[Closed] Bullshit Bingo, the revised edition

Place I used to work had "Synergy Drivers" and "Growth Engines" pop up with alarming frequency on any conference call.

Yesterday I heard a comment that a particular change request needed to "be able to wash its own face" 😀

The old chestnut 'going forward' is the most popular cliche here. Every sentence ends in going forward

Protecting our future... It means massive wage cuts and sacking half the staff

Key measurables sounds about right. TBH I'm across so many different industries they mostly just pass me by, I can get the gist of what people want or mean fairly quick.

'reaching out'
'art of the possible'
'holistic approach'

The comms cell.
aaghhh.

We have a lot of these in the office, I currently have the below list pinned to me desk so I can throw a few in at my leisure.

??? piece (context, “we’re doing a lot of work on the data migration piece”)
Best in breed
Break through the clutter
Calibrate expectations
Class leading
Close the loop
Customer centric
Disruptive innovation
Elevator pitch
Fulfilment issues
Herding cats
High order thinking
It is what it is
Just doing my job
Leverage
Low hanging fruit
Mission critical
Money maker
Par for the course
Paradigm shift
Quick and dirty
Synergy
Thought leadership
Value add

You can use the "[url= http://www.acronymfinder.com/buzzgen.asp ]buzz phrase generator[/url]" if you want to add some more into your repertoire.

If we wanted to get there we wouldn't start from here

We have a board in our office with a list of them, the highlights (and translations) are:

Shovel-ready - projects we've won and are ready to get started on
V2V - a phone call (FFS!)
Diarised - put it in your diary
Bandwidth - how much free time we have for new projects
Ideation - who the f*** knows, can't you just say "let's have a think about it"?

While not a buzzword, a personal bugbear of mine is "verbiage", which seems to be used by (US) clients to mean "words", as in "can we change the verbiage here?". It's not big and it's not clever. Plus it's 3 syllables rather than 2, so it's actually more work to say...

The bloke I sit next to refuses to do anything unless it's on his "critical path".

I use 'quick and dirty' though more to describe my sexual prowess rather than in a work setting....

Mindshare

'I don't think we have enough of their mindshare on this project'

In other words they can't be bothered to spend any time on it.

I recently worked with a contractor project manager who used so many bingo words it had everyone looking at each other in disbelief.

Over a few beers it appeared that 3 of us had independently noted them down as a few were new to me and priceless. Some of these look made up but he actually said all these words over a 3 month period.

We need to make sure he has skin in the game
I want you to all think outside the box
We need to be pushing the envelope
We need to park this point and resolve it offline
I'm going to put this meeting to bed as we are just bayoneting the dead
This will be a chalk and talk
We don't want to boil the ocean here
Hope is not a strategy
Do we need to go exploring the deeper envelope?
I'm the Captain but we will steer this ship through the project together
We need to define our Modus Operandi
Lets make sure we upskill the client
We're all adults now
I'll crank the handle of the plan
These dates are barrelling towards us like a drunk Elephant
It's up to each individual church goer to determine their own attendance
I will shepherd us through the detail
Lets all try and inhabit the common ground
There are different ways to skin this cat
Let's all try and be on-board
How much of the drizzle of innovation will be ready in time.

'Leverage' as a verb.

Isn't everything lean and agile these days?

'Let's not try and boil the ocean'

'We need more skin in the game'

Both genuine, both heard yesterday 😐 Decided to work at home today...

EDIT - DaveRambo, hadn't seen yours when I posted but you reminded me of 'chalk and talk' 👿

'Stripping away' used instead of multiply

As in

'We are stripping away red tape'

slowoldman - Member
Isn't everything lean and agile these days?

It does make it a bit nicer when you do find some good lean work going on.

Perfectly straddling "bullshit bingo" and "things that annoy me":

We need to clear the lockjam here

[url= http://blog.mlive.com/chronicle/2008/07/grand_jam_of_1883.html ]Logjam[/url], you cretins. That even makes a kind of sense...

🙂

DaveRambo....That's our nominated ****!

He doesn't have normal conversation, he just talks like that all the time!

'Leverage' as a verb.

'Surface' as a verb. As in, 'we need to surface any potential problems with this solution'.

The managers at our place seem to be obsessed by 'space' a the moment. Such as...

'We're moving into a new business space'
'The space we're in is changing'
'Competitors are moving into our space'
'Opportunities in this space are growing'
etc.

