Bullshit Bingo, the revised edition

Every-one knows about “low hanging fruit” and “Pushing the envelope”

No one says them anymore, even our company nominated **** manages to use them ironically, bless ‘im

The phrase “Key Measurable” keeps cropping up on our organisation’s group calls

I’m going to suggest it as a candidate.

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 “buzz phrase generator” 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?

sadly from my experience it’s fat and unresponsive.

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

Logjam, 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.