Decoding Business Speak for Design to happen
First presented in Interaction South America 2017 , Florianópolis, Brazil
License Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Designers tend to be confused, or even frustrated, about what Business asks for. That’s because Business Speak is vague and confusing by design.
Business speak was not designed with Openness and Collaboration in mind.
Business speak was not designed for Design to happen.
How can designers decode business speak to get things in motion?
To understand business speak, we must first understand its nature.
Which has nothing to do with communication.
Business speak is rather the expression of a fundamental force of nature.
There are five forces of nature:
- Weak interaction force, which is necessary for the buildup of heavy nuclei;
2. The strong interaction, which keeps neutrons and protons together;
3. Electromagnetism, which keeps atoms and molecules together;
4. Gravity, which keeps large chunks of matter together, and:
5. Bullshit, which keeps people together.
Bullshit is not about lying. Bullshit is a fundamental disconnection with reality, necessary for humans to get along.
Marriages, teams, companies, political parties… Every collective human venture is only possible because of the magical powers of Bullshit.
On the nature of Bullshit
Why does Bullshit exist, how does it work, and why do we humans need it?
Well, it happens that reality is essentially multidimensional, ever changing and absurd. Let’s say it’s something like this, but dark and full of taxes:
When people experience reality, they inevitably do so from different perspectives and arrive to different, incompatible interpretations.
That is a very bad starting point for teamwork.
Bullshit replaces reality with a substitute that is simple, static and manageable, thus making collaboration possible:
Some people prefer to call that substitute “narrative”.
That, of course, is bullshit.
As is pretending that bullshit is reality itself, which is necessary for it to actually do its work.
Until the bullshit breaks down, our perception of reality changes catastrophically, and we believe that reality itself has changed. Instead of finally realizing that it is not reality what changed, but us. And our bullshit.
Understanding bullshit and its singularities
Bullshit may have a bad name, as we usually become aware of Bullshit only when it’s soul crushing. It’s like perceiving the electromagnetic force only while being electrocuted. But as it happens with the four classic fundamental forces, it is just part of our daily lives.
By understanding the nature of bullshit, we can understand how to manage it in our favor. Or at least, not against us.
Are you with me? Great, let’s go!
Let’s start by understanding that as a force, bullshit has both strength and amount.
- Amount has to do with how many bullshit statements are exchanged.
- Strength has to do with how disconnected from reality those statements are.
Much like stars need to keep an equilibrium between the expanding termonuclear reactions and gravity, businesses need to keep an equilibrium between Bullshit and Reality.
As business grows, the equilibrium between Bullshit and Reality is stressed. It is necessary to increase both amount and strength to account not only for the growing market, but for the growing workforce as well. So the business can bullshit more employees into making more bullshit, and marketing and sellspeople can bullshit more customers into buying more expensive bullshit.
If bullshit fails to counteract the reality forces acting to turn people away not only between themselves, but also from the bullshit field, business will be torn apart and dissolve into reality as a Bullshit Nebula, from which other businesses may rise in the future.
Conversely, if bullshit is increased too much, business will be crushed down into a money sinking black hole: a Bullshit Singularity. Fortune 500 companies bullshitting on a global scale, usually end up in this late stage before reaching 20 years.
Vision: the bullshit that keeps the wheels turning
What’s universally understood as Bullshit, is the kind focused on the present and past, building a compelling narrative based on gifted founders, a Manifest Destiny set back in the day, or whatever can be retroactively made to work.
Every year, leaders and founders become more and more perfect; flaws are forgiven and forgotten, and selfish jerks like Steve Jobs* grow wings and became revered industry visionaires.
(*) The Bullshit force was strong with this one. Employees of Steve Jobs used to say that he had a reality distortion field, could not dare to ground it, and accepted it “as a force of nature”.
Revised founder biographies progressively check all the marks on Campbell’s journey of the archetypal hero, to the point to eventually turn into hagiographies – despite increasing documented evidence to the contrary, which must be forcefully kept behind a carefully reinforced bullshit dam.
As can be seen, building up a mythical past that casts a visionary status into the present, is as easy as increasingly dangerous: having more and more bullshit focusing in the past becomes an increasing liability. Just one dirty secret being uncovered can take down the whole house of cards, and crush the business into a singularity.
A far better strategy, is focusing bullshit on the future. That’s called “vision”.
The trick is to fulfill that vision as time comes. So in the end, that bullshit turns out to be part of reality, and works on your favor to create bolder bullshit for the future.
That’s what Mission statements are created for.
Good mission statements are:
- built on present and past reality,
- related to the company, and
- inspire future growth.
Good Mission Statements are like racehorses.
As in, there are no horses in corporate buildings.
Let’s see some real life examples of how bad it can be.
Which company do you think has concocted the following mission statement?
