By: Stuart

Stuart — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 16:23:37 +0000

Hi Paul,
Great to see you the other day (although it would have been nicer had actually won something in the poker game!). Don’t have your email address - hence using your website.
Interested to read that you (like me) get irritated by signs like “Operatives in road” or the less used “Operatives operating in operational arena” - I presume the mental process would go as follows - “Operatives? What do they mean by Operative? Is that meant to mean operator? Not like a telefonist, but something similar, right? Surely they have to be opertaing something? -CRASH- “Sorry, mate, didn’t see you in the street!”) Anyway, it put me in mind of Neurolinguist Programming and the importance of using the correct terminology to better communicate with your audience.
The theory is pretty sound. If you’re talking to an audience of football fans it makes sense to use verbal (and actual) references they understand - “our goal is X” (rather than “our operational objective is X”), “let’s get the ball in the back of the net” (”let’s focus on meeting team objectives”), etc. Simply put, it takes more mental processing power to understand unfamilar terminology. (It reminds me of a time when a friend was asked to estimate how far away a building was - his response, “It’s about half the length of a polo pitch away”, was not fully comprehended by the person posing the question.)
It gets more complicated when you consider favoured representative systems. People see/feel the world in different ways and tend towards visual, audio or kinetic language. It depends what sounds/looks/feels right for them. If you consider that approximately 70% or people favour visual language (”looks like a good idea to me”), 20% favour audio (”sounds good to me”) and 10% favour kinetic (”feels about right”) - then why is most management jargon in less-penetrable kinetic language (”let’s get our ducks in a row”, “let’s unpackage that idea”, “get a handle on”)? Language designed not to be understood? (Something about obfuscation in order to self-empower senior managers?)
But I digress. In fact I digress all the time… there was this one time back in the 90s when… never mind.
Hope the new card trick is coming along well!
I guess I press the “submit” button to “send it now”?
All the best
Stuart

Comments on: user-centred design and traffic cones

By: Stuart