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Words
Setting an example

I just heard a chap on the radio, a senior civil servant of some sort, saying that his was a policy ministry. It didn’t actually do things.

The chap was explaining why something that his ministry had done had not been done very well. A further truckload of taxpayers’ money would be required to put it right. In the meantime, however, his policy ministry would be ‘conducting a review’, ‘identifying best practice opportunities’, ‘preparing a report’. After ‘consultation with relevant stakeholder communities’ he hoped to ‘agree terms of reference within an appropriate timeframe’.

It all sounded very impressive – as long as you didn’t listen too closely to what he was saying.  And it reminded me of a conversation I had with the chief executive of another policy organisation.

A seven-person team had laboured for almost a year to prepare a briefing paper. But the CEO wasn’t sure that the resulting novel-length document was as concise as it might have been. He was right. Even the executive summary ran to almost 20 pages. ‘If you could just … well, pull it together a bit,’ he said.

But pulling it together was easier said than done. It was not only tediously long. It was also mind-numbingly abstract. And I was struggling to work out what it was trying to say.

After toiling away for a couple of hours, I decided to call the CEO to get him to clarify the objective of the document.

‘It’s essentially designed to inform the agenda,’ he said. 

Inform the agenda? It sounded important. But I had no idea what it meant. Could he elaborate perhaps? Was it, for example, intended to present politicians with some options?

‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘It’s more a consultation document designed to assist in kick-starting the debate – or perhaps even the pre-debate – by contextualising some of the culturally-derived possibilities for going forward – without, of course, in any way closing off the possibility of further possibilities that may or may not develop over the course of the debate.’ And then he added: ‘In a nutshell.’

It’s little wonder the writers of the endless opaque document wrote as they wrote. If their boss thought 52 waffle words was ‘in a nutshell’, why should they be any different?

For several years I worked for a company whose CEO was most particular about the written word. His own writing was stylish, precise and economical. In those pre-email days, his memos were gems of clear communication. And I’m happy to say his passion rubbed off on the rest of us.