Buzzword bingo in the public service

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Gary Chow | No Comments » | Trackback URL

I recently finished an assignment at a large government office. It had been a while since I stepped into the hallowed halls of a large organisation so one of the first things that hit me was the degree of spoken mumbo-jumbo.

I felt I had wandered into a new world where the lingo was not quite English or at least not the English we learned in primary school. I found myself playing ‘buzzword bingo’ in my mind constantly.

Here are a few examples of buzzwords, jargon and corporatespeak much beloved at this particularly workplace.

Space

This was used ad nauseum. We work in the xyz space. Have you done anything in this space? We are looking for someone experienced in that space. The only time the word ‘space’ was not used was in reference to…space; instead, they’d use ‘pod’.

Around

Anything worth discussing and working on was assigned to a committee or project team whose job it was to get ‘around’ the issue. And from what I could gather, often in a literal sense.

Learnings

I think this meant ‘lessons’ but using the proper term would have been too easy and too common.

Wellness

Almost spat out my coffee when I first heard this one. I think it means health and safety. They even had a wellness officer.

Offline

Anyone who had anything worthwhile to say at a meeting was often asked to take the matter up ‘offline’. Spending time discussing something useful would have got in the way of all the talk around governance, learnings and wellness.

Unpack

This is what happened at every meeting. Someone would stand up, often with a PowerPoint presentation, and ‘unpack’ a bunch of concepts. These key learnings were then considered takeaways.

Takeaways

No, not a quick scrumptious Chinese meal but the learnings you were supposed to remember, and which you then had to ‘cascade’ to your people.

Stakeholders

This referred to anyone who had a say in what you are doing or is the recipient of what it is you are developing. From what I could gather just about everyone was a ‘stakeholder’, which meant emails comprised of takeaways were copied to all and sundry working in the space.

Buy-in

This was apparently a big deal. Without buy-in, stakeholders would get left out and end up feeling disenfranchised and even unloved and may respond by ‘pushing back’. The more buy-ins one gets, the more one’s backside is protected.

Heads-up

Just as every stakeholder demanded buy-in, they also expected a ’heads-up’ whenever anything was proposed or planned. At first, I wasn’t sure what constituted a heads-up. Would a water cooler briefing suffice? A brisk pod walk-by? A brief phone call?  No. Usually what was needed was an all points bulletin written in the corporate typeface.

Back-fill

This meant temporarily doing someone else’s job while that person was away from the space. While I was there, it seemed like every second person was back-filling and few were actually doing the job they were originally hired for.