Every cloud has a silver lining and maybe one effect of the recession might just be to reduce the ever-rising tide of jargon.
The Local Government Association has launched a drive to do away with buzz phrases like “stakeholder “ and “best practice.”
The Association says that in a recession, people need to be told clearly and in plain English what options are available to them, particularly in the field of finance. ”Unless information is given to people to explain what help they can get, then it could well lead to more people ending up homeless or bankrupt,” it warns.
Just think - we may no longer have to suffer the indignity of having emails “cascaded” down to us or be forced to drink our coffee in fatuous ”breakout” rooms. We might become passengers again instead of ”customers” — we might even see the end of the phrase “going forward” (though that, surely, will be the ultimate test).
Do you have any particular pieces of official or office jargon you would like to see disappear?
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3 comments so far
This is the upshot of an effective skull-time, showing holistic thinking and I am glad people ham and egg it. The future state needs to focus on the wide issue of hitting the ground running in a hear-now fashion and lining up the ducks will get us to first base - we dont want to over egg the omlette or have too many ducks short of a shoot otherwise we will have to open kimmono our strawman to external competitors.
- Posted by David KellyI would say that as an ambassador for many agencies within my area that I cautiously welcome this initiative which will champion community engagement and customer involvement and enhance the evidence base for a framework of good practice. This will facilitate a step-change in citizen empowerment providing guidelines for incentivising a bottom-up and holistic approach, signpositing localities towards an outcome of meaningful dialogue within a participatory partnership with service users.
In order to encourage a joined up, process driven, transformational seedbed for cascading the vision, the strategic approach needs to be coterminous with the core message that engaging service users provides us with a democratic mandate for capacity building among stakeholders. We, therefore, need to prioritise the scoping of developing a level playing field for language use which will provide a multi-disciplinary audience with a menu of options , thereby encouraging a transparent approach which will highlight best practice.
Hopefully this will be a sustainable approach, but one which will provide a quick win and which will be robustly tested for soundness. However, a performance network will have to be developed to offer peer challenge and monitor outputs, providing improvement levers which will ensure the contestability of the approach. This will be a risk based approach which will lead to more sustainable communities and can then be streamlined in order to ensure correct resource allocation. We also need to develop a symposium for providing external challenge, helping to develop a more consensual approach delivering the flexibilities and freedoms necessary to fast track the core values into all areas of governance.
This should be recognised as a beacon approach which will encourage a can-do culture, cross-cutting areas including the third sector and which will deliver a top-down message that in order to communicate effectively with the public, plain language should be used at all times
- Posted by Roger StorerSo, is jargon a side-effect of an overblown economy? Was there just too much tax payer’s money around, and Government sociopaths and social engineers were hiring too many jargon enhanced civil servants? I wrote a section on jargon for one of my books and stick to my original claim: The use of jargon is to confuse you so the provider can basically charge you more based on your lack of knowledge. The concept applies to I.T., Government and anyone else who can string a few vague phrases together without cringing.
- Posted by Simon DrakeI welcome the Local Government Association action to cut down on the jargon. It means they have to lift their gain and end their abuse of our language, AND stop baffling the hands that feeds, and has to listen to them, the Tax Payers.