…
Take all the time you need.
…
It’s a… library?
…
It’s a… museum?
A cultural center, perhaps…?
…
…
Give up? OK, let’s reveal:
It was Yahoo!, back in 2007.
Some executives were paid an obscene amount of dollars every minute they spent crafting that bland, steamy pile of words without any real identity or character.
…
Let’s see another one.
Wow. They threw everything and the kitchen sink into that buzzword Frankenstein monster.
Can you guess — not the company, but at least what this people sold?
Again, take all the time you need.
…
I’ll be here.
…
Uhm, theme parks?
…
Flying Iron Man suits for children?
Shoes.
They sold shoes.
To that end, they believed it would help to have these these kids featured on their website:
Marketing thought they were cool. Children, instead, thought they were dorks ready to be mercilessly bullied, and didn’t want to be related to them nor to the shoes they were modeling.
Shoes that kind of resembled “Spasmotica”, the fictional $972 million blunder that costed shoe designer Drew Baylor’s career in Elizabethtown (2005), starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst:
The actual company behind the actual shoe, was founded 11 years later as “Super Heroic” by former Nike employees Jason Mayden and Harshal Sisodia. And because those who do not learn from fiction are doomed to repeat it, the company shut down after four years.
But they left us with a ton of prime quality, fine-crafted bullshit of several shapes and sizes to serve as a warning to any future entrepreneur and investor.
For instance, on their funding-seeking institutional video:
- Investor Magic Johnson tries reeeeeeeally hard to make us believe that founder Jason Mayden has “a track record of success” (successes we know and are told nothing about), and that is “the best in the world designing… apparel… and footwear” (which triggers the question: if he’s so good, why haven’t we heard of him before?).
- Jason’s mom and two guys –with evident interest in making their money back–, deliver meticulously crafted, intensely rehearsed statements hitting all the right buzzwords.
- It is told that the shoes have something to do with founder Jason Mayden’s personal story, but we’re left grasping at straws when trying to grok what is that personal story about, and why we should care.
- Not a single second is devoted to explain what’s actually so “great” and “empowering” about the shoes.
- After the video ends, the only factual information provided about the shoes is that they are flexible, and that the neon green plastic strap serves as a Velcro replacement.
It should take no more than 5 seconds to say so. The video demands three full minutes of our life. From that time we’ll never get back, 97.2% (175 seconds out of 180) is filled with –you guessed it– bullshit. - There is no explanation about why the strap is neon green. A missed opportunity, as they could have told us that it was “tactically designed” for road safety or something alike to appeal the wallet holders, i.e. parents.
- We are left to speculate that the practical, unintended function of the neon green straps would be to aid bullies in identifying kids dorky enough to wear those shoes, especially in low-light conditions.
- As the last nail in the shoe box, at 2:29 and 2:49 we are shown a bunch of happy joyful girls playing in a climbing gym, wearing a cheap piece cloth as a “cape”… and no shoes at all.
It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s a… decent mission statement!
Now that we know what mission statements of Bullshit Singularities look like, let’s get to a rare, good one:
If you are a musician and know about cymbals, you can effortlessly relate this mission statement with Zildjian, the oldest manufacturer of musical instruments in the world.
And if you’re a real cymbal nerd, you will notice the mission statement I quoted is somewhat dated, as Zildjian celebrated 400 years in 2023.
Respect.
Transmuting bullshit
So, let’s recap:
The key to survive and thrieve in any business, is to transmute bullshit into vision.
Make that vision into reality.
And double the bet.
Transmuting bullshit into vision, is the way we designers and UX professionals can make a difference.
First step is to bear in mind what the business actually wants. That is, we have to decode the craving and concern behind the business bullshit.
For instance, every time bullshit speaks about “value”, what is deeply concerned about is about customers preferring its products and services.
How do you transmute that into vision, action, and reality?
So, when at the business table, every time value is talked about, is our cue to explain the UX research we will do to uncover user needs, our strategy and plans to design products that customers actually want and value.
For which we need business support. And resources. And, of course, money. Now we are talking the language of business: give me money, to make you money.
Capisce?
When business talks about being “customer centric”, that’s a cue for us as well.
There are occasions where business is not only mistaken, but plain wrong. Not addressing those mistakes, will cost us and ultimately hurt the business.
When business talks about people as “resources” (as in “easily replaceable”), is our cue to remind that resources are called so because they are scarce and valuable.
If HR doesn’t understand the difference between a senior UX “designer” and a junior graphic “designer”, then you, your team and your company are in peril of being overrun by idiots.
And when business talks about “being agile” as in “hurrying up”, is our cue to introduce what Agility actually is, and lead the way to proper practice.
So, in order for Design to happen, don’t just be a Designer.
Be a bullshit alchemist.
