bigideas

So, with much glee the British media report that the Local Government Association has published a list of “words and phrases that all public sector bodies should avoid when talking to people about the work they do and the services they provide”. Let’s have a look.

Is It News?

The LGA is selling this initiative as an effort to “help people during the recession”, which looks like a rather craven attempt to give their press release some news value.

This is especially true since this is old news — or, more precisely, a run at generating some fresh coverage out of an old press release. “Surely not!” you cry, since the PR is dated 18 March 2009 (ie, today). But I easily found the following previous accounts of this story:

• Nottingham Evening Post, December 14, 2007: “Why do we have to have ‘coterminous, stakeholder engagement’ when we could just ‘talk to people’ instead?” asked Sir Simon Milton
• The Daily Telegraph (LONDON), February 9, 2008: Sir Simon Milton, the association’s chairman, explained: “Why do we have to have ‘coterminous stakeholder engagement’ when we could just ‘talk to people’ instead?”
• Associated Press Worldstream, June 21, 2008: “Why do we have to have ‘coterminous, stakeholder engagement’ when we could just ‘talk to people’ instead?” [Simon Milton] said.

I’m not a journalist, but if I were I’m pretty sure I’d have campaigned to bin this from the get-go.

Coterminous, Stakeholder Engagement

As you will have noted, the PR quotes Cllr Margaret Eaton asking, “Why do we have to have ‘coterminous, stakeholder engagement’ when we could just ‘talk to people’ instead?”. Note that this year it’s Cllr Eaton saying it; previously it was Sir Simon Milton, but he seems no longer to be with the LGA and so Cllr Eaton seems to be speaking his lines for him.

Anyway, the only references I could find via Google for the alleged phrase were in reference to the LGA’s campaign. Perhaps somewhere there is a council that has used this phrase to mean “talking to people” in a document designed to be read and understood by the public. I sincerely doubt that it’s in widespread use. I suspect, but cannot quite prove, that the LGA invented it.

Even if they didn’t, “stakeholder engagement” doesn’t mean “talking to people”. It means communicating (in any of a number of ways) with a certain specific set of people. “Talking to people” doesn’t cut it in a document that needs to be precisely worded. It’s possible that this phrase — without the absurd “coterminous” — has made its way into less formal literature designed for a broad readership. If so, yes, someone should have caught it. I’m not sure they should have rewritten it as “talking to people”; that would depend on the context.

So What Else Is Banned?

But let’s get to the list proper. The variously-attributed quote about “stakeholder engagement” calls these phrases “impenetrable jargon”, but actually they fall into a few different categories.

The first category is what some of our American cousins call “ten cent words”. So out go, among others, “taxonomy”, “advocate”, “autonomous”, “capacity”, “cohesive”, “collaboration”, “consensual”, and so on.

Another category seems to be largely aesthetic: phrases that have that vague ring of management-speak about them that enrage Telegraph readers. The LGA cites “across-the-piece” (meaning “everyone working together”, apparently), “blue sky thinking”, “can do culture”, and so on. It’s easy to be sneery about these terms, but two things are worth mentioning.

First, in some cases they seem perfectly understandable. “The council has a can-do culture”, while not worthy of Dickens, is no more “incomprehensible” than the LGA’s recommended “the council has a get-the-job-done culture”. And having a “can-do culture” is not at all the same as having a “culture of getting the job done”. One implies enthusiasm, the other success.

Second, some of the these would not seem to be rife in the .gov.uk-o-sphere. At the time of writing, “across the piece” gives 531 Google hits. Some of these appear to be records of speech in which the speaker may well be using an idiom that they wouldn’t choose in writing. Others appear to memoranda, reports and other documents that are mainly intended for internal consumption. Again, I’m not sure which council services the LGA thinks recession-hit Britain will be denied because we couldn’t understand a document that included this phrase.

Yet another category seems to take words with specific meanings and recommend replacing them with more general terms. So an “ambassador”, in the sense of someone whose job is to go out and win people over to something, becomes merely a “leader”, although they may not necessarily lead anyone. “Agencies” — who act as intermediaries between interested parties — become the more shadowy “groups”. And so on.

Lastly there are those that just seem wrong. “Baseline” doesn’t mean “starting point”. “Champion” doesn’t mean “best”, unless there’s a local council somewhere in Yorkshire that thinks maybe it does. “Context” doesn’t mean the same thing as “background”. And so on.

These categories are obviously porous, and the last problem actually affects all the others to different degrees. You just can’t search-and-replace one phrase for another and expect to get exactly the same sense. When you’re writing documents designed to be read by a wide public, you need skilled writers who have a good ear for how to get a message across simply and accessibly. If someone writing a document like that uses a phrase like “coterminous, stakeholder engagement” then all is already lost: telling them to delete it and write “talking to people” isn’t likely to yield a wonderful piece of prose. It might also change the sense.

Let’s Try It!

For example, maybe this randomly-chosen example of a question-answer pair from a public consultation is the kind of thing we’re talking about:

When do we involve contractors (who win minerals and take away waste)?
We will be engaging the industry as part of this early stakeholder engagement on our evidence gathering.

First of all, I doubt whether the intended audience of this document would have any trouble understanding this, but let’s put that aside. How would you re-write it using the LGA’s new rules? Well, the LGA gives me:

Engagement – working with people
Stakeholder – other organisations

Right, let’s do it:

We will be working with people the industry as part of this early other organisations working with people on our evidence gathering.

Much better! OK, maybe this is more like what the LGA intended:

We will be working with the industry as part of this early work with other organisations on our evidence gathering.

I have two problems with this. One, it’s harder to understand. Two, it’s vague to the point of sounding evasive. “Other organisations” isn’t defined in the way that I’d expect “stakeholders” to be, and “working with” might mean anything. I wouldn’t be happy with that as an answer to the question, were it my question in the first place. It’s ironic that the LGA offers these linguistic fluffifications as an antidote to attempts to “hide behind impenetrable jargon”.

Accessibility and Rightness

The LGA’s stated intention is to help local councils “communicate effectively with local people [...] in a language that they can understand”. This is a worthy aim. I accept that not everybody is a native English speaker with an office job and that those who aren’t deserve to be able to understand the information their local government publishes for them.

It would just be great if their advice were based on some kind of research into which phrases are most confusing for the people they’re most concerned about. I’m sure existing research is easy enough to lay hands on without even commissioning a new study. Clearly, though, the LGA really has no interest in doing this. What they’re after is a bit of media coverage. I don’t know why that would be either. This same story has already been through the news cycle at least three times in the past eighteen months. I guess the LGA got enough out of it that they figured it was worth another go, and certain publications will never tire of an excuse to run this sort of thing.