‘Red threads and pain points’: What Davos taught me about corporate gobbledygook

The first warning signs arose days before I left London for the Davos summit.

“Hi Pilita,” emailed a woman from a firm that described itself as a “C-suite positioning consultancy”.

She was lining up interviews for her clients at the World Economic Forum’s annual mountaintop meeting in the Swiss resort and wondered if I might like to see a headhunter who knew all about the “pain points” facing “corner office aspirants” and was also “a great red thread for many issues top-of-mind for CEOs”.

I like to think I am reasonably fluent in corporate jargon, but those last words left me stumped. “Who knows what a red thread is?” I asked anyone within earshot at work. “Is it an important strategic element of something?” one colleague asked. “Something about being connected?” another guessed. “No idea,” a third said.

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This was just a warm-up for five alpine days at the epicentre of global business-speak, the hopelessly persistent patois that is not just morphing into more variants but actively spreading from its corporate roots.

I did not knowingly encounter any red threads in Davos itself, which was just as well because there was much else to contend with.

This was a place where I found myself invited more than once to a “short, high-level conversation”, also known as a “meeting”. This was easy enough to grasp, as was the fact that, once in a meeting, people tended not actually to say anything. They “shared”. And if they had to be somewhere else by a certain time, they had a “hard stop”.

I was struck though by the number of executives who had stopped talking about brainstorming, thinking outside the box or blue-sky thinking, but were keen to discuss their “ideation phase”. Likewise, a notable number of businesses no longer had a goal, a mission or even a central purpose. They had instead acquired a “North Star”. I fear much blame lies with the artificial intelligence (AI) companies that have become a Davos force.

OpenAI, the company that gave the world ChatGPT, turns out to have multiple north stars, as I discovered when listening to its rugged-up chief financial officer discussing its contentious move to introduce advertising on some versions of its chatbot.

ChatGPT would always give you “the best answer, not the paid-for answer”, Sarah Friar told CNBC. And it wouldn’t be selling your data to advertisers either. “OpenAI’s North Star is AGI for the benefit of humanity,” she said. “It’s not for the benefit of humanity who can pay.”

I knew AGI was artificial general intelligence and I would like to be able to tell you more about Friar’s thoughts. But she then put on such a dazzling display of tech-speak about “multidimensionality on the infrastructure”, “value exchange” and the “SaaS-based model for enterprises” that I lost the will to listen.

By that stage I realised I had grown almost nostalgic for the pointlessly redundant, but more or less intelligible, jargon of old. Almost. There is still no excuse for saying you are operationalising the AI piece in your business end-to-end moving forward when you are actually just “introducing AI”.

Moving forward and going forward are especially surplus to grammatical requirements. As Australian comedians James Schloeffel and Charles Firth write in their recent handbook on workplace bullsh*t, this is “literally the way time works”.

The pair have already taken their message on tour, with live shows in Australia and the UK, and have more planned at home and in Europe. Alas, their success is partly due to corporate jargon’s failure to stay inside corporations.

As Schloeffel told an interviewer last year, he and Firth initially thought only business people were victims. But as teachers, council workers, nurses and doctors came up to them after their shows, they realised “everyone seems to be affected by this”.

That they are. Exhibit one: the extensive “jargon buster” compiled for the UK’s National Health Service. It tells you the difference between an “activated patient” (someone who looks after their own health) and “reablement” (what most of us call rehabilitation) and is not to be confused with the NHS’s acronym buster, which is a whole other set of horrors.

In a better world, people would not need any of this. They would simply use words to say what they meant. In the actual world, dream on. Or stop over-rotating on optimism about a move with no forecast traction. Moving forward. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited