Jargon

Some time ago I received notice that I must attend a seminar at our hospital entitled "Agenda for Enterprise Visioning and Action Planning - Developing the A3 Transformation Roadmap." What? I was given no more information about the seminar initially, and I didn't really know what it was about. I guessed that it has to do with learning to plan for a department or something like that. Recently I received the agenda for the two day seminar, and I still don't really know what the thing is about, because the jargon used in it is simply incredible.

The agenda is divided into four columns. Each agenda item has an entry in each of the columns. The columns are entitled: Time - I know what that means; Action - okay; Deliverable - huh? and Responsible - it tells us who is supposed to do it. Under the action column one of the entries is "Paradigm and Core of Transformation." A sample Deliverable entry is "Training on using quality function deployment to prioritize high leverage improvement areas." Frankly, they couldn't make this less understandable if they tried.

And I suspect they did try to make it difficult to understand. I've seen these kind of lectures before, ones that try to improve management skills (I think that's what this is about), and they usually employ this type of gobbledygook language. It seems they use big terms to make it sound important or scientific, to try to make their information seem to have more substance than it really does. If this is like other seminars I've been to, they'll have about two hours worth of information to present in eight hours.

Maybe you're thinking that a physician has no right to complain about jargon, that doctors take the cake for using difficult to understand words. It's true, we do use a lot of medical language that lay people might not understand. (Someone once told me that the purpose of the first two years of medical school is to teach you the language.) There's a difference, though. We use big words to make communication more efficient. If we didn't use words like bronchopulmonary dysplasia and postprandial cerebral hypoperfusion we'd have to describe what those entities are each time we refer to them, and that would take forever. I'll admit that sometimes we use a fancier word than necessary - like metastasize instead of spread - but most of time there's a decent reason for the medical jargon.

I wish I could say I'm looking forward to doing Deliverables like Prioritize Value Streams against the Key Measures, but it will likely be a long day. (To make matters worse, the agenda says at times we have to break into small groups. I hate small groups.) Oh well. It shouldn't be too strenuous, and in the end I'll know how to Re-cap the Transformation Plan of Care. Yippee!