I went to a seminar a few years back given by Don Watson, political speech writer and author of two rather confronting and very humorous books:
- Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language
- Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words
Both books are a strike at how the language we use in our society is communicating less and less meaning, despite that around 20,000 words are added to the English language every year! Watson, in both books and very lucidly at the seminar I attended, described how business, politics, and even schools and religious organisations are more and more choosing to use "weasel words" to communicate their organisation's purpose, intentions, goals, products, services and performance. Productive, process efficiency, effective, decruited, high value targets, engage, key stakeholders, best value, product offering, strategy elicitation, structural adjustment, sustainable future outcomes, endeavour, and on and on and on.
The implication for performance measurement? They say you can't manage what you don't measure, but before this becomes a relevant cliché to quip, ask yourself how you can even measure what you don't truly understand.
How many words in your strategy are weasel words?
Weasel words are inert, they are incapable of producing a reaction from those that hear (or even utter) them. Especially infected with this vocabulary virus is business, where inert language has taken over almost every corporate document and meeting room like a cancer. It's too easy to find examples to illustrate this point. The first example I noticed at a public display at the airport, and the others from five minutes exploring the internet:
"This unique partnership is a joint effort to leverage the research strength and depth of [the University] to assist [our airport] in better understanding its development objectives and impacts on the surrounding environment as we seek sustainable future outcomes."
"Instilling community confidence is an ongoing objective that aims to ensure we have a sustainable revenue collection system."
"The community housing system is proficient in delivering flexible, quality, cost effective and accountable housing services."
Now, for each of these examples, try to create in your mind a clear, vivid, colourful, life like, detailed movie that tells the story each example is trying to describe. You may have to read them a few times, you may have to guess at what some of the expressions mean, but you probably can't easily get this detailed movie. It's because the language used has left you cold, failed to inspire you, put you to sleep.
Have a look at those things you want to measure - your business goals or objectives or critical success factors (more weasel words!) - and hunt for words that aren't really saying anything, aren't telling the story about what you really what to achieve. Why are those words there? They aren't communicating meaning, which is the purpose of words, so what purpose (or person) are they really serving? How can you make the improvements or differences implied by the words, if people in your organisation aren't going to understand, feel inspired by and thus respond to those words?
What are you really trying to say?
So having caught the weasel words in your crosshairs, what do you do next? Basically, replace them. Use richer, simpler, more descriptive words instead to express your goals and objectives (and so on).
Try to involve your physical senses in the act of understanding the goal better. It's through our senses of sight, hearing, touching/feeling (and smelling and tasting, too) that we take in information about the world around us, and our senses are also a great basis for describing our experiences or ideas to others in a way that they can easily understand. And understanding your goal in sensory terms makes it easier to measure!
