Consultants and Language: The Good, the Bad, and the Impenetrable
Consultants often fall into the trap of using jargon and complex language that can alienate clients and colleagues alike. This episode explores the peculiarities of consulting language, highlighting the overuse of acronyms, convoluted phrases, and military metaphors that clutter communication. Ian and Mike discuss the importance of clarity and simplicity, avoiding verbose expressions and ensure that messages are accessible to all audiences. By addressing these language pitfalls, the hosts aim to foster more genuine connections in the consulting world and beyond.
Transcript
Foreign for Humans, a podcast all about life in consulting.
Ian:You're with Ian and with Mike, and in each episode of the show, we'll be shining a light on a new topic that gets to the heart of what makes consultants happy and successful.
Mike:On the Consulting for Humans podcast, it's our mission to add just a little more humanity to the lives of consultants.
Mike:We'd also love to bring some of these skills and perspectives from consulting to human lives as well.
Ian:Absolutely.
Ian:So if you're a consultant who's trying to be more of a human, or even a human who's trying to be more of a consultant, then welcome, because we think you are just our kind of person.
Ian:Mike, what's on our agenda this week?
Mike:Well, Ian, today we're talking about consultants and language.
Mike:We're hoping to explore some of the examples, the strange and sometimes alienating language that consultants use, from the annoying to the hilarious.
Mike:We're going to talk a little bit about how our use of language can get in the way and provide some tips and examples for keeping language plain and simple.
Ian:Oh, my.
Ian:This feels like it's going to be a really fertile ground for us.
Ian:The easiest thing in the world, I think, is to tease a consultant for using impenetrable business BS kind of language.
Ian:And I always feel slightly seen when this comes up because I have a sneaking feeling that I do this enough myself to be part of the problem here.
Ian:So where should we start?
Ian:What do you think we could be talking about?
Ian:Should we go through some categories of the kind of things that we have in mind here?
Mike:I think that's a great idea, Ian.
Mike:Certainly.
Mike:Acronyms.
Mike:Acronyms, always.
Mike:What are the usual suspects to round up?
Mike:MECE and SWAG and sow.
Mike:We've invented some of our own and teach it Gimo.
Ian:We talked about Gimo a few episodes ago.
Mike:Absolutely.
Ian:And his close cousin jfdi.
Ian:So it's funny.
Ian:Maybe this is.
Ian:Mike, I should defend consultants here, but maybe it's totally forgivable and understandable.
Ian:These are slightly complicated four or more word phrases that we abbreviate.
Ian:And abbreviating is just an efficient use of time.
Ian:Right.
Ian:It's just a nice way of shortening something.
Mike:Don't you think it's funny?
Mike:I always love this, and I think any professional occupation does this.
Mike:And I can't for the life of me recall at the moment the Navy's acronym book for all of its acronyms.
Mike:It is, of course, it's written in order so that people will understand better what we're talking about, but the name of the book itself is an acronym, which, of course, somebody who doesn't understand has no idea what it means.
Ian:You're putting me in mind of Tom Clancy books here, talking about the Navy.
Ian:Maybe a consulting project should have, like, a Tom Clancy style glossary of all the acronyms at the back so you can look at what kind of guided missile it is that we're talking about today.
Mike:That's right.
Mike:That's right.
Mike:And what I love is how we've talked about SWAG before that we had very different.
Mike:It meant the same thing, but very different words to use that for that thing.
Mike:And when we were doing research for this episode, we found a number of other people who use swag and again, all used slightly different words for each of those letters.
Ian:Indeed.
Ian:And everybody's pretty sure they've got the right one, right?
Ian:Yeah.
Mike:Oh, of course.
Ian:I think it's forgivable.
Ian:I'm prepared to go with, like, use of acronyms.
Ian:It's teasable.
Ian:But also forgivable.
Ian:What pushes my buttons a bit more, Mike, is the.
Ian:The grammatical mangling of verbs as nouns or verbs that become based on nouns.
Ian:And you and I are guilty of at least one of these.
Ian:So leverage.
Ian:We'll talk some more later on about leverage, because it's a great example of a consulting cliche.
Ian:But leverage is a noun, and we talk about leveraging something so it becomes a verb.
Ian:And that already makes me squirm a little bit.
Ian:The.
Ian:The noun.
Ian:The compound noun.
Ian:Storyboard, which we use a lot, gets turned into storyboarding.
Ian:Oh, I'm going to storyboard my PowerPoint deck.
Ian:And we're guilty of that one.
Ian:We have solutioning.
Ian:What are we doing now?
Ian:Oh, we're solutioning.
Ian:No, we're not.
Ian:We're creating solutions.
Mike:Right.
Ian:And I saw a great example of somebody saying, oh, I'll.
Ian:I'll conversate with him later.
Ian:Meaning I'm going to take the abstract noun conversation and I'll turn it into a verb.
Ian:I don't know why we do this, because it's not necessarily making the language any clearer or shorter.
Ian:It just seems to make it sound unnecessarily exclusive and indirect.
Ian:What do you think?
Mike:It just seems to be a habit.
Mike:It's just something we seem to do over and over again as if we were xeroxing it.
Ian:Good.
Ian:I see what you did there.
Ian:What else?
Ian:What about you, Mike?
Ian:What grinds your gears?
Mike:It's this over verbose usages of things that could have very simple, ordinary meanings.
Ian:We found one, by the way.
Ian:There's a really good video on YouTube by the YouTube account called Consulting Humor that breaks lots of these down.
Ian:They come up with a great one.
Ian:The consultant says we will implement a phased approach to improve operations by leveraging synergies and industry best practices to add value across your organization.
Ian:Which is actually consultant speak for we will help you to be best.
Ian:Right Mike, I can top that with a real example.
Ian:This also strays into the world of military metaphor that we're going to get into in a second.
Ian:One very senior partner level person that I was working with insisted on a slide headline in the kickoff presentation for a consulting project that said something like we will mobilize and prosecute a four phase plan of attack.
Ian:Very much a very military sounding and the very skeptical, very non military female client said what does that mean?
Ian:And he went we're going to prosecute and mobilize and blah blah blah blah.
Ian:She said does that mean start and continue?
Ian:And the consultant said yeah, I suppose it does.
Ian:And she absolutely rinsed him, just leaving hanging there.
Ian:The question of why did you write all this macho BS in your slide headline when you could have written start and continue wouldn't have sounded as good, at least in his ears.
Mike:I think war kind of metaphors brings me always to mind of old white guys.
Mike:Yeah.
Mike:And in a lot of my time has been old white guys in the South.
Mike:I remember comments like that dog won't hunt.
Mike:Yeah.
Mike:And other kind of folksy metaphors that are used now.
Mike:Interestingly, I just finished this week the book the Demon of Unrest and one of the tales in there was about how Abraham Lincoln, not an older white guy from the south, but from Illinois, but he would use these folksy metaphors and tales to get himself out of conversations he didn't want to have or to not answer questions to do things.
Mike:There may be more wisdom behind some of these than I realized early on.
Ian:By the way, dodging tricky conversations and avoiding awkward moments is absolutely core consulting skills 101.
Ian:So I think we all need a bit of that.
Ian:It's good to know that we can learn from Abe Lincoln.
Mike:Right?
Ian:Although the Gettysburg Address is famously, I can't remember, it's only a few hundred words and it was only like a minute and a half or something.
Mike:He was brilliant in some of that as well.
Mike:He could certainly play both sides of that continuum.
Ian:So we've had a bit of toxic masculinity here.
Ian:We've had war metaphors, we've had over verbose usages, we've had folksy metaphors I think we're probably also guilty again, probably coming back to the old male demographic here, sports metaphors.
Ian:We're on the five yard line here, we need a full court press.
Ian:I'm giving you a Hail Mary pass.
Ian:I think.
