The Local Government Association has banned another list of jargon. But it’s minds that need to change as much as words, says Neil Taylor.

I don’t know what a trialogue is. I’ve never heard of predictors of beaconicity (I’m struggling to say it, let along predict it). And a deep dive sounds vaguely rude to me. So, I’m all for the Local Government Association (LGA) highlighting and ridiculing the worst excesses of public sector speak. But banning it? I’m not sure that’s going to help.

After all, they’ve been publishing their bureaucratic blacklist for four years. If it really worked, they would have stopped by now, wouldn’t they? Instead it seems like one lot of nonsense just gets replaced by another. It’s like playing Whac-a-Mole. Bash one over the head and another one just pops up.

That’s because this language is a reflection of something much deeper, and much harder to change. Language is the product of culture. So if your culture is remote, complex, and obfuscatory, your words will be too. The problem is that this way of thinking, speaking and writing becomes so ingrained that we can’t stop ourselves slipping into it. Even in the press release about the LGA’s list of banned words, their chairman talked about people ‘getting access to services’. No-one really talks about ‘getting access to services’, they talk about using them.

But this kind of management mumbo-jumbo is not confined to the public sector. Nearly every big organisation we work with – and every function within those corporations – is riddled with it. And scarily, HR is one of the worst culprits. When I run workshops with HR people (who are, of course, intelligent, warm and deeply charming in person), I hear them fall over themselves to avoid using the words that normal people use. So they don’t talk about pay, they talk about remuneration. Or reward. Or compensation. (I love ‘compensation’. The idea that work is so awful that we all have to be compensated just for coming into the office.) In the last year, I’ve heard people talk about realignment, lower people intensity, even synergy-related headcount restructuring. What they mean is redundancies.

So why don’t they say that? When it comes to HR, there are a couple of big reasons, I think. The first is that HR has struggled so long to be taken seriously at the boardroom table that people overcompensate. They’re so scared of being seen as fluffy that they resort to language which is remote, and ironically, inhuman. Even though an understanding of human behaviour is what got them to the boardroom table in the first place. If you start trotting out HR-speak, you undersell the greatest skill you have.

The second reason is that we’re often scared of being clear. Swaddling your thoughts in jargon and buzzwords actually stops you thinking about what you’re saying, and stops other people really engaging with it. The upside of that is that it stops them challenging it, too. The most conservative audience we ever meet in our training workshops are new graduates, because they don’t yet have the wherewithal to just be themselves; they’re pretending to be professional. Take away the corporate words – and so the excuses – and they’re terrified of being exposed.

Sometimes it feels to me that the defining characteristic of large organisations is fear. The fear of being exposed; the fear of being ‘inappropriate’; the fear of legal comeback; the fear of not fitting in; the fear of being left behind. That’s the culture that breeds this language which is too scared to say anything real.

And that’s why the people who get to the top in most organisations are not the fluent management-speakers. It’s the fearless. Think of Alan Sugar, or Richard Branson, or Michael O’Leary. Because they have utter faith in the validity of their thoughts and opinions, they’ve got nothing to prove, and no reason to dress them up. Their clear thinking comes across, unambiguously, in clear language.

A simple test to see if you have got sucked into the language of fear is to read it out. That’s what we get people do in our writing workshops, and an odd thing happens when people use too many of these words. When they read them out, they put on a funny voice. That’s because deep down, the words don’t feel genuine; no-one would ever naturally say them. So when we ask people to read them out, they take on a role, or a character, of someone who would say something like that. Then we ask them: What do you mean? How would you explain it? And usually off the top of their heads they come up with something much more natural, and much more understandable.

So that’s the final lesson, not just for the public sector, but for all of us. Let go of the fear. Don’t try to sound clever; just be clever. And the cleverest people are the clearest communicators. If we all accepted that, no-one would need a trialogue again.

Neil Taylor is creative director of The Writer, the country’s largest language consultancy. He’s also the author of Brilliant Business Writing.