Slowing down the process of innovation with buzzwords and newspeak

"People will swarm more often and work solo less. They'll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization," says Tom Austin of Gartner, a market research consultancy. "In addition, simulation, visualisation and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills."

I'll translate this cloud of mosquito-like buzz-words for you: people need to work in ad hoc teams, sometimes with people from outside their company, to handle the large amount of information that the modern work environment creates.

In converting the process of managing a company into newspeak, Gartner elevates management to new levels of incomprehension. They aren't alone in producing impenetrable fog.

McKinsey, a global consulting firm, on six business trends: "distributed cocreation, networks as organizations, deeper collaboration, the Internet of Things, experimentation with big data, and wiring for a sustainable world." Hugh MacLeod, a marketing consultant, declares that advertisers no longer build brands, now they "articulate purpose ideas via social objects".

The Harvard Business Review has invented "balanced scorecard", "core competence", "strategic intent", "reengineering" and "marketing myopia".

The destruction of language is one of the methods used by George Orwell's totalitarian Party in his novel, 1984. "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words," says the villain.

One way of destroying the ability for intelligent people to discuss ideas is to reduce the number of words they have available to describe those ideas. The other, the way favoured by "thought leaders", is to create endless streams of new words to describe existing concepts and systems.

As this fog of verbiage envelops it becomes impossible to navigate without guidance. And so consultants write new jobs for themselves through the simple matter of creating new words to describe old ideas.

Such things have been picked up by politicians. Here's the ANC describing the spurious "benefits" of the "Protection of Information Bill": "Such intervention through policy and legislation with objectives to creating an enabling environment, which support media development and diversity, can enable free, independent and pluralistic media."

And there is the danger in this perpetual definition reproduction: leaders whose bad ideas don't work don't fix them, they just rename them.

The internal combustion engine was first patented by Alphonse Beau de Rochas in 1861. Nikolaus Otto built one in 1862. If consultants had been involved the definitions would have been under discussion for several decades before anyone built anything. The engine in your motor-car has undergone significant improvement and development yet it is still called the "internal combustion engine".

New processes got new names, the old ones kept theirs. In this way science can progress through the accumulation of new ideas and innovations.

A process which simply renames and redefines old ideas becomes incomprehensible and functionally impossible of meaningful use.

America's new "Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act" is an epic 2,319 pages. The original 1913 Federal Reserve Act, which created the central banking system for the US from scratch, ran to only 31 pages.

Innovation happens where ideas are simple and clearly expressed. As soon as clarity is lost then confusion reigns.

George Orwell, in "Politics and the English Language" in 1946: "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns ... to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."

"The slovenliness of our language," he continued, "makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

Business management is the application of finite resources to infinite wants. That is a complex and politically fraught undertaking. It requires intellectual clarity, moral sincerity and procedural lucidity.

Business consulting is an essential part of bringing precision to the fog inherent in complex business processes. That clarity is not served by continually renaming our tools.