Ian:I know there's all bros together social thing that we're trying to get going here and I appreciate that.
Ian:Sports is about ambition and achievement and achieving something within the set time.
Ian:All of which are valuable things in consulting, but I think some of us overuse them.
Mike:Yeah, I absolutely agree.
Mike:As somebody who was not very sportsy, I remember spending a lot of my early dial up time trying to figure out what are these people talking about and making sure that before I had any client interactions or office interactions, I always read the summaries of what had happened that weekend before so I could be in on the news.
Ian:Yeah, yeah.
Ian:There's a really funny episode of the British sitcom the IT Crowd where these two IT consultant geeks, they're not consultants, but they're geeks, are in the basement and they have this kind of phrase generator that comes up with sporting stuff about the weekend.
Ian:So you don't have to have followed the sports report, but you can join in with your buddies in the bar.
Ian:I can relate.
Mike:Speaking of it, I do see a lot of that too, or hear a lot of that, that IT language used out of context here.
Mike:That becomes then great consulting jargon, bandwidth use case, full stack, agile, data warehouse, end to end solution user.
Mike:What's next?
Ian:Mike?
Ian:It's funny, I used to have a client that was an IT services firm and I used to roast them for using end to end as a cliche to describe everything that they did.
Ian:And there's one particular guy said, but you don't understand, we really do offer an end to end solution.
Ian:And he went on to describe one terminal device at one side of the network all the way to another terminal device on another side of the network and all of what that meant.
Ian:And I was like, mate, I've glazed over just the fact that you had to explain it to me and that you resent it for being a cliche means, do you know what?
Ian:It's a cliche and it's too late.
Ian:Stop using it.
Mike:I got a feeling prompt engineering is going to become all things to all people pretty soon.
Ian:I think you can be right.
Ian:I think I can see that one coming soon.
Ian:All of those AI bits of terminology are going to creep in more and more.
Ian:I think another thing that IT consultants have taught the rest of us consultants how to do is is how to repackage things.
Ian: s and: Ian:And when consultants try and sell things, I think we're very often tempted to put a big new sounding or fancy sounding label on something I might get.
Ian:You were involved in the genesis of E Business as a term.
Ian:Right.
Ian:Way back in the day, E Business meant something really specific to a very narrow group of people before it became the thing that everybody did.
Mike:It did.
Mike:And I think the real giveaway here is that the original name for E Business Solutions was network based Business Solutions for Business.
Mike:And it was like that's what Abby, who was a great marketing person said.
Mike:I think maybe we call that E Business Solutions.
Mike:Oh my gosh.
Mike:Yeah.
Mike:We could have had a firm that just went on an old heap to die had it not been for that.
Mike:Abby's brilliant insight there.
Ian:Well, it paid off.
Ian:Right.
Ian:Again, let's give ourselves some credit because lots of these pieces of jargon at a point in time said something very memorable and concise and specific about something that everybody needed to be able to talk about in shorthand.
Ian:So that would have been great.
Ian:The difficulty was what came for the 10 years after when everything that anybody talk about, advertised, sold, offered, discussed, wrote about on LinkedIn posts would have had the same word attached to it.
Mike:Absolutely.
Ian:Consulting down the ages is littered with these time and motion back in the mid 20th century business process, re engineering, downsizing in the 90s and noughties, agile digital things, digital marketing, digital communication strategies, digital transformations.
Ian:We've ended up in some cases overusing these words for forgivable but unnecessary reasons.
Mike:And we do turn them sometimes.
Mike:I remember when downsizing became right.
Mike:Sizing.
Mike:Yeah, we don't want to come in and do downsizing anymore.
Mike:That's hatchet job we do.
Mike:Right.
Mike:Sizing.
Ian:We're not those consultants.
Ian:We're the new friendly.
Mike:No, exactly.
Ian:So Mike, it's easy to mock and probably it's very reasonable that all of this stuff should be mocked.
Ian:It's not only a problem because it makes us parody able.
Mike:Right.
