Blowing Chunks

I was in a workshop on training recently, delivering a session on curriculum development for my new project. Typically, because I’d joined the project late (having been tied up on my previous project, which refused to free me up), the existing project team had tried to do this bottom-up, by deciding on what they were going to teach (by way of defining the learning objects to be developed) before deciding who they were going to train or what they needed to be taught. So I was now trying to retro-fit a more structured, classical approach to curriculum development onto what they had already decided, without simply throwing it all away and starting again (although I was sorely tempted to do this). So I was doing my best to provide some guidelines on the nebulous area of module determination – deciding how (or whether) to divide a course into smaller learning units (with an eye on SCORM compatibility) – made all the more difficult now by having to decide how to logically group their already-determined learning objects into undefined modules. One of the attending knowledge workers interrupted me with “Well, Manager X on my last project came up with the concept of ‘chunking’ – breaking the course into chunks of deliverable content”, and then went on to provide some guidelines that sounded strikingly familiar.

Now I don’t really mind the break-in – this was a workshop and contributions were heartily encouraged – but what really irked me was that Manager X (not their real name) was a former protegé of mine (at least to the extent that a manager whom you report to and who has employed you solely so that you can cover their ass by teaching them everything they are supposed to know already can be called a protegé) to whom I had introduced the term and concept of ‘chunking’ to a couple of years previously. And now here it was being trotted out by someone whom I had never met before, as if it were all some major revelation, and I should be eternally grateful for having the opportunity to suckle at the teat of Manager X’s vast knowledge on the subject. “It’s a great concept; we’re even thinking of trademarking it” they quipped, as I smiled and nodded through gritted teeth (to the extent that you can nod through your teeth…). Sadly, this is all par for the course when you’re a Consultant, and it would have been petty of me to blurt out “WTF‽ That was my concept!” Besides which I actually borrowed the term from Robert E Horne’s Information Mapping, simply repurposing it for curriculum development. And as I consider myself to be such a charlatan on all of this training malarkey, I can hardly throw the first stone…

That said, it did warm the cockles of my heart to hear a term I had coined (at least within this context) having a life of its own, and being freely used by the client. That’s usually the best a Consultant can hope for – leaving some little, incongruous nugget behind. Sometimes I’ve tried to do this just for my own amusement. Several years ago I worked on developing business processes for the Client. My job was to build global high-level processes that the local business units needed to expand on and customize to reflect their own business-specific processes. For the fun of it I termed this activity “broadening and deepening” the global processes. I dropped this phrase into every presentation I did on the subject, and before long everyone was talking about the need to “broaden and deepen” their processes, and “broadening and deepening” was being talked of as a milestone activity. Of course I couldn’t stop there, and had to push it to its illogical conclusion. When reviewing the ‘broadened and deepened’ processes of one business unit I quipped, of “Well, sure it’s broad, but do you think you could push it a bit deeper?”, just so my inner Finbarr Saunders could have a titter, as I fought off the urge to shout out “That’s what she said!”

And it’s not just me. Given a group of like-minded consultants on a project, things quickly degenerate. On one project with a large contingent of Consultants, a group of us (including the inimitable Farhad – I blame him; he was the ringleader and made us do it; we were just his pawns) would choose a meaningless word or phrase and see if we could get it adopted into common parlance. One meeting we chose “piggy-back” as the magic phrase, and all took turns to see how often we could squeeze it into the discussion – for example, “To piggy-back on what Charles said, I’d like to add..”, even if what followed had nothing to do with the previous comment. Every time one of us used it there would be a barely-disguised sniggering, and when the department manager in the room unwittingly use the phrase by the end of the meeting, we just about lost it. But such innocuous words are only the low-hanging fruit. After a couple of months of this, we’d upped the ante, and were managing to get phrases like “happy ending” used in a business context during staff meetings (much to the bemusement of our line manager who clearly had no idea what a happy ending was…).

Well, I guess after 18 years of this you have to find your own entertainment where you can. Plus, it’s an alternative to Buzzword Bingo (where each person in the meeting gets a list of common buzzwords, and gets to cross one off every time someone else in the meeting uses one of them; the winner is the first one to cross out all of the buzzwords on their list). That’s just too easy here, because everyone talks in buzzwords all the time anyway. You’d have a harder time with ‘real English’ phrases – or even just whole sentences – on your list.

This project I’m going to push the envelope a bit further and try to get the phrase “full body rub” adopted. And I think I know how do it. We’re re-using training content from a prior (and inferior) project that needs some work doing to it to bring it up to standards. I’m already referring to this rework as “massaging” the existing content. All I need to do is suggest that content needing a more extensive remediation needs “a full body rub”, and we’ll be there! By the time the project is done I swear I’ll have senior management reporting metrics of the number of full body rubs effected by the training team. And then, for me, this project will have the happy ending I always go for…

Follow-ups:
This post contains eight common business buzzwords. Can you find them all?
Have you done something similar at your work? Leave a comment and tell us all about it.