If someone asks you to “think outside the box” do you want to take said box, wrap it around their head, and then push them down some stairs? If so you may need to channel your hatred of buzzwords into something more positive; buzzword bingo!
Simply write down all the current cliches being bandied around at meetings (particularly any to do with strategy), then make a card of them for future meetings. Mine currently contains such gems as “intrapeneurship”, “upskilling”, “platform”, and “intellectual masturbation”.
Having spent the past couple of weeks hanging around with higher education strategists I thought I’d also help provide some essential translations.
Innovation: Making new stuff. Note that innovation doesn’t mean “having a good idea”. The world is full of good ideas. There is a glut in fact. Innovation is about having a good idea, building it, and then making sure it works properly.
Knowledge transfer: Someone from an evil corporation takes you out to lunch, steals your ideas, you get nothing.
Stakeholder: Any one of the select number of individuals who has ever heard of you, gives a crap about what you do, or knows what your stupid acronym stands for.
Evidence base: A set of numerical lies you can point at to argue for more funding.
The “x” agenda: The skills agenda. The diversity agenda. The knowledge agenda. Agenda is a word you can tack on to the end of just about anything to make it seem like a global effort, not just you and half a dozen quangos. “I like ham” = one crazy person. “The Ham Agenda” = Vast global conspiracy of plotters bringing about a porcine snack utopia. See?
Partnership: When someone lets you put their logo on your website or powerpoint slides.
Diversity: If your organisation needs to have a policy that recognises that people are all different, suggest they open up a dialogue about stating the obvious.
Consensus: Where you only invite people who agree with you to the meeting.
Lifelong learning: Mature students. Hell, they pay fees, we’ll take anyone who does that.
Best practice: “There’s no point reinventing the wheel”. Unless that wheel is rubbish. Then, you should reinvent it.
Accountability: When instead of claiming for a first class train ticket, you just claim enough mileage to cover the cost of it. Everybody’s happy.
Transparency: When you ensure that nothing sinister, sneaky, controversial, or in any way interesting is every committed to paper, ever.
Holistic approach: Fancy words for the entrance to a cave.
Work life balance: Bunking off work.
Entrepeneurship: Watching The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den.
Buy-in / Engagement: The holy grail of participative democracy, when 100% of your stakeholders show up to meetings, respond to surveys, fill out their suvey forms, holds spontaneous public celebrations in your honour, and finally provides you with what you’ve always wanted: Validation! Oh, bask in its glory!
Knowledge transfer: Someone from an evil corporation takes you out to lunch, steals your ideas, you get nothing
You get the warm glow of knowing that all those tax pounds that you’ve been frittering away on machines that go ping and unwashed labcoats has led to something that might generate something that s itself taxable? :o)
See also:
Learnings – pieces of knowledge gleaned from experiments, projects or life in general. A bit like ‘lessons’. In fact, exactly like lessons. Or ‘findings’. Or ‘results. But, you know, for idiots.
Thought-sharing The new brain-storming. Essentially, talking but with rather than the violent imagery associated with a storm, you have a ‘share’, a nice positive word. Thought-sharing can be done by people who draw nice pictures on their stomachs and pretend to be Care Bears. Variants include ‘thought-showering’ and ‘idea-douching’ (oh, okay, I made the last one up)
Action points Or, the tasks formerly known as ‘things to do’. If ‘respond to email’ sounded boring, then call it an action point and as you do it, you can picture yourself swinging from a vine while spraying terrorist with gunfire. From this abomination of a phrase came the use of the word ‘action’ as a verb.
And as far as I’m concerned, this is the only real context to which ‘stakeholder’ should be applied.
Work life balance: Bunking off work.
Or:
Work/life balance: an attempt by management to ensure that work pervades every area of your life. Also known as “flexible working”, “working from home” and any other term that implies you take work with you everywhere and never get time to think about anything else.
There is no escape…