Ian:I think the problems that lie behind this difficulty with language go deeper than just that.
Mike:They do.
Mike:They absolutely do.
Mike:Because they have the risk of leaving our clients and perhaps other folks in our firm in different areas or new joiners or junior consultants on the outside because they don't speak that jargon.
Ian:And we can dig into this some more in a later conversation.
Ian:I think there's a social aspect of dividing people up.
Ian:People who know the language versus people who don't, or creating pretend bonds of friendship between people who have the same language.
Ian:I think it's a really interesting problem for us.
Ian:Words that get used ubiquitously.
Ian:You've reminded me of another one.
Ian:I had a friend who was very skeptical of people's tendency to use the word strategic.
Ian:And he found that consultants and clients alike would all tend to describe everything that they did as strategic.
Ian:Oh, this is a strategic partnership.
Ian:It's a strategic initiative.
Ian:I'm a strategic supply chain manager.
Ian:And his sort of subversive way of addressing this was to pretend in his mind that anytime he heard the word strategic, he'd substitute the word lightweight.
Ian:And this used to cause him to giggle a bit in meetings.
Ian:So the client would stand up and say, I'm the director of strategic marketing.
Ian:And he would go, yes, director of lightweight marketing.
Ian:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Ian:This is a strategic initiative for us.
Ian:It's a completely lightweight and disposable initiative.
Mike:I remember when we were so upset with inflation back in another era, not just in this one, real inflation, that the mandate went out that we're no longer to speak about that.
Mike:We're going to call it banana.
Ian:Yeah, okay.
Mike:And the high rate of banana.
Mike:So that would somehow take the sting off of it.
Mike:But clearly, in both cases that we've been talking about there, it shows the adverse corrosive effect of jargon.
Mike:I've got a doctorate in strategy.
Mike:Strategy was my coin of the realm.
Mike:And to know that somebody said, ah, that means lightweight, that completely undercuts my value.
Mike:And I think we came upon that undercutting, honestly, by making everything strategic, which means, of course, therefore, nothing is strategic.
Ian:Amen.
Ian:Yeah, yeah.
Ian:So let's think about lessons for us here.
Ian:Part of this is we should just catch ourselves a little bit when language is getting used too freely, when we're drifting away from the original meaning of something and it creeps up on us.
Ian:Like, it starts, as you said, Mike, for good reasons.
Ian:And it creeps up on us and it undercuts stuff that is important.
Ian:What can we do instead?
Ian:What thought process could we use to drive out some of this fluff and cliche?
Mike:I think in the spirit of irony, in the spirit of reversal, we went to what we thought would be an absolute guru ninja, thought leader in the area of simple and direct language.
Mike:The United States federal government.
Mike:Oh, yes, but I say that, and we can all snicker and laugh up our sleeves.
Mike:But actually, once upon a time, there was passed the plain language action and information network guidelines.
Mike:Yeah, what?
Mike:What oh, plain.
Mike:It's the acronym, plain.
Mike:But when you get into the PLAIN guidelines, it's great advice for all times.
Mike:These are things we could actually do.
Ian:Oh, Mike, I love a guideline.
Ian:I love a list of bullet points.
Ian:Talk us through some of the things that might be covered under the plain guidelines.
Mike:The first is write for your audience.
Mike:And boy, I'll tell you what, truer words were never spoken.
Mike:The explanation says, always consider the intended reader's level of understanding and tailor your language accordingly.
Mike:I thought, wow, good.
Mike:Could we have saved forests full of trees had we done this in a lot of consulting reports?
Ian:Absolutely.
Ian:A little bit of empathy for the audience is never a bad starting place, is it?
Mike:Yeah, yeah.
Mike:Now the second one says, always use the active voice.
Mike:And I thought, oh, here we're going to get into.
Mike:You and I are on opposite sides of the pond.
Mike:And the use of active versus passive voice, seen very differently.
