where leverage is a very well understood term, but I also was in a sea of consultants who talked about leverage all the time.

And so a couple of us who actually grew up with leverage would always make a little motion to each other in the meeting.

Like, we had a wrench and we were going to, like, leverage something with that wrench.

In finance, we're talking about using borrowed capital to increase the potential return of an investment.

But this originally comes from that mechanical principle of using a lever to lift heavy objects with less effort or using A spanner or a wrench, if you will, for just a little more.

And that was that signal.

We give each other leverage.

But now to leverage something, we say we're going to, you know, instead of saying use something, let's use our resources.

We're going to leverage our resources here.

And, you know, we're going to leverage this and leverage that and leverage and just think, where's the leverage in any of this?

So it just is adding unnecessary complexity to simple statements.

It's just adding, aren't I cool?

Buzzword.

Aren't I different?

Hey, do you know what this means?

Yeah, I know what it means.

And it has nothing to do with what you're talking.

No.

So it's a good thing, I think, for us to feel a little bit corrected by that.

Plus, it's an example of one of those nouns as verbs that we seem to be a little bit prone to.

We're going to come up against another noun wrangled into being a verb.

Next, Mike, we're going to talk about synergy.

Synergy initially originally described the interaction of multiple elements in a system to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

And it's a philosophical phenomenon and a scientific phenomenon.

People sometimes talk about two plus two equals five.

And it comes from a real Greek word, synergos, meaning work together, sin meaning together, ergos, meaning work.

And it gets used so recklessly these days.

Synergy meaning nothing to do with a vague idea of overlap or an unspecified plan for making things better.

By putting two things together, it's lost its contextual meaning.

It's employed as a vaguely futuristic sounding term that means relatively little in lots of contexts.

And sad to say, Mike, our favourite creator of habits, Stephen Covey, of the seven Habits, had a noun turned into a verb.

One of his habits is synergize.

So even the great Stephen Covey wasn't immune to stretching the definition of synergy a little bit.

So, Mike, these are just three examples and I guess to the listeners, use these in any way that you like.

If you want to be able to interrupt at the next after hours drinks party or the next dinner party that you're at and say, ah, actually I know the definition of thinking outside the box, then you can go ahead and be smug and start a conversation about that.

Or if you want to go back and read a little bit about where these ideas come from and maybe improve the way that you create change programs bringing organizations together, or the way that you generate new and familiar solutions, then thinking hard about where the ideas come from might be really useful.

And tell us as well.

Get back in touch with the show.

Tell us if you've got any examples of words and phrases that, you know that we use that originally meant something more useful and specific that have now been washed away into cliche.

Ian, we're sitting here on the eve of a new year and a lot of people make resolutions as they go into the new year.

And if language you can see is a bit of an issue in your consulting and or in your humanity, we've got a little bit of a resolution, a little bit of a challenge, a little bit of something you might want to try.

Take a look at some of the words and phrases that you use often.

Do you think that everybody that you're communicating with understands what they mean?

And ask, can you help improve the clarity of your language by either first getting closer to the original meaning when you use that phrase or by substituting something else rather than just inserting this phrase in there?

Yeah, absolutely.

Mike, you and I used to work with a colleague who was a principal at one of the places that we used to work.

She used to say you should be able to read it aloud and imagine your grandmother is reading it and your grandmother ought to be able to understand it.

And I think that's really good advice.

I'm going to take a look at some of my the emails in my sent folder and we'll see what has become of the language in them.

Mike, I want to keep thinking about culture as well and thinking back over projects that have been maybe not as successful as I thought, where they've been big misunderstandings.

How many of the communication problems that I encountered or even that I caused were ones where the client and the consultants had radically different cultures and were really very different in their approaches to language and what meaning was and what understanding was.

I can think of some examples where I know that I made some mistakes in that area.

Yeah, no doubt about that.

Again, I absolutely have the same.

Even just working in group settings with teams from clients in different cultures, I can tell where and tell stories about how I really could have been much more helpful and we would have gotten much better understanding out of a different kind of interaction and an exchange in language here.

So, Ian, any other thoughts?

These luminaries, listeners of ours, how they can be reflecting?

I'll say this.

If you're going to use jargon, then by all means use the client's jargon.

If your client, your customer, has particular words and phrases that they use and they mean something specific to them, Then why not use their language and establish an identity that's close to them, rather than using your consulting version of the same thing that establishes you as the outsider.

It might change the way that you're seen.

It might change the way that your advice gets heard.

And I'll go back as well to another old tool that I remember from the first days of using Microsoft Word, which I had forgotten about, but it's still there.

There are language clarity tests that you can use, the famous Fleskincade readability Index.

You can select a piece of prosecutor, run it through this, and get an idea of the grade score and some other equivalent metrics for how complex your language is.

And it might be interesting as well to get a transcript of a teams or a zoom call and examine the clarity of your spoken language as well.

And besides zoom and teams and Microsoft Word, if you're a Grammarly user, you can get a review of your written work that way too.

Yeah, I find Grammarly quite helpful in at least alerting me to some possibilities.

Yeah.

So the other thing to do, I think is like in all things where we're learning or we're trying to improve.

I remember doing this in speaking especially, but is to think back and to observe models of great performance.

Think back.

I would think about speakers that I really would like to emulate and think, what are they doing?

How are they doing that?

So ask yourself, when's the last time that somebody persuaded you with a really good, clear idea and well chosen language?

Watch for that.

Think back on that and take apart, how did they do that?

You know, you might just ask this simple question.

Did they make themselves sound more like a consultant or more like a human?

Mike, I think that's a great overarching New Year's resolution for any of us who are curious about a language.

Let's see if we can sound a little bit more like humans and a tiny bit less like consultants.

I'm in for that resolution.

Let's give it a try.

Nice.

So, Mike, that gets us to the end of our Luminaries episode.

I've really enjoyed digging into language.

It starts out without the kind of feeling of embarrassment that we're part of this community of people who come up with jargon.

But actually, when you think about it, there are all kinds of avenues for improvement and for clarity.

That's got to be fertile ground for anybody making New Year's resolutions.

Mike, in our next episode, we're going to be extending this idea.

We're going to be talking about when we should speak and when we should stay silent, when should we talk and when should we not talk?

And I'm really interested in that.

I'm looking forward to digging into that with you and with the listeners.

Well, happy New Year to all of you who are listening to this kind of in real time.

And we hope you'll join us next time on Luminaries.