Opportunity Lost
June 11, 2008 – 7:17 amI ran into an interesting problem communicating something I wanted to say the other day. I was trying to describe a new opportunity we had discovered to do something positive for the company to some of my team members. Strangely enough, I chose to use the word “opportunity” to describe it.
Where this led next is the interesting thing- my team assumed that it was a bad thing and started trying to solve the “problem”, not be excited about the opportunity. At first, I thougth there were some terrible implications of the idea that I had not thought of, and so I started digging in, trying to figure out what the problem was. All in all, it took us all about ten minutes to arrive at the fact that I trying to communicate something positive to them, not a problem.
So what went wrong here? Business speak. Our company has fallen into the trap of trying to be positive about things. Business people commonly say “opportunity” when they mean problem. In fact, I’ve heard them correct each other in meetings to intentionally make the substitution. What effect has this led to? Has it made problems truly become opportunities? No. Has it made people more optimistic and positive? No. What it has done is changed the meaning of the word “opportunity” in our lexicon to mean “problem”, which now leaves everyone in our company with the challenge of how to communicate about real opportunity now, because we can’t use that word anymore.
As humorous as this sounds, the problem is real. When I related this story to a few of my colleagues in management and said “so what do we say when we want to talk about an opportunity now?”, no one had an answer. We’ve successfully sabotaged our ability to relate important information within our own company. We probably are not the only ones. Try relating this anecdote around your own company and see what kind of conversations you end up having about it.
I’ve written before on the dangers of business jargon before. This is an honest, serious problem creeping into the business world. The one thing that businesses cannot afford to do poorly is communicate. Understanding jargon is important. Don’t propogate its use.
Anyone else have any similar experiences? Better yet, anyone know a better way to talk about opportunities? 
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