Which business word do you hate the most? Mine is ‘transformation’

Words are important. They can make things easier or harder to understand. They slice up the real world into conceptual units and hierarchies, whilst seeming neutral. They can impart unintended and unhelpful bias into the way we look at things. Over the years, I have written a few research notes on the topic of wording at Gartner, with my awesome friend and recently retired colleague Richard Hunter We wrote about never using the wording of ‘IT and the Business’, since the IT function is part of the business. (It should be noted that we haven’t really succeeded changing the world on that one, sadly.) We also wrote about the pros and cons of the IT department talking about colleagues as ‘customers’. And we wrote about naming projects. We argue that a name that is associated with a particular piece of software or vendor is a terrible name for a project. So is a random name like ‘Project Armadillo’. We suggest that there is a lot of power in using project names that are associated with the intended business outcome. Like ‘simplify to grow/ scale’. Or ‘One <company name>’. Over the years, I have come to hate some words commonly used in business. Top of my hate list is the word ‘transformation’. Mainly because it is very ambiguous what a transformation is. Is it a large project? Is it a project that crosses many business units? Many functions? Is it a project that involves changes in ‘soft’ stuff like culture as well as processes. Or business models as way as operating models? I also hate it because the word transformation is, as Bruce Lee would say, a finger pointing to the moon, rather than the moon itself. My second least favourite word is ‘architecture’ (as a business/ tech term). Perhaps here, I hate the discipline more than the word, because it seems to see itself more important than the companies it is ‘working for’, or the problems it is trying to solve. I am also saddened that project and program management are much more well-used words and well-established concepts than benefits realization. Some of the terms I have ended up researching and writing about have sliced business and technology slightly differently and sometimes uncomfortably, like bimodal, antifragility, simplification and benefits realization. Let’s avoid being prisoners of unhelpful terms, and unthink, unask, unlearn and evolve the lexicon of business and technology together, along with how we practice it. #unthink #unask #unlearn #business #communication