Selecting words with care

In the sessions that we facilitate, we pedantically push teams to choose the words that describe the system they are trying to improve...with precision and great care.

Language pollution is real.

Slop isn't something that AI alone creates.

Ambiguous, fluffy, misdirected language is pervasive in the strategy space and the job of a decent facilitator is to enable groups to only select the cleanest possible language in describing and designing the system that is desired.

Getting ideas down to the simplest possible point (which can take days and days of dialogue and debate to get to just a handful of words) ensures that confusion is minimised and variance in understanding is reduced as much as possible.

Strategy documents that are more than one or two pages in length are generally poorly distilled and almost guaranteed to be of zero practical use.

Words are tools and should be selected sparingly.