by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n
Be wary when someone asks for “actionable fill-in-the-blank.”<\/strong><\/p>\n I few years ago, I was working in a prestigious organization (just ask anyone who worked there, they would happily tell you that it was a prestigious place). A division there had an expiring charter and needed to update it. Several senior managers asked that the new charter contain “actionable words.”<\/p>\n My reply was, “You mean verbs?”<\/p>\n I thought it was a funny reply. Others disagreed. It highlighted how in government we always tried\u00a0 to dilute everything. \u00a0Notice “dilute” is a verb. In government we would write “we try to water down everything.” “Water down” is not a verb; it is a weak combination of verb-preposition.<\/p>\n Perhaps the problem in this prestigious organization was that they had forgotten how to do anything.<\/p>\n Move on in time, and I work at another organization. The senior managers sit in a meeting room all day while underlings enter and give briefings. The senior managers want “actionable briefings.” They request information they can use to do something. My thought was, if I give you information, you can think. Thinking is something, right?<\/p>\n Perhaps the problem was that they had forgotten how to think.<\/p>\n I sense a pattern here. Whenever someone asks me for “actionable” anything, the results are bad. Is “actionable” a real word? Dictionary.com has a few definitions for it with most of them being legal terms. The situations mentioned above where not related to legal cases. Take great care when confronted with actionable. I recommend not trying to be humorous as I was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dwayne Phillips Be wary when someone asks for “actionable fill-in-the-blank.” I few years ago, I was working in a prestigious organization (just ask anyone who worked there, they would happily tell you that it was a prestigious place). A division there had an expiring charter and needed to update it. Several senior managers asked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,25,50,67,5],"tags":[132,147,172,187,128],"class_list":["post-463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-management","category-meetings","category-thinking","category-work","category-writing","tag-management","tag-meetings","tag-thinking","tag-work","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":477,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions\/477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}