Consultant Lingo Bingo — Transcript
[00:00:00.01] Jim: So we’re going to talk about jargon or consultant lingo, whatever you want to call it, but I think all occupations sort of end up in a backwater where they’re using phrases that other people just don’t understand or they latch on to. on to things that are, in the case of consultants, that are just meaningless, and I’ve suffered through those as much as anyone else, I think, and I’ll never forget the first time that I was working in a consulting capacity, and it was a job that had multiple– uh consulting groups working on it and a guy that was outside of our group was presenting to an executive I can’t even remember which client it was uh probably Rhode Island and at some point in uh uh The guy had listened to the client and he looked at the client and this consultant said to him in a southern accent, “That dog don’t hunt.” And I remember thinking to myself, “Why would he say that? That sounds totally meaningless. context, and the guy seemed so self-satisfied, I was imagining that he was preparing the invoice, you know, right there in the spot, and it wasn’t even the first step in solving a problem. I wouldn’t even, it probably wasn’t even the negative one step. It was so far off. That’s my sort of reaction to consulting lingo is just say it plainly. So, I know, Ken, you’ve got some good stuff from our past on this.
[00:02:05.72] Ken: Well, yeah, I’m going to start with a quick story. The first consultant report I was ever I ever wrote, and I don’t mean contract. I mean, I was the primary author, was for a client and she had been a consultant with the firm I was in, and she was now working for a state agency, and I went through and wrote this report, as I’d read and as we’d spoken and all that, and it came back. I’ll just give her first name was Carla, and I sent her a draft and bless her ‘cause she’d been a consultant and it came back and I sent her the clearly marked draft and all that, and it came back with red ink all over it, and most of on the left-hand margin was WTF question mark. Now, I didn’t know what WTF meant. I was that naive about it. I didn’t know what WTF meant, and I called her up and said, “Hey, sorry about that, what’s going on?” And to her credit, she was really mentoring me about how to write a consultant report ‘cause I had all kinds of consultant lingo in it. it sort of read like a high school report where I was trying to push for that 500th word, you know, or yeah, you know, when you have that 500 word essay and you’re trying to pad things. That’s kind of my story about my first experience and it was full of jargon and all that, and I went back and rewrote it. very cleanly and she called me up and said, “Thanks.” And to this day, I owe her a debt of gratitude about just for that coming back, and I think the shock of it seeing covered in red ink from a client, I was just mortified. Fortunately, she was just, quite an individual and took it all in stride and truly helped me grow in my consulting career. But later on, you know, it became, one of our jobs became to cut down the consultant lingo. I think we became as much editors as anything else on our people’s paperwork, and they were all loaded with jargon. talking about, you know, client specific terms or acronyms, you know, the client would know about. I’m just talking about Luffords. We actually, at one of our retreats, one of our partners decided that one of the things we needed to have was a consultant word bingo. people were talking, you know, he handed out these sheets that had all these consulting, Pat consulting phrases on them and part of the retreat, and it was one of the most memorable things ever, was simply that you got to play bingo based on what whoever was speaking said. The words are things like, you know, optimized resources, critical path, blue sky, bleeding actionable, productize, visioning, value add, reach out, parking lot, move the needle, key, critical, those sorts of things, you know, are all the words that we used to use, and there’s a bunch more. You know what a geek I am, I went and actually built a list of all those words and I got it by going through. to the reports, not only our people, but I had written in the past and kind of looking at those adverbs and adjectives that were at least unnecessary, and then the phrases that were, you know, I couldn’t explain to my mother, things like blue sky or bleeding edge or those sorts of things. that were in these written reports and I actually made a list of them and I’d scanned, I made a little macro that would scan documents for them and word documents for them and point them out to me, and I, that was my first step at editing was to go through and find all those words in my own writing as well as others writing. I tried to spend a little bit of time, ‘cause it’s funny to me, because this is language that hinders rather than helps communication in most cases, both overused and ambiguous words and phrases. I’m not sure why we as consultants did that. about it. In some cases, it was a sales language. You had mentioned on a previous podcast that people were using it to create a culture. So, you know, you’d call something that had a common name in the world something else internally so that we had a special culture about it. I’d seen it used in, I’d again, in sales language, things like blue sky. Well, we’re going to blue sky these ideas with you, and, you know, I mean, it’s meaningless instead of saying, you know, we’re going to, even the word brainstorming sounds a little bit