Mike:So you could tell this is the us But a colleague of ours, Midge Wilker, when we used to teach this, particularly in the uk, used to say, okay, you've been on a project and you've been away from home for quite some time now, and you return home and your significant other comes out of the house, runs up and says, you are loved.
Mike:And she says, as opposed to I love you.
Mike:And that was her point to say, even where you love the passive, you can understand directly how active sometimes makes a difference.
Ian:Yeah, it's normally a shorter word count, but also it's just more direct.
Mike:Right.
Ian:It's more honest.
Mike:Yes.
Ian:Has agency behind it as well, to use a vogue word, which is probably also going to be a cliche pretty soon.
Ian:What else have we got, Mike?
Ian:What else about our choice of words?
Mike:So simple language, everyday words, not complex terminology unless necessary, so where it actually conveys a real meaning.
Mike:By all means.
Mike:Short sentences, concise to the point, clear organization.
Mike:And this is something consultants should be living and breathing.
Mike:I had a secretary who nailed me on this once years and years ago, said, I always love typing your memos, Mike.
Mike:I can't wait to get to the end to find out what you're actually talking about.
Ian:Oh, Bern.
Ian:It's funny though.
Ian:I think that we teach and lots of people practice structured thinking for big, complex technical things like PowerPoint documents.
Ian:I've met loads of people who could use some help in structured thinking when it comes to, like, emails or even IM messages, like just getting some structure behind how we think and how we communicate.
Ian:I think it's a big payoff.
Ian:Excellent.
Ian:So clear sentences, clear Organization.
Ian:I think those are great points.
Ian:What else?
Mike:Well, back to what we've been talking about all episode so far.
Mike:Avoid jargon and acronyms.
Mike:Right.
Mike:And again, technical terms, when used, should be explained.
Mike:And always consider alternative phrasing for acronyms.
Mike:Make sure to spell out what they are.
Mike:Positive tone rather than negative phrasing because it's easy to misunderstand.
Mike:Negative phrasing and visuals.
Mike:Tables, lists, graphics to enhance clarity and comprehension.
Mike:So as to the plain act, probably long forgotten from every recent government document I've read.
Mike:But to say it was good advice still is good advice, I think.
Mike:Always will be good advice.
Ian:It really is.
Ian:And the other thing I like about this, even though this all sounds really easy and elementary, I think every single person could take anything that they've written and apply those tests and say, do you know what?
Ian:I can find some places where I'm creeping into cliche, or I'm overusing jargon, or I'm using complicated syntax like passive voice, when I could be using direct syntax.
Ian:It's a really good reminder.
Ian:Excellent work.
Ian:Excellent work, Mike.
Ian:There's a lot for us to think about here, and even just kind of language and structure and visuals are things that we can talk about in future episodes.
Ian:But the list is a really great starting point.
Mike:And I'd add that the starting point for all of this is to have something clear to say.
Mike:Yeah, maybe our language.
Mike:Yeah, it may get unnecessarily complicated when we haven't yet come up with a clear idea of what we want to communicate.
Mike:Was it Voltaire who said, I've written you a very long letter because I didn't have time to write a short one?
Ian:Yeah, it's really great stuff for us to think about.
Ian:There's so much fertile ground here, Mike, that we can go further with this in the Luminaries episode.
Ian:So if you're interested in what's going on in the minds and the hearts of US consultants that makes it so difficult for us to be clear and direct with our clients, linguistically speaking.
Ian:If you're interested in that, join us for the Luminaries tier.
Ian:If you're interested in looking at the purpose or purposes of consulting and the impact that has on the words that we use, join us in the Luminaries tier.
Ian:And if you want to dig into the facts behind some of these consulting cliches that might actually have an origin story that's way more interesting and way more useful than you think, if you'd like to hear about that, join us in the luminaries tier.
Ian:Your 7 day free trial is waiting for you right now.
Mike:As always, we look forward to speaking with you again next episode.
Mike:And thank you for joining us.
Mike:We hope the new year is a good one for you.
Ian: ing forward to joining you in:
