Today, I looked at the cover of one of the dozens of trade magazines I receive each month to read (industry disguised because the industry is unimportant for the point) the headline:
"CHANGE MANAGEMENT
[members of industry category] try to navigate a changing of the guard, as well as a sea change in operating tactics and business paradigms"

These are folks at the very heart of all business in North America. Their industry had a record year in every category they measure, including revenue, despite rising fuel costs. Five of the major organizations within the category have new CEOs in the past five years.

The industry, itself, was the very first to introduce an industry wide method of automatically identifying and recording the activity and location of all mobile equipment, so it really does change and adapt to its economic climate.

This is an industry I have followed for more than 40 years, but continually frustrates me with its talent for "obfuscation" (using high-sounding words to describe simple activities and thus befuddle the ground level employees who have to carry out the activities.)

THE PROBLEM WITH HIGH-FLOWN LANGUAGE:
I might have expected a sentence like the one above buried somewhere in a report, but not in a cover page headline. When folks make information about change management inaccessible to the rank and file of their organizations by using language difficult for most of them to understand, it is akin to giving work instructions in college-level English to employees who are illiterate in English. The net result is frustration for managers and employees alike. Even worse is the impact on customers who may receive nonconforming goods or services because employees misunderstand instructions.

MEA CULPA (my fault)
I recognize my own guilt when it comes to using language difficult to understand and so may be more sensitive to the problem than many. Because I have been my own worst enemy when trying to communicate, I know first hand the poor results when folks don't get the whole message because they don't understand the words.

Part of the reason I campaign against the use of obscure acronyms is precisely because they are so open to communication failure.

THE GOAL FOR QUALITY FOLK:
Somehow, our Quality industry has to bring our language and message into the mainstream if we want to be as efficient as possible in serving our organizations. We have to tread a fine line between using a secret code known only to a select few of our members and "dumbing down" the message so much we alienate our audience by speaking to them in "baby talk." (Did ums want a pretty product? Yes, um do!)

Got any suggestions?

I can appreciate your Mea Culpa Wes. I too have a bad habit of not communicate clearly. It mostly shows up in writing.
One thing I have learned to do is, after writing something I reread it with the idea of reducing the number of words. Also I read the piece out loud to hear if it sounds clear.

This is mainly a survival thing. A quality person doesn't want to come off as "uppity" to the production personnel. Knowledgable yes, uppity no.

James

Wes, I could not agree with you more. A general rule that I follow is to have the people doing the job write the work instruction, SOP, SOI, whatever the documentation that is required. The people closest to the job do it. It is then reviewed and edited as required. This way, the language is understood at the level required. In my present job though, management has made that practice strictly foreboding.

It doesn't sound professional when our customers review and read these so engineers and management are to write these documents and make them sound good. When the average reading level of college seniors is 7th grade why do we demand that the line workers who make the profits for our companies be left out of the loop?

We we never learn?

Excellent point, TN. When we started down the ISO 9001 road (actually 9002 then), I had many of the Operators on our 4 shifts write out what they did. There was a little moaning at first because they all did their job the same way, and I was loading them up with extra work. Yeah, right.

Well, usually we ended up doing about 4 or 5 iterations that each of the Operators for a certain job would critique until we ended up with something everyone could live with. So, we ended up with a document they could live with (and read), found some best practices that we formalized accross shifts, and, by the way, our procedures were audit resistant because the guys wrote out what they were actually doing.

Actually, with all of the running around and rewrites, I was the one who got loaded down with "extra work". It would have been much easier to just write something out and throw it in a binder. But, what we have has worked, for several years now (a decade +) with a minimum of revisions.