In general, I assumed, people who work at corporates are good at
abstracting the language. While the senior level management who wants to share
the message across, uses simple language, the mid-level management and the
juniors try to validate themselves by abstracting the language in such a way
that one may need a diploma in the language to understand the idea or the
content.
Interesting stories on the abstraction of language (Extracted from the book, Stories at Work by Indranil Chakraborty)
If our intention is to drive in with the message and make people act, why do we have to confuse them with the abstraction of language, creating an impression that we are dealing with something important but, unintelligible?
Just like how I could not use the simple word for ‘unintelligible.’ It’s time that I brush up my language 😊
Interesting stories on the abstraction of language (Extracted from the book, Stories at Work by Indranil Chakraborty)
If a Chief Strategy Officer with effective communication in mind, says,
‘this year one of the key areas we will drive is teamwork.’ It would sound
simple and straight to the point.
But, conditioned to the elite vocabulary and in an attempt of sounding much
more strategic, the same message can be told, “This year, we need to break the
silos across the business and foster a sense of deep trust and collaboration
across all verticals of the company.”
“In April 2018, Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla sent an email to
Tesla employees. In it, he mentions seven productivity recommendations. One of
them reads ‘Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or
processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation of inhibits
communication. We do not want people to have to memorize a glossary just to
function at Tesla.”
“In linguistics, the Gunning Fog Index (GFI) is a readability test for
English writing. The index estimates the years of formal education a person
needs to understand the text on the first reading. A GFI of 12 requires the
reading level of a U.S high school senior (around 18 years old). Some analysis
took the transcripts of keynote speeches given by Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and
Bill Gates in 2007. The GFI for Job’s transcript was rated at 5.5, Dell at 9.1
and Gates at a whopping 10.7. This means that while one requires 5.5 years of
formal education to understand Steve Job’s speech, one would need 10.7 years of
formal education to understand the one delivered by Bill Gates. No wonder one understands
and remembers Steve Job’s keynotes so easily.”
Maybe, it’s our abstraction of
language that’s obstructing us to drive the message home. There could be various other factors to deal
with but, I discover ‘abstraction of language’ seemed to be one aspect we need
to look over.
If our intention is to drive in with the message and make people act, why do we have to confuse them with the abstraction of language, creating an impression that we are dealing with something important but, unintelligible?
Just like how I could not use the simple word for ‘unintelligible.’ It’s time that I brush up my language 😊
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