Surely "Working from Home" is bullshit bingo for "Duvet Day" !

Surely "Working from Home" is bullshit bingo for "Duvet Day" !

This 🙂

What about
"reaching out to..."
"Socialising" when applied to an inanimate object e.g.a document

'a more rounded animal'

'where he thinks our product base might fit in with his existing portfolio'

'moving forward' I can almost blank out now, it's like a nervous tick with some people

While not a buzzword, a personal bugbear of mine is "verbiage"

Verbiage is being unnecessarily verbose and using convoluted language. Using it in the context here is bloody hilarious. (-:

I may have recently been guilty of raising a laugh with

"Jellybean the options"

And

"Going on a bearhunt" (ie. Let's stop and see if we can go around the problem before fighting our way through it)

😀

Going forward can we have less of these topics? I don't feel anymore empowered or enriched by these.

I was in a meeting a while back when one of the contractor BAs actually used the word 'imagineer'. Needless to say the whole room burst out laughing and he felt forced to apologise.

Going forward can we have less of these topics?

"fewer".

HTH.

he felt forced to apologise.

Thing is, it's contagious. I've caught myself coming out with meaningless gibberish before now and then had to catch myself and apologise. You hear it so often and it sticks in your brain going forward.

One of our suppliers told us that his (antivirus) product was great because there was lots of opportunities for 'tromboning'

10 minutes before we stopped laughing.

Imagineer? How long before someone is called a business sorcerer?

A couple of years ago I worked at a place where the term 'negative upside' was very popular. e.g. The potential upside of the outcome is... the potential negative upside of the outcome is...
I always assumed that they meant downside but never had the heart to ask!!

We need to break through the clutter of all of these words and phrases and calibrate expectations that they're simply not acceptable, a real paradigm shift is needed. However, it is par for the course for some people to talk this way, to take the Michael out of them would be just going after the low hanging fruit, we need some real disruptive innovation to close the loop in this piece.

...Taxi...

Have we ringfenced the unicorn on this one yet?

not yet, but i think someone was about to isolate the marginals.

It doesn't need to be a complete game changer, let's just breakthrough the clutter and put in a quick and dirty solution.

One of my work colleagues once became obsessed with using the word 'decimate' to describe the process of dividing a problem up into smaller chunks (10 presumably). He actually once told a potential (and very confused) client that we 'decimate projects'. After that meeting I told him that if he ever used that word again I'd tell him to shut up there and then no matter who was in the room.

Have we ringfenced the unicorn on this one yet?

Not heard it for a while, though someone snuck 'ringfencing the Crown Jewels' into a business review at the end of last year.

😆

I'm fortunate enough to be self-employed now but a previous boss used to use the word 'elude' instead of allude, which amused me. Another previous boss got a promotion and started wearing clear glass glasses to make himself look like less of a thicko chav, and I burst into laughter when he used the word 'synergy' to describe a shelf of christmas crackers 😆

'Surface' as a verb

Submarines quite often surface, no?

[i]Thing is, it's contagious.[/i]

absolutely this.

The one I mentioned was mentioned once a couple of weeks ago by the MD, taken up by the Ops director (an idiot) and now is the default word in every conference call with the whole team...

Hateful

re decimate a colleague had one of those cartoons up with a line of centurions - one had been nobbled, caption from one surviving c to another along lines of "this decimation stuff isn't as bad as it's made out to be"

Have a colleague who uses skin in the game and 'piece' crops up a lot recently - oil and gas industry so maybe you just get pulled along with using them?

Going forward let's leverage our synergies across the piece so we can totally own the mindshare in this space.

Bandwidth is used on an almost hourly basis where I work. It absolutely drives me mental.

Some class leading thought leadership being written here by some best in breed contributor's. Good stuff.

heard most of them before including 'wash it's own face' in the 1980's. Usually used to describe an application for a loan for a purpose that generated enough cash to make the repayments.

The current one that everyone in my org is using is 'disrupt' as in we need to disrupt the industry but of course gets used everywhere for lots of other reasons.

Other good ones I've not seen mentioned already are 'we need to shoot the puppy' i.e. make an unpopular decision or 'hydro-digital' for a high level estimate i.e. put a wet finger in the air.

EDIT: 'Gain traction' is also a few years old but not seen it above

'hydro-digital' for a high level estimate i.e. put a wet finger in the air.

