Clear the air: Reduce jargon monoxide

In my early days as a consultant, one of the most challenging aspects of the job was navigating the bewildering blizzard of industry and company-specific jargon. I’d commonly sit in meetings, having little to no idea of what was being said, and take copious notes to decipher it all later. Within a few weeks, I was parroting buzzwords with pride, feeling like an insider yet still unsure about the meanings of phrases like "operating model," "sensitize," and "syndicate.”

Using jargon felt good, but at what cost? Jargon is not wholly devoid of virtue. It can foster a sense of belonging and speed up communication within a group. However, it can also make one sound arrogant, overly eager, purposefully incomprehensible, or just unintentionally vague.

Sadly, unlearning and refuting jargon often takes more effort than broadcasting it, but…ahem…let’s try not to boil the ocean. Instead, we’ll pick the low-hanging fruit, cut to the “so what?”, and explore some of the damage done by jargon. We can then get granular and circle back to the critical path to double-click on this holistic notion of why clarity in communication is vital.

Different types of Jargon Monoxide

In their excellent new book, The Friction Project, Stanford Professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao dedicate a chapter to jargon monoxide – a term created by the writer Polly LeBarre –to show how this poison is a common source of friction in many organizations.

They provide four categories of jargon monoxide:

1. Convoluted Crap. This is unnecessarily complex language. Winston Churchill was famously appalled by the amount of convoluted crap in his government’s communications. He repeatedly called for brevity, advocated for “short-winded-ness”, and reminded his Foreign Office, “The number and length of messages sent by a diplomat are no measure of his efficiency.” ?

?2. Meaningless Bullshit. This is empty and misleading communication using words or phrases that sound important but convey little actual meaning. Try this generator tool and produce some fun examples, many of which are sadly all too familiar to me. With a few clicks, I was able to “cultivate cross-platform relationships,” “enable turnkey supply chains,” and “orchestrate real-time experiences.” ?This proves Brandolini’s law, which sets out the principle which I alluded to earlier, that the amount of energy needed to refute?bullshit?is an?order of magnitude?bigger than that needed to produce it.

3. In-group Lingo. This is the specialized language used within a particular group or profession. In-group lingo may actually help with brevity and can build camaraderie within groups. Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible not to use this insider lingo beyond just close colleagues, and it’s far too easy to forget how silly much of it sounds. Here are more than 150 examples of business lingo, a few of which I have personally never heard anyone use (e.g., “bellwether”), but many that I often hear (e.g., “benchmark”), and some that I must confess to often using myself (e.g., “iterate”).

4. Jargon Mishmash Syndrome. Sufferers of this ailment create confusion by using phrases that mean different things to different people. ?Sutton and Rao use the term “agile” as an example. The original intent of the twelve principles in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was to contribute to better working methods. These days, “agile” is used in so many ways that its usefulness has been heavily diluted. The same is true for the term “operating model,” which now easily captures nearly anything and everything.

The case for clarity

“Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.”

―?William Howard Taft, ?27th President of the United States.

We communicate, think, and shape our world with language. It follows that if we trade in meaningless jargon, our intentions are diluted, our thinking is unclear, and our organizations are poorer for it. This is why the spread of jargon is poisonous in any organization.

The proliferation of hollow and convoluted language in an organization will cause people to lose interest, ultimately leading to a breakdown of meaning and trust. Jargon usually frames the message and the messenger as untrustworthy, lazy, pretentious, or somehow all of the above.?

It’s helpful to remember that jargon is often purposefully deployed to obfuscate rather than clarify. It can mask a lack of clear plans, distract, misdirect, or provide cover for the absence of meaningful action. With an eye to Churchill’s measure of his diplomats’ efficiency, it’s worth examining how we might unknowingly reward people in our organizations who add complexity and disincentivize people who speak plainly. ?

Take inspiration from Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, a brilliant communicator and physicist, who believed that we could improve how we learn and retain information by distilling complex concepts into a clear explanations for an imaginary audience—ideally, a child. If we can communicate a concept with plain words that any child can follow, that is proof that we understand it, and it’s also more likely that our ideas will take flight.

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