Saturday, July 25, 2009

THE HORRORS OF ‘DEV-SPEAK’

From guest blogger: Ian Davis July 2009

“.......This hen-house language might not matter if it were confined to the business world. But it has escaped, like some malign virus , and is infecting us all. I would love to claim that the BBC, with its proud history of championing good English, is fighting back. Sadly, it is not. We have been suborned. A colleague of mine interviewed a young man who was applying for a job in his department. He asked him what he had been doing in the few months since he left Cambridge. He was told ‘Proactively networking’. He should have been thrown out of the building on the spot or, better still, publicly executed, his body left to hang in the lobby of the Television Centre as a warning to others. Instead he gave him the job. The young man is now, I have no doubt, a middle manager telling his colleagues how he can ‘progress’ his latest challenge,- or some such rubbish” John Humphrys (Introduction to Cochrane J. (2003) ‘Between You and I- A Little Book of Bad English’ Cambridge Icon Books

Some really horrible words/ expressions/ ‘managementspeak’/’socialsciencespeak’ jargon tortures the Queens, and Obama’s English. The ever expanding torrent fills the reports we hear on radio/TV or are obliged to read. This terminological jungle is a particularly pain within the development/ humanitarian community, and I not only have to read the stuff every day, suffer from it whenever I attend a conference but worse still, find myself unwittingly writing and speaking the same twisted language. I have put up with it, and alas perpetuated it, for all of 37 years and it has got to stop!

The jargon has a distinct following, a pair of examples: To relieve the boredom suffered in umpteen development conferences, a helpful friend- Geoff Payne who works in the low-cost housing/ urbanisation field , has invented a game called ‘Bingo’ (But... see the second PS). This required the development of a list of key words that of course had to include:
• Sustainability
• Stakeholder
• Holistic
• Gender sensitive
• HRD
• Indicators
• Bottom-up
• Empowerment.... etc. etc. etc.

Whenever a conference speaker gets up to share his (and its mainly men..!) pearls of wisdom the various Bingo Players in the conference hall have a checklist on their laps and when the speaker has used all the jargon on the list, the first of the competitors to recognise the achievement (this normally takes less than three minutes) has to climb on their seat and shout ‘BINGO’ very loudly . This has the electrifying effect of the platform speaker halting the flow of verbiage for a few seconds, while the prize winner is frog marched from the hall by conscientious minders.

My other example occurred in Angola when running a course on Disaster Management in 1994. As the course ended a local NGO director asked me “which words should I use to use in funding applications to ensure success?” In the subsequent, rather strange, conversation he told me that he had looked hard at the literature and felt that there were certain essential words or expressions to be sprinkled liberally throughout the text of any project funding application to International NGO’s , The UN or Donor Government Agencies.

In seeking confirmation that he had learned the language of development funding correctly, he produced a well worn list from his wallet, and it was no surprise that the list included:
• Sustainability
• Stakeholder
• Holistic
• Gender sensitive
• HRD
• Indicators etc.etc.etc.
In fact , when Geoff Payne showed me the rules of Bingo, the similarity of their lists made me wonder whether my Angolan student was in fact his co-author!

Therefore we, the undersigned, faithfully promise to cut ourselves away from the
world of the word merchants, in order to think and write with clarity and purpose,
and promise never, ever, to use such vocabulary again until our dying day, and we
promise to play the BINGO game in all future conferences , and insist that BINGO
checklists go in all future participant conference packs.....

The provisional list of no less than 93 examples of verbiage. (Additions/ Deletions welcome)
• Actualization
• Actualizing Interventions
• Access Funding
• At this moment in time...
• At this point in time....
• As of now...
• Basically
• Beaconicity
• Blue Sky Assessment (unless applied to meteorological analysis)
• Bottom-Up and Top-Down and Hands-On and Hands-Off
• Brainstorming
• Building on Best Practice
• Collateral Damage
• Common Approach Delivery Mechanisms
• Concretize (note the US spelling...)
• Conscientize (ditto..)
• Cross-Cutting Issues
• Data Mining
• Data Processing
• Delivering Objectives
• Descriptors
• Dialogue Mechanism
• Dialogue Teaching
• Diarise (this is when the Blackberries come out..)
• Disaggregate
• Double-loop learning (unless applied to aerobatics)
• Early Wins
• Ensuring Access (unless opening a door)
• Epigenic (?)
• Facilitator
• Facilitation
• Factor Analysis
• Factor-in and Factor-out
• Fault Line (unless applied to a seismic fault line)
• Flag-up
• Framework Parameters
• Gender Awareness
• Gender Sensitive
• Globalistic (makes this reader ‘go ballistic’...)
• Going forward
• Grassroots empowerment (but OK as a horticultural process to fertilise a lawn)
• Hands-On and Hands-Off
• Human Resource Development (HRD)
• Holistic
• In-Depth Analysis (unless applied to Scuba Diving)
• In-Tandem (unless applied to two people on the same bike)
• Interactive formulation
• Level Descriptor
• Level Playing Field (unless applied to a level playing field)
• Logarithmic
• Log Frame Analysis
• Low Hanging Fruit
• Macro and Micro everything
• Mainstream (unless applied to the middle of a river)
• Methodology
• Modalities
• Moving the Goalposts (unless at the end of the football season)
• North- South Interchange (but just as long as you don’t live in Australia)
• Participative Action
• Participatory
• Performance Indicator
• Platform (unless at a railway station)
• Proactive
• Proactive Networking
• Public/Private Partnerships (PPP)
• Rendition
• Revisiting Issues
• Seismic Impact (unless it is an earthquake)
• Sensitize
• Service Provider
• Silo (unless it is a Silo full of wheat)
• Sourcing the Inputs and Outsourcing the Outputs (Ugh)
• Special Service Provider (SSP)
• Stakeholder Analysis
• Stakeholder Partnership
• Stakeholder Engagement
• Stakeholder Management
• Stakeholder (unless applied to someone holding up a vertical wooden stake)
• Stretching the Envelope (unless applied to an attempt to place a large letter into a smaller envelope)
• Sustainable Livelihoods
• SWOT Analysis
• Take Forward
• Target (unless applied in archery)
• Tease Out
• Tokenism
• Tokenistic
• Thinking in Silos
• Thinking outside the Box (unless applied to someone giving serious thought with the Television switched off)
• Ticking the Boxes
• Toolkit (unless applied to a box of tools)
• Unpacking the issues
• Value Added
• Workshop (unless applied to a room where work takes place)
• Workshop Facilitation