François Michelin, head of the eponymous tire manufacturer from 1955 to 1999, took great care about communicating his meaning when he spoke, and was well-known for stating “We must always consider what words mean at their root, and where they come from.“
Those who have had experience in international organisations know that words carry different meanings to people in different cultures and of different mother tongues. Indeed, when two such different people talk, the use of the same term often masks a lack of mutual understanding.
As humans, we are continually trying to make sense of what is around us. We try and avoid the heavy thinking necessary to take all our inputs and environment into account, and we tend to jump to what we consider workable conclusions, influenced by past experiences we think are similar and the meaning we were brought up to understand. Yet there may be a big gulf between what is meant and the sense we make of it. This implies that mis-communication in international organizations is unavoidable; and the same goes in a more limited fashion for the use of any concept once it quits a learned context and goes mainstream.
The effect is redoubled when the word in question is conceptual and in common use, and the use of buzz-words or abbreviations without a common definition is a great handicap to understanding. The tendency in business to try and encapsulate a company goal or behaviour in one word – “Our values are Team, Action, and Respect” – is a great source of mis-understanding, and not many take the trouble to explain themselves. Using metaphors and proverbs can be equally risky, but very much worse is the tendency for some to bluff knowledge by liberally using such words or phrases, quotes and references without understanding the subject.
In general, I find that the terms that cause the problems are those that have an opposite, but which are not a binary choice, more a sliding scale. This adds a degree of arbitrariness which may be selected by one person at a certain point on the scale, and by another elsewhere, even though they are using the same term and scale, yet hiding from each other where they put their definitions. For example: Where does strategy stop and tactics begin? Where does mistrust become trust? When am I aligned with somebody? What would I consider to be initiative, and what doing something I’m not allowed to?
All these points on mis-communication are coloured by our perception of what it costs to not know what the term really means. Would I lose face if I admitted that I didn’t know how strategy is defined? How can I find out if someone is bluffing, without causing them to feel mistrusted? Can I really object to management-speak, if this is a common language, and how can I make sure that the common language does not have different interpretations?
Let’s consider what some management terms mean. I intend to pick a few and go through their meaning in detail, trying to set the context of the term in the midst of the constellation of similar terms, in order to help avoid confusion. While it won’t cover abbreviations (another fertile source of mis-communication), I hope it may serve as a glossary for those who want to aid comprehension.
Mis-understanding is fostered by:
- Abbreviations and buzzwords
- Bluffing
- Inconsistent interpretations of key concepts
- Our attempts to make sense of things we don’t understand without putting the effort into learning
- Applying different values
