Friday, February 4, 2005

Great content, names that suck

Today I attended my first day in a four-day seminar aimed at teaching the basics of Neuro Linguistic Programming to participants.



Neuro... what?  I means that is quite a name to put people off! And NLP (since that is the best way that was found to KISS, since we are at "acronyming" everything nowadays), is full of extremely interesting tools that are indeed very usable in all sorts of contexts (professional, family, leisure, politics...) MOST of which bear impossible names: Internal Map, Computation Index (huh?), Logical levels of change...



Anyway, I think it's often well worth going beyond this jargon thing, but, in the name of whatever experts in any field of interest hold dear, please, we mortals beg you, choose nice, simple, concrete names to speak of concepts and tools. PLEEEEASE!



I certainly became even more aware today of the complexity of human communication, so why do we feel a sort of urge to make things worse by inventing language that is tough to understand? Remember words like "subsidiarity" in the Maastricht Treaty back in the early nineties? Can we seriously believe that it is sound practice to be organising a referendum on a topic written in jargon or to be asking people to learn and use tools full of jargon (typical of IT / ERP projects)? I know, I know, I am becoming annoying with my "stupid" questions...



Reminds me of the famous story giving an Accenture consultant's answer to the question "why did the chicken cross the road?"...



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