Oh, I'm having that, that's brilliant.

'hydro-digital' for a high level estimate i.e. put a wet finger in the air.
Oh, I'm having that, that's brilliant.

My pleasure! 8)

" How difficult can this be? It's not rocket surgery!" WTF???

Keep on adding value

Optioneering

Choosing best athlete

Robust processes

Been using rocket surgery for about 20 years!

Literally extrapolating synergistic linkage for sub-triad decades.

My personal favourite. "Oh for f***'s sake, shut up".

I don't hear many at all, simply because we all speak so many different languages (both in the usual sense and because it's a load of lawyers, bankers, engineers and architects), so plain speak is needed otherwise we never get anywhere.

That said, there is one chap I work with who uses the same phrase over and over for describing delaying something we don't want to deal with now but know we will have to at some point:

"Kicking the can down the road"

🙂

"just bayoneting the dead" - I'm going to try and use that one this week!

Not overheard directly, but passed on, "bio-break".

Oh, just heard this one "Silence is consent".

Currently in my organisation, people are 'gatekeeping their silos'.

"We should kick this into the long grass for now."
10 words to say forget it.
RM.

Not overheard directly, but passed on, "bio-break".

Standard phrase in multiplayer online gaming, heard it all the time in my Warcraft days.

Onboard/ed/ing is used fairly regularly. Makes be want to kick small animals.

[img] [/img]

'Organisations/sectors/divisions etc must consume their own smoke'
'Completed by close of play' (irritatingly shortened to COP by email)
'Battle rhythm for today'

"We need to dovetail this into the scenario" was a favourite used by an old boss of mine.
It is now the agreed 'safety word' that I use in conferences when I can hear my MD building up to excessive BS.

A few years ago a Dutch colleague was on the phone while 2 of us were in the car. After the call he announced "Tomorrow, we cut the balls off the rabbit!"

My mate and I exchanged 'WTF' looks, thinking it was bullshit bingo and I asked for an explanation.

He said "That was my wife. The rabbit, he's very aggressive. Tomorrow, the vet, he cut his balls off."

Priceless.

We did manage to use it in a call later with one of the worst bingo offenders present, so if one day you hear it in business, maybe we started that one.

DNA. Everything 'has it in its DNA' these days. Brand DNA. Product DNA. FFS.

"are you the chicken or the pig in this breakfast".

My bullshit haul from a workshop last week:

On The Radar
Territory
Strategy
Up-Skill
Onboarding
Micromanage
Comfort Zone
Leverage
Re-Crystallise
Call To Arms
Thrashing Out
Piggybacking
One Stop shop
Link In
Cascade
Pillars
Harmonisation
OTIF
Whitespace

Have we had 'value add' yet? As in 'We really need to be sighted on the value add here'

Saddens me every time.

'Battle rhythm for today'

😐

send an e-blast

Put the tiger in the hamster

the goldilocks option

knock on the door of uncertainty

risk isn't a gamble

treasure the hairy map

start it up and see what catches fire (its software, not a rocket ship).

"Treasure the hairy map". WTF? I can't even begin to image what that might refer to unless it's perhaps checking the back of your hand whilst masturbating. That at least would make some sense unlike most of these meetings that infect businesses these days preventing us getting any work done.

Is there a TLA for the way I feel about this?

'Surface' as a verb

I hadn't come across this one before, but lo and behold, bang on cue, an email just came through containing this delight.

Hmm, I've got a surfacer, and quite often timber is surfaced with it.

Without that machine it's utter bollocks though!

People saying "in terms of" when that actually mean "with relation to" or "regarding".

"I'm going hull down for the PM" meaning "Please don't disturb me this afternoon"

Treasure the hairy map - looking at a load of user experiences that cross over and sometimes didn't end in a positive interaction leading to a non-linear logic path cloud.

'We need to Solutionise this'

f%^& off its come up with a solution. We are not heat treating aluminium.
Called the main offender out on this in front of the whole office, twice. She has stopped, but I suspect only temporarily.

Bloody acronyms too. I like to ask what they mean. It no longer amazes me that people do not know what they stand for.

Not one I've heard but my wife did during a communications meeting - "we are where we are" 😕

We spend a lot of time in meetings working out how to get on the "Happy Path".

(IT project meetings mainly).

So what are your takeaways from this thread?