consulting-ish to me, instead of saying, you know, we’ll examine ideas collaboratively or something like that. the biggest part on biggest reason I use those words was kind of laziness. You know, you all get into a writing pattern or writing style and in consulting there’s that old Mark Twain quote, you know, “I’d have written you a shorter letter if I’d had more time” and that’s kind of true of consulting reports, you know, you just go So if you have the time, you can write a good one, but to write one in a limited amount of time, you tend to be wordy and use the consultant language. But I love the consultant bingo. That was the story went kind of wide, but I love the consultant bingo. That was kind of the first, well, that and my client, Carla. who kind of pointed things out were real eye openers to me as to how much you use silly language, and to this day, if a client is listening to this, you know, look for those things. Look for those things that don’t help communicate the point that they’re trying to make, and don’t be afraid to point them out and you’re doing the consultant a favor, and if you’re a consultant, go through your work looking for those words. You know what they are, I’ve mentioned some, but I think every consultant has them. You know, the kind of quick summary is, you know, don’t do that ‘cause it’s not a good thing. Don’t use that language. I was walking by a client’s cubicle one time and he had a really wry sense of humor. of humor and he had a big sign on his wall that said and I agree with this and it’s kind of my
[00:09:05.43] Jim: Summarization of this his sign said a shoe obfuscation so you know the consultant bingo I think that was super instructive because the The cards were handed out to all of our employees at a gathering, and I think everybody, I mean, I think everybody saw the humor in it, but more importantly, I think they were all surprised at how quickly the bingo cards got filled in, that we were all sort of guilty of this type.
[00:09:45.38] Ken: - To my last day it was an effort to not throw that language in.
[00:09:54.37] Jim: - Yeah, oh yeah, it’s difficult, and after spending, you know, almost 30 years in this field, I still can’t explain why office workers would ever need to scrum, and yet, you know, most weeks didn’t go by without somebody saying, “Are we going to scrum?” Or, you know, I know it was associated with a certain methodology, but it came to the point where people were using it all the time. “No, we’re not going to scrum, can we just get together?”
[00:10:24.27] Ken: You know, I mean, and the analogy comes from rugby, but it’s, it’s like… “Seriously, can’t we think of something better like ‘meet’ and, you know, isn’t there a plainer word for it?” But that gets to the sales part that I was talking about.
[00:10:43.42] Jim: It’s a sales window. Yeah. We’ve got something new for you or something exciting.
[00:10:48.58] Ken: And instead of saying, “Hold a meeting to discuss our progress,” it’s much…
[00:10:52.69] Jim: Easier to say Scrum. Yeah to your question about why do consultants in particular do it just an observation that some of the worst writing I saw was a cry for relevancy and and I think you’ll recognize this the the number of different ways that people would try to describe the urgency that this is a super critical this is a key critical problem this problem is going to be disastrous if it’s not I mean that people kept escalating the the language around how critical and how important and almost a cry for relevancy. Like, you know, we know that we’re just hired to be here for a short while and are gonna go away and you’ll carry on. But the more that we could edit that stuff out or, you know, it was either. relevant or it wasn’t?
[00:12:02.06] Ken: - Yeah, I think that’s a brilliant observation.
[00:12:03.91] Jim: - Or not.
[00:12:04.92] Ken: - Yeah, I think that’s a brilliant observation that it’s as much a cry for relevancy. There’s so much noise that goes on in any, at any client site, in any business. I think sometimes people tried to escalate their work. above others by doing things like that. This is, you know, super hyper turbo critical problem, you know, as if somehow reading that makes it, oh, well, that that elevates it above just a critical problem or a hyper critical problem. Yeah, that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that, but it is a good observation. So any advice for people about how to avoid this? I mean to me it was just other than making my list of common phrases that I did and I found others do and just grunt it out. You know I mean go through every document and look for
[00:13:02.38] Jim: Those. That was the only advice I have. Yeah the only advice I have… from a similar situation to yours about from a client and this was a client who was trained as an attorney but she was working in a non-legal role for a bigger agency and it was the same situation I had a draft report and she just
[00:13:32.41] Ken: Read it and handed it back and said get rid of all the adjectives. Well that’s a
[00:13:38.82] Jim: Good start, right? Damn, she was right. As I went through and crossed out all the adjectives, you could actually see what I was trying to say, and it was all, up to that point it was all hidden. It was my cry for
[00:13:52.74] Ken: Relevancy rather than just presenting the facts, but my high school high school reports wouldn’t have made 500 words They would have been about 200 if I cut out the adjectives I never would have made it out of high school Anything to add no, that’s it