Emoji: A Way To Combat Jargon?

My A-Z of Modern Jargon post seemed to go down reasonably well -although I imagine those most guilty of it won’t be reading it.

Jargon is one of the oddities of the world of work. Everybody seems agreed that great communication skills are vital for leadership — and yet it’s one of the main reasons change efforts fail.

Jargon , which is sometimes useful, can be deceitful. It can be used to purposefully make a relatively simple work activity sound highly skilled.

Sadly — it works. Power can be gained through appearances. When most people hear someone using abstract language, they’re more likely to respect that person.

If we are to truly share our work and learning with others we need to adopt three principles:

Everybody can see it, there are no secrets
Everybody can understand it
Nobody is discriminated against

On our Bromford Lab WhatsApp yesterday we were discussing the 70 new emojis about to flow into our collective language.

1.5 billion people speak English, but 3.2 billion use the Internet, 75% of them through smartphones equipped with emojis. You can go pretty much anywhere in the world and communicate with emoji.

To say that emoji — this new universal language — can combat jargon is a gross simplification of the problem.

However we did see a role for our favourite new emoji in the war on useless words.

When we are faced with language we don’t understand, with acronyms that make no sense, with peculiar phrases that make things more complex than they need to be — we are going to deploy this fellow to playfully pp

So if you get this in a tweet from us, or an email, it means one thing:

You blew our minds.

Just not in a good way.