In Defence of Bureaucratic Language (and Meaning)

by Kent Aitken

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Top of the billboard charts right now is the album Mandatory Fun by Weird Al Yankovic (file under: sentences, comma, ones I didn't see myself writing in 2014). It includes the song Mission Statement, which skewers the language of business.

A language that happens to intersect significantly with the language of the bureaucracy. Two years ago our particular Government of Canada flavour of verbiage was taken to task by Sh*t Bureaucrats Say.

But I'd like to mount a defence of this bureaucratic language, or at least, a specific subset of it. Of course, there are arenas in which bureaucratic language is legitimately terrible: where it is used to deliberately obfuscate meaning, or to sound knowledgeable or important (the true meaning of bureaucratese), or where it is used without consideration of whether or not the audience speaks that language.

And there are arenas in which it is legit - like the jargon of any field - in which it represents meaningful shorthand for a complex concept. To a citizen, the name (or acronym) for a sub-division of a government department could be completely meaningless. To a different audience, three letters can immediately convey history, mandate, scope of authority, leadership, and key figures.

But there's another arena, in which the meaningfulness or lack thereof is on a case-by-case basis. The terms that jump to mind are things like:

mission statement

strategic plan

year-end review

performance management

Whether these terms represent a meaningful concept or not is dependent on us. For example:

At its best, a mission statement is a powerful vision of an organization's goals and aspirations, that employees can rally behind. One example is Sony in the 1950s, declaring that it would change the worldwide perception of Japanese products. For such a mission statement to work, a leader must demonstrate why it was articulated as it was, ensure that the values are congruent with people's experience in the organization, and convince people that they are taking it seriously.

At its worst, a mission statement is a line on a website, absent of promise, divorced from reality.

At its best, a strategic plan can be an opportunity to test assumptions, explore the environment, reposition an organization, and set meaningful goals for people. To make sure that everyone is rowing in the same direction, and to provide a baseline to assess success against and launch future improvements.

At its worst, a strategic plan is a document that consumes time. A list of disparate plans, all prefixed with the word "strategic".

There are good reasons why these concepts are staples of our organizations. Their practice and adherence keeps organizations alive. But they don't have meaning in a vacuum; it is our job to create meaning for ourselves and others.

The language we use gets a bad rap - rightfully - when we fail at that.

MBR: Unconscious Civilization

I decided I was going to read a book a week for a year, here's a quick review of this week's book.  You can see the ongoing list here.

Basic Info

The Unconscious Civilization by John Ralston Saul




Why I read it

I picked it up at a community book sale a few years ago -  having already read On Equilibrium - but for some reason I never got around to reading it.

If you aren't familiar with the Massey Lecture Series I suggest having a look, there are a number of great lectures / books available (e.g.  Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress).


How it connects to the Public Sector


Despite the fact that the book was originally published in 1995, the context within which is was written was very similar to the context within which we currently find ourselves. Among other things, the book addresses issues such as what it means to be a citizen, how bureaucracies use dissociative language to create distance, and the detrimental effects of the rise of the managerial class.

Here's a great excerpt about the tendency for bureaucrats to cast citizens as consumers of government services (rather than citizens):

Yet in imitation of the marketplace, govemment is busily transforming itself to meet business standards. It isn't quite clear what these are when it comes to public service. The flaw in the logic can be seen in very simple things: for example, there is a tendency now to refer to the citizen as a customer of the govemment. The customer of the police. The customer of the fireman or the health officer. But we are not customers. We haven't walked into a shop to think about buying. We are not going to make a purchase and then walk away. We are not even customers with long-term (in business this is rarely very long) service contracts. We are the owners of the services in question. Our relationship is not tied to purchase or to value for money, but to responsibility Not only are we not the customers of public servants, we are in fact their employers. I suppose that if this mania for business terms is uncontrollable, then the most accurate term to describe the citizen would be shareholder. But even that is inexact because (1) we cannot buy and sell our shares (we are stuck with them for life) and (2) we do not own these shares for profit.

This little linguistic slippage within the bureaucracy shows how essentially directionless the corporatist system is. Once the idea of management for management's sake takes over, the organization, whatever it is, begins to skitter about aimlessly, following one expert system after another, obsessed by problem solving without really considering the problem in its own terms. And control. Everything is a matter of control. Yet control, like efficiency, is a secondary or tertiary business, well behind policy and purpose and, for that matter, effectiveness (p 100).

What I got out of reading it


We need to bridge the language divide between government and citizens. One need only walk into a conversation in Ottawa amongst public sector employees to see that bureaucrats have a language all to their own. It's a language that makes videos like these clever, amusing, eye-opening and tragic all at the same time.

Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect