The High Paid Job of The Future Every Company Needs NOW

Not long ago, I visited the Museum of Modern Art of Medellin. It's an awesome building, with great art.

But on every other wall, you see a huge block of text that makes your head want to explode, like this:

"The concept of reconstruction chimes with many of the works that may be seen as indirect responses to how perception and cognition are being remapped to accommodate our newly bifurcated existences... on an unstable terrain of accelerated change, our deepest subjective recesses are constantly being reconstructed with cameras serving as almost bodily appendages to interface between these two realities."

I really hope you didn't read that whole thing. But if you did, please let me know what it means. Cuz I still don't get it.

We may take for granted that museum curators seem to be in a contest to write the most confusing and pretentious sentences. But business has a similar problem.

Case in point: I've recently seen some ad agencies try to make the word "insperential" a thing. Here's the quote that's been going around about it:

"In a consumer society dominated by experiences in the (semi) public domain — often branded, designed, themed and curated to the nines — INSPERIENCES represent consumers' desire to bring top-level experiences into their domestic domain."

WTF. Couldn't we just say "people want to have high quality experiences at home"?

The problem is, if we said that, people would realize that what we were saying was neither new or profound.

Wrapping up basic ideas in jargon may make us sound smart, but when we peel away the bullshit, we sound... basic.

And here's the thing:

People are good at spotting bullshit.

So when our businesses talk like this, anyone who's discerning will either decide that we're a pain to deal with—because we make them think too hard about what we're saying—or that we're full of it.

In other words, when our companies try to make ourselves sound profound, we're shooting ourselves in the foot.

A few days ago one of my favorite apps provided a relatively minor, but excellent example of how easy it is to do this. The company released a new policy that said employees should be able to choose where they work even after COVID is gone.

Now, that's a great policy. But the sensibleness wasn't what caught my attention about the announcement. It was this sentence:

"Work isn’t something you come to the office for, it’s something you do."

When we break this down, we realize what the company is trying to say is that work isn't a place. Which is a good point, and we could use the reminder.

But what they're actually writing is this:

"Work is something you do."

...which is, well... you see what I'm saying here.

(I'm nitpicking this in part because I know this company is a) worth billions of dollars, b) has my customer loyalty, and c) has great and caring HR people. I know they're going to be okay when I pick on them in this small example.)

The point is, when you say things that make you sound profound, they'd better actually be profound. Otherwise, you're needlessly making your audience work to understand you. It's so much better to just say what you mean, clearly.

And yet, we ALL have these kinds of blindspots in our communication.

This is where I propose a new role that every company ought to hire for:

I call the job title, Bullsh*t Sniffer.

The job is to look through everything a company is saying, and sniff out the bullshit before it goes out to the world.

• Are you about to try to coin some new jargon that will make you look lame? The Bullsh*t Sniffer is going to cross that out with a red marker and force you to speak like a real person.
• Are you about to tweet something obvious, but dressed up in pretentious jargon? Bullsh*t Sniffer swoops in to make you come up with something more novel instead.
• Do the buzzwords on your company website make you want to go live with bears? Bullsh*t Sniffer writes copy edits that make your customers love what you're saying instead.

(If you can't tell, I'm being cheeky. But if you do decide to run with this idea, I'd suggest that in exchange for the terrible job title, the Bullsh*t Sniffer should be paid exceptionally well!)

So, why don't we just train everyone to cut bullshit out of their communication?

The answer is: we should.

Before we send that email or launch that landing page or save that PowerPoint, we all should go back over our writing for one more look-for-bullshit pass.

But then again, like I said we all have bullshit blindspots.

I write posts like this one where I rail against bad writing—but even I do it myself. It's easy to get caught up in our own ideas—or to rush straight to typing them—to notice when we're making things harder on the audience than we need to.

That's why I have my own personal Bullsh*t Sniffers in my life. Trusted colleagues who I run my most important work by before I hit publish. Check my back catalogue of blog posts and you'll easily be able to tell which ones I had bullshit sniffed and which ones I didn't.

Here's the bottom line:

How we say things makes a huge difference for building trust with our customers.

So why wouldn't we invest in—and empower—people who can help us come across more clearly, less clichéd, and more human?

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