Jargon, consultants and failing to properly communicate
If you’ll just lie back on the couch, make yourself comfortable and take a deep breath. In. And out. Let’s begin. You say your wife doesn’t understand you?
It’s not just her. I start to speak in meetings and I can see people trying not to snigger. I think my old college friends even do drinking games when I turn up. They regularly bang the table and down a tequila shot when I speak. It’s like there’s a big joke, with me as the punch line.
This sounds like the early onset of paranoia. When did you first notice this?
It started when I changed careers. But if you were to drill down into the...
…‘Drill down’?
If you were to drill down into the matter, I think the sniggering gained traction when I joined the consultancy’s transformation working party with a view to refresh the digital road map and ensure all our people had information capabilities tailored to their mission, location and role.
I’m sorry, what did you just say?
I said I think the sniggering started around the time of my promotion. It was a difficult task, although not quite of boil-the-ocean proportion, but something had to give. I simply didn’t have the bandwidth to juggle all the balls. Perhaps I neglected my wife.
I’m confused. I thought you were a management consultant. Why are you trying to boil the ocean?
I’m not trying to boil the ocean. It’s a phrase for an impossible task.
But why didn’t you just say that?
Say what?
That it’s an impossible task.
I did. I said: ‘Boil the ocean’.
But it’s not the same thing. And is boiling the ocean really impossible? Surely, on occasion, the sun ‘boils the ocean’, so it’s theoretically possible, although it would take a very long time.
Look, can we just get with the program here? I’ve come here to reach out to you for help with my issues, and you’re quibbling about my language. At the end of the day, that’s not really the point. What I need here is a therapist who can hit the ground running and sort this mess out.
I beg to differ. I think your ‘issues’, as you describe them, are directly related to the idioms you use. For example, you just said that you had ‘reached out’ to me. As far as I’m concerned, that implies somebody who is stretching out for an embrace...
Whoa! Back up there. I’m definitely not looking for any touchy-feely type of therapy. Let’s close the loop on any sort of misunderstanding there.
What loop? I can see no loop in this room, so how can we close it?
It’s a figure of speech, doc!
No, it’s not. It’s jargon.
You say tomato, I say tomahto. You’re starting to sound like my wife. Every time I say something, she tries to correct me. I play back each conversation in order to action some of the issues being addressed and to make inroads going forward with our relationship, but to no avail.
You’ve identified the problem – we’re making progress. Now let’s...
...Sorry, doc! We’ve got a hard stop at three. Adios.