It is not lost on me that as a poet who loves words and relies on metaphor has become tired by the overuse of terminology in the workplace. Perhaps it is that these terms are banded about with such high frequency across all the sectors that it’s become another noise to filter out, whilst trying to listen and see what is actually going on. 

No doubt they were initially coined as a way to aid understanding and communication. Nowadays, often times, I don’t really know what the speaker or emailer is saying. I have to work harder to shift through the words to either;

A) establish the truth of the matter or 

B) what next action needs doing. 

Perhaps there are some things which are unmeasurable, us being humans and all. It is almost impossible to measure a toxic work place, or a thriving team. But you can sense it, feel it, observe and absorb it. Aspects of all work can be counted. I can tell you how many siblings of children at the hospice I looked after. I cannot tell you what counted most for each one of them about our time together. 

There are innumerable wonderful, good, pure interactions. Hours of our lives energy, effort and skills spent, ideas and creativity fizzing, and yes, even healing,  as we formally or informally take another’s hand into the future. Too often though we have developed a habit of stifling this with constructs, and yes words too.

So much so that what we have resembles life but is not really alive.

Which is what happens when  wildness and unpredictability is extracted from anything and is instead replaced and managed with controlled measures and manufactured substances. 

Like entering a heated sanitised overcrowded pool rather than being submerged amongst the known and unknown forces of nature in and of the sea. 

undeliverables

Keep your tangible outcomes 
complex landscapes, key performance indicators
drilling down, hearing a range of voices in this space. 
Keep your spinning plates, turning the soil
appropriate consideration of the risks,
getting back when you have more  bandwidth,
shifting the dial, building resilience.
We are done being thrown under an alphabet bus.

Give instead,
honesty.

Honestly say 
what you mean.
 
Call an end to inadvertently snuffing out sparks of
meaningful change and smothering embers of 
best practice with colloquialisms and jargon. 

Let all the balls fall from the air