Word up | Why it's time to ditch the business jargon

In this exclusive article for Grapevine Leaders, David Clayton, founder of training provider True & North, explains why using jargon instead of communicating clearly and simply is very bad for business...

If you’ve been reading news reports from the recent World Economic Forum at Davos, you may have been perplexed by some of the mystifying language spewing forth from politician and thinkers’ mouths: all ‘economic iron curtains’, ‘shift-lefts’ and ‘trust-shoring’.

To anybody working in advertising, this is just garden variety stuff. For years, everyone from the Chairman and CEO to the junior account manager has been guilty of using empty jargon and brain-befuddling buzzwords - so much so that they have become an unavoidable part of our professional lives. 'Growth hacking', 'snackable content', '"socialising" a document, 'agile culture', 'lining up ducks in a row' – phrases like these all get tossed around with liberal abandon, whether it’s during painstaking pitches, on mission statements or corporate websites or in emails and internal communications with your own staff.

And the problem is organisation-wide in many companies. Leaders are as guilty of using jargon as many of the people they manage, overusing clumsy language which can often mean different things to different people. It is no surprise, then, when misunderstandings happen in your organisation because communication has become so opaque. If you’re investing a large chunk of your budget to drive “organic reach”, does that mean online users naturally stumbling upon your content or will you be forking out for online communities to share it? If you’re joining a “dynamic and challenging team”, your workplace experience will be different if the team is run by a toxic manager rather than somebody more tolerant.