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Words and phrases that make me go 'hmmm...', Part 1
Over the years, I’ve heard many phrases that jar with me (e.g. "pre-read’) or with which I take issue (e.g. “we must find the right balance”). Whenever this happens, I doodle out my thoughts on it, then resolve to include them one day in an email update. But I retire next June (click here for details), so I've a race on to give them all airtime.
Today, you've my thoughts on six such phrases (two are brief ones you've seen in previous emails). They aren’t in any particular order, other than the longer ones are in the middle.
“It helps people see my journey” Who cares about your journey?! Just tell me how things are going. Story-telling is a power trip, click here for a previous email on this topic.
“Send me your slides so that people who can't make the talk can read what was covered” It's a dreadful suggestion - if the slides are sufficiently detailed to act as a standalone reference for people that don’t attend, they’ll be truly terrible slides for those that do.
“It’s a pre-read” Eh?! Why not call it a 'report’? Or a ‘note’ or 'memo'? Such words worked well in the past. Then again, if you tell bosses that you've sent them a 'report', maybe they won't realise they're meant to read it... (“Darn it, if only I’d called it a read-report…”).
Anyway, I've another problem: the word 'pre' implies that something is a bit secondary. But - to me – the report is critical, it drives what happens next. If the report is bad, you’ll need a long meeting. If it’s good, you might not even need a meeting.
If you insist on using a phrase like 'pre-read', can I suggest a twist in the nomenclature? Revert to words like ‘reports’ and ‘emails’ - then talk about having a 'post-meeting'. Do this, and people will go: "Huh? A post-meeting?!? Didn't we used to call it a 'meeting'...?". Eventually, the 'post' bit of the phrase will be quietly dropped, and normal service - and phraseology - will be resumed.
P.S. I do mid-week hockey training for games I play at the weekend. Thinking about it, maybe I attend pre-training - or perhaps at the weekend I play post-matches.
“It’s just a matter of finding the right balance” (This is the longest one.) When I suggest that reports eschew icons, frippery, photos, most graphs, etc - and also that we use simple words - people say: “Really!? Surely it’s a question of finding the right balance, no?”. Which is a roundabout way of saying: “Can’t we meet half-way on this…?”.
No. If something is wrong, don’t meet halfway on it - if you want us to rob six banks and I reckon we should rob none, it’s wrong if we find the ‘right balance’ and rob three.
But what about using simple words? Maybe we should find the right balance and meet halfway, because surely it’s bad to make stuff too simple. Again, no. Imagine there’s a ‘reading’ scale that goes from 1 to 10 where '1' means “Easy To Read” (which is what we should strive for) and '10' means “Brutal To Read”. If your report is a brutal ‘10’, don’t let’s meet halfway, for you’d then be roughly ‘5’, and that’s still too tough. Rather, if you reach a score of, say, '3' - or '2' - but can't countenance making it any simpler to achieve a '1'... well, no worries, that'll still probably be good enough.
True story: in corporate life, I was handed a yearly benchmarking report to update, one that Marketing had previously done – and they’d stuffed it with 50 graphs. The graphs were all dreadful (though, of course, not all graphs are dreadful). When I updated the report, I could have ‘found the right balance’ and kept, say, 25 of them - but instead ditched them all. Bosses loved it. The report never went back to Marketing.
P.S. I’m not advocating we dumb down. Dumbing down is different to using simple words (maybe I should do a Venn diagram to help you more easily grasp this idea...?). Want to read something that uses simple words but doesn’t dumb down? Study this email.
“It doesn’t suit our culture” If someone comes to you with an idea that you just can’t be bothered with, but you struggle to think of a good idea to reject it, use the word ‘culture’. “Hmmm,” you say, “I can see why you suggest it, but it just won’t suit our culture”. It’s impossible to argue against, it’s just so abstract.
“There is no magic bullet” So…? Should we just do nothing, then? Every time a politician says this, I want to scream.
That’s enough phrases for today. No fun stuff this month, I've stored up lots for an email early next year.
Til next month.
Jon
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