Language - Keep It Simple and Be Understood

It is interesting how people seem to think that if they use jargon and complex sentences, they will appear smarter. Think about it, listen carefully when you are at a high level meeting and the senior leadership is present. How much of it did you really understand? How much actually contained useful content, and how much sounded like random jargon strung together? How much was a deliberate attempt to skirt the issue at hand?

It is amusing that we all know how to say something in a simple way, but choose not to. Usually because we do not want to appear dumb in front of peers, so we resort to complex sentences and jargon.( At other times, we do it when we really do not know what to say, and use it to purposely confuse the audience and hope they don't notice!)

In the movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Captain Jack Sparrow said,

"I am disinclined to acquiesce to your request",

what he really meant to say was simply, "No". This is of course a rather extreme example but it helps to illustrates the point.

Here are some gems which you may have heard too.

"We must leverage our core competencies" - which actually means, "We must do more of what we are good at"

"We must critically engage with our customer base" - what he wants to say is, "We must do what our customers want"

"We facilitate an environment of empowerment" -which in simple terms means, "We let you get on with your job"

''Our focus must be on execution excellence in all our prioritized projects going forward'' - which is a complicated way of saying, "We must focus on making a success of our most important projects"

''The implementation of Project X was a learning experience for the company'' - which is a polite way of saying, "We screwed up"

"Moving forward, the outlook is positive" - a more lengthy way of just saying, "Things will be better in the future"

''To remain profitable, we must re-align salaries to the market average'' - is management speak for, "We must ensure that we don't pay our employees more than other firms"

''We have challenging goals in a resource-constrained operational space'' - what the poor fellow is trying to say is, "It will be difficult to meet our targets when we are so short of money, time, and staff"

Do the words you use help the audience to understand what you want to convey? Be clear in your mind what you want to communicate and say it as simply as you can. Remember the saying, "Less is more". Your audience will appreciate it.

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