Recently I met with a client who have been through an extensive series of facilitated workshops over the past 6 months. It is clear that much good work has been done to bring together people from very different cultures under the one roof.

I did sense, however, a palpable fatigue with terms familiar to the leaders and managers of business and government agencies such as KPI’s, KRA’s and Peak Performance. What do these terms mean anyway? From where I sit, they come from a worldview of command and control.

So, as consultant I turned to ‘plain speak’. I avoided jargon and acronyms an promised nothing from the workshop approach that I sketched on their whiteboard.

My sense is that managers and leaders everywhere are growing tired of neat little packages that promise to deliver everything to their organisation. Strip away the noise and the complicated processes and we might start making some progress.

I loved this quote I learned from Johnnie Moore when talking about Organisational Change Models that promise outcomes and best practice … it goes something like this (how did it go again Johnnie?):

“When God spoke the plain truth one day, the Devil saw it and thought ‘I’ll package that up and sell it to someone'” – that’s the quote I remembered and here’s the quote that Johnnie actually used:

God spoke the truth. The Devil heard it and said, “hey, this is great! I’m going to organise it and call it ‘religion’.”

Geoff