The Toonie Jargon Jar of Shame.

How we decided to preach what we practice.

The halls and homes of REW are filled with some magnificently average human beings. To hastily unpack that statement before the overly-polite rioting starts: we consider ourselves to be a group of normal human beings adventuring through life in much the same fashion as pretty much everyone else.

We constantly forget we’re on mute on video calls. Almost all of us cried when Forrest said, “He’s so smart, Jenny.” And, yes, we too discuss the weather like we live in the only place in the world that ever gets it.

“We” are you and I. So why on earth would we pretend to be anything but?

At some point, companies and brands began to speak to people like they weren’t people. Which we think is a problem. Not just because if you addressed people at the company picnic as Sir or Madam you would soon be eating your potato salad alone, but because of what the decision to adopt this manner of address represents. It suggests that everything in business isn’t personal. Which we think is utter [redacted].

We are who we are

So we sat down and had a good, old-fashioned chinwag. Yes, of course we first talked about the weather. But then we universally agreed that there is simply nothing more important to what we do than those who make what we do happen. We’re not a company of corporate heirs and your grace’s. There are no stencilled letters on our office doors. There aren’t even any office doors. We talk to each other, not at.

On the surface, this hardly felt like some great leap in brand ideology, but when we scrolled, paged and clicked back through how we were speaking, it was clear we had been stealthily dragged into the quagmire of corporate speak. We had de-humanised the most human of interactions.

And we recognised immediately that that just wasn’t who we are.

A load of [redacted]

We live in an age of organizations seemingly desperate to codify, control and police the way their people speak. Even to one another. And we think that’s [redacted]. If we could track down whomever it was that decided that a politely-worded, personality-devoid and inhuman voice was how people would want to be addressed, we would uninvite them from any of our company picnics. Forever.

We can’t stress enough how important it is to recognise that this has happened. After all, there is no other way for humans to come to understand you as a business (or, for that matter, as a person) than through how you communicate.

The “rules” of corporate communication are, frankly, garbage. And corporate speak seems to have been specifically devised to exclude - an odd choice for a means of transmitting information. When you don’t understand what’s being said, it makes you feel like an outsider. Plus, what if you actually are from a faraway city, province or slice of the world? Go stick a pin in that when you circle around to take it offline.

Never double kayak

To prove the utter pointlessness, obfuscation and isolation of corporate patter, take this simple challenge: make up a term, drop it into a sentence in a meeting and see if you’re challenged on it. We’ll bet you an actual kayak that you won’t be.

“So I think we need to zip tie that product line.”

“Let’s double kayak that idea for now.”

“Look, we want to avoid another rooster knuckle with our PR stream.”

But it turns out that reversing decades of inhumanization is hard. Just try not to say “align” for, like, an entire business day. Thus, to attempt to ensure that we truly do preach what we practice, we’ve embraced another entirely human concept of having a bit of fun and have decided to introduce The Toonie Jargon Jar of Shame.

Every time someone drops some jarring jargon, $2 goes into the jar. At the end of the year, we’ll celebrate actually making sense to one another by voting on how to spend or donate the cash, in a very normal human being kind of way. Suggestions welcome.