Good communication is all about clarity. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a humble sole trader or a blue chip fat cat, an entry-level employee, senior consultant or CEO. It doesn’t even matter if you’re god. No matter how powerful or important you are, or your audience is, it’s your job to deliver simple, powerful messages in language people can understand without swallowing a dictionary.
Here are my current favourite communications fails, two ghastly examples of corporate bollocks. Nobody should ever communicate like this, no matter who their audience is. I challenge you to decode what they’re on about!
My jargon awards – Two of the worst offenders
First, this one from Deloitte:
“The role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) is evolving rapidly, with integration at the core of its mission. Increasingly, CIOs need to harness emerging disruptive technologies for the business while balancing future needs with today’s operational realities. They should view their responsibilities through an enterprise-wide lens to help ensure critical domains like digital, analytics, and cloud aren’t spurring redundant, conflicting, or compromised investments within departmental or functional silos. In this shifting landscape of opportunities and challenges, CIOs can be not only the connective tissue but the driving force for intersecting, IT-heavy initiatives.”
Second, another from Deloitte. Whoops. Sorry Deloitte, but really… 😉
“The IT worker can be the bedrock of an organization’s ability to compete in this era of exponential technologies. But beyond rhetorical remarks about talent scarcity, few organizations are investing in attracting, retaining, and developing their organizational capabilities. And while companies will secure commoditized skills through the most efficient means, innovation and growth will depend on workers with the skills and the vision needed to reimagine the art of the possible within the bounds of existing constraints such as the realities of existing systems and data and a limited understanding of emerging, cross-discipline technologies. While future technologies may not exist today, the need is clear, the potential is immense, and the time is now to start retooling your IT talent to be the IT workers of the future.”
A few words about confidence…
People who are not that confident about what they want to say often use jargon to make them feel their message is worth more. If it’s complicated then it must be clever, right? Not so.
When ideas, theories and propositions are genuinely worth having, there’s no need for a smokescreen. If you’re truly confident in your ideas, you should be able to express them simply and elegantly without resorting to gibberish.
