If you work in advertising, you probably recognise the acronym above. It’s something of a golden rule – Keep It Simple, Stupid. I suppose you could call it jargon. And jargon’s bad, right? Read any tone of voice guidelines and they’ll tell you to avoid it like the bubonic. But keeping it simple isn’t always quite that simple.

First let’s think about why people use jargon. Yup, it’s sometimes used to project expertise when said expertise is sadly lacking. But often it’s actually a shortcut – a way to reduce the word count when communicating a familiar concept between two people who operate in the field.

Speaking of operating, a good example is a busy hospital emergency room. You and I might find the barks of “50ccs of KCl through an IM, stat!” baffling. But I’m sure glad they don’t waste time spelling it out – I’m bleeding over here!

So is jargon a Good Thing? Yes. No. Sometimes. It’s all about context, innit? Good communication is about getting across your message as clearly and concisely as possible. And that’s exactly what many examples of jargon have evolved to do. The problem arises when a specialist uses it to communicate to non-specialists.

No wonder it’s anathema to consumer brands. The cynics among us may argue the byzantine language of financial services is designed to deliberately obfuscate. That’s probably part of it. But a kinder explanation might be that someone who’s intimately acquainted with the ins-and-outs of actuarial theory may have trouble describing it in simple terms to a lay audience.

Rightly, brand teams seek to proscribe language that may confuse and alienate customers. But applying the same approach to communications between specialists and you don’t make it straightforward – you make it facile. Clarity is sacrificed at the altar of simplicity. And, in your search for brevity, you actually create verbosity by banning shorthand.

Perhaps the problem is one of definition. Merriam Webster offers:

1. The technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group

2. Obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words

There we have it. Jargon is either the everyday language of a specialist group or it’s deliberately obscure and pretentious language. So, which is it? Take it on a case by case basis and you’ll invariably find the answer with the supreme court of all communication: your audience. IMHO.

This last week, I have read both the MacLeod Report to Lord Mandelson on ‘enhancing performance through employee engagement’ and (for wholly professional reasons and not because I’m bonkers) the Fortean Times (http://www.fortean.times.magazine.co.uk/)

I was disturbed to see that the first could quite easily have appeared in the second and not caused its readership to bat an eyelid.

The Fortean Times, for those of you who haven’t experienced its charms, is a magazine read by and contributed to by cranks who believe that extraterrestials walk amongst us and are ease with the thought that there is many a yeti lurking in the woods.

What they have is no evidence whatsoever for any of this. That doesn’t stop them reporting hearsay as fact.

Sequey to the MacLeod report. Firstly, it is proud to report that it fixed on no definition of the term ‘engagement’ (Chapter 1, section 10) which alerted me to the worrying idea that in order to search successfully for something, it helps to know what it is you are searching for. Even if that thing is a yeti. Worse, however, was to follow. There is a hugely impressive summary of research material pointing to the predictive power of engagement and how it correlates closely with business performance improvements. I wanted it to be true. But then came the killer: after reading the whole of chapter one, with its impressive case histories and waterfall of facts, I came naturally enough to chapter two, headed ‘The Evidence.’ There -in bold type – is the sentence; “We have not attempted to validate each and every study cited in this report.” Pardon? Say that again. “We have not attempted to validate each and every study cited in this report.” They didn’t even attempt. So how much source data did they actually look at? 50%? 5%? 0.5%? In other words this influential report, on which rests many £millions of hard-to-earn-cash earmarked for engagement communications, rests its recommendations on what its hand-chosen contributors choose to tell it. The report’s authors haven’t interrogated the source data. They have no idea whether what they are being told is the truth, a first approximation to the truth or a totally fabricated story designed to make its teller look good.

I really, really wanted this report to be a factual account of what engagement is and what it does. It would make my company’s job immeasurably easier. But immeasurability is sadly the only the report gives me.

So, it’s great for yeti hunters and those who believe that Elvis still stalks the aisles of WalMart, but sadly it’s no good if an engagement professional wishes to do her or his job properly. What a sadly wasted opportunity to shed some light on the murky world of people’s relationship with their employers.