Meeting bingo

There’s an old office game called meeting bingo, where you catalogue all the buzzwords and clichés that people use in meetings. Sometimes, there’s a good reason for using a particular piece of jargon or saying, but all too often they become meaningless catch-phrases, with everyone bandying them about in the hope of proving how smart they are.

Here are some of my favourites currently doing the rounds:

• Pro-active. An oldie but a goodie. Being reactive is now considered a bad thing (but when you’re a hospital or fire station, this is exactly what you want to be). And whatever happened to just being active? No one’s active anymore, only proactive.
• Learnings. One of those great verb to noun conversions, now we never have to say that we learned anything, we instead get learnings. Or if they’re really important, then key learnings. Closely related to outtakes.
• Actioning. As an equal opportunity mangler of English, we can also convert nouns into verbs. So instead of “have you done it”, we get “have you actioned those key learnings”.
• Critical mass. People love to take very particular scientific terms and use them in a vague, generic sense. Critical mass comes from nuclear reaction, but now it’s used in relation to the latest awareness campaign. “What’s the critical mass we need to action those key learnings?”
• Going forward. A marvellous tautology to rival the superfluous “pre” prefix for its sheer redundancy (pre-pared food, pre-booking). We’re also looking to improve the business going forward, which is great, as I’m sick of getting in that rickety old time machine and going back to improve the business in 1924.
• Interfacing. Another mangled technology neologism, we don't just talk to people any more, or comment on their work, or even go see them, we interface with them. I once met someone whose job was essentially customer management, and their job title was (I kid you not) interface facilitation. Do I sound like a musical robot?