Well versed in nonsense

There is a concerted campaign to empty words of their meaning and HR is one of the worst culprits.

Humpty Dumpty was not quite right when he said: "Words should mean anything I say them to mean." It is a useful enough dictum for realpolitik and organisational skulduggery, with phrases such as 'unwillingness to change' becoming a devastating put-down, when it might just as easily refer to 'taking a principled stand'. But it does not quite capture what is taking place.

The trend in the workplace seems to be to use words to avoid having to communicate. Saying something definite spells trouble down the line - from a transgression-hungry press, or pedants who will pop up at awkward moments to recall what you said before. So it has become better not to say things. Better just to waft vague thoughtlets, emptied of precise meaning, that are designed to slip unnoticed into the ether leaving only a faint whiff of something dynamic.

There was a fine example last week when the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and the Employers' Forum on Age called for 'a new vision' for the planned Single Equality Body (SEB). Unfortunately, they didn't specify what vision they wanted to see. Most people would judge a vision on its content, not merely on its existence.

A 'new vision'

They then concluded a long and conceptually void press release with the remark: "The Government needs to work with employers to ensure we create an SEB that really delivers on equality and diversity in the future." Deliver what exactly? Maybe total equality among humankind. That would be nice, but a mite ambitious.

Do they mean they hope the SEB is powerful? Because power in public policy is largely about budgets, so if they do, they need to call for an expansion of the funding of the previously existing equality commissions. Then the SEB might be able to sponsor lots of discrimination cases against recalcitrant employers and properly investigate structural inequality at work. Maybe that is not what they had in mind.

A 'new vision', you see, is tame - a harmless, but indisputably go-ahead thing to call for. 'Delivery', meanwhile, has become the frenzied catechism of Whitehall managers trying to reform public services, so it sounds official and in-tune with the predominant Blairite cant.

So it has been with 'modernisation', which has been used to impressive effect during the firefighters' dispute. The Government accused the Fire Brigades Union of being opposed to 'modernisation', even though the union had produced its own blueprint for modernising the service long before the current strikes. The less 'modernisation' means, the more potent it is as a weapon for attacking strikers.

Those naive critics who enjoy cruel sport with HR departments about their mission, values and outside-the-box 'isms' miss the point. The aim is not really differentiation of organisations, or getting employees to 'buy in to culture change'. The aim is safety.

Increasingly, there is a list of things organisations need to be seen to take seriously and over recent years that list has suffered inflation. It is no longer enough to produce goods and services - you've got to have a mission. It does not matter if the mission wraps you up in paradoxes: many organisations are now trying to think globally and act locally, to have determined leaders who are big on teamwork, to have strong cultures that are also consensual.

The only way to survive in this sound-bitten environment is to dispose of the significance of language and replace it with the new killer blandness.

Corporate communication has become rather like those attempts by mathematicians to do away with speech altogether because of its impreciseness, and instead just hold up placards with symbols on them representing collectively agreed thoughts.

Fuzzy-edged vagueness

This is not the usual whinge about business jargon - itself just as much of a cliché as the language it affects to despise. Jargon may be ugly and contagious, but all professions generate it.

There seems as much point in singling out business managers as in believing Americans to be uniquely bombastic. Philosophers can no more do without the a priori than chartered surveyors can live without 'portfolio mapping'. Jargon is about inclusion and exclusion from specified communities. Using it is a badge of belonging, but to be confused by it, or to pick someone else up on it, is to announce in a graceless way that you are separate and remote. Saying 'what box?' or 'did you really say emotional buy-in?' are, in truth, statements of deliberate ignorance.

What is happening now is different. Clarity has become a manifestly dangerous phenomenon. Fuzzy-edged vagueness, however, is a lithe and malleable substance that will not come back to haunt you at inconvenient occasions - a tool for not saying what you mean. That is why it has become an organisational no-no ever to concede the existence of 'a problem': it is too specific compared with the infinitely preferable 'issue'. In the modern world of work, the victory of perception over reality is nearly complete. Esse est percipi, the ancients said - to be is to be perceived.