Geekification

“Geekification:” The chances are you’ve never heard that word. It isn’t in any dictionary, but I guarantee you have experienced it. You’re listening to someone speak or you’re listening to an interview and you realize that, while they’re speaking English, you don’t understand what they’re saying. They’re using acronyms and arcane jargon that you just don’t get. Geekification.

A friend of mine explained it this way: When you go to work for a company, at first you don’t understand their nomenclature, you don’t understand the acronyms, you feel like an outsider. But little by little and lot by lot you get so you understand what they’re saying. In fact, after a while, it gets so that all seems to you like the King’s English.

The problem is when you go into an interview or into a speech and you’re still using that “geekified” language that has become so familiar to you. When an accountant with an electric utility was asked how he arrived at the cost of service between residential, commercial and industrial customers, he answered:

“We bring the lamda value down to the average energy cost make a correction to the following day or in the hourly period where the values are positive. Where we have the System Lamda for the capacity cost allocation process, we set it equal to zero and distribute those negative credits to the other hours of the day when the lamda minus alpha values are positive.”

A colleague in the back of the room said, “Yes! Nailed it!” Well, maybe he nailed it as far as other experts on cost of service were concerned. For the rest of us, not so much.

An extreme example? Perhaps, but only by degree. Consider the news conference announcing the merger of communication giants AT&T and Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI). A reporter asked the obvious question: “What kind of service will you be able to provide over your new network?” The answer, from John Malone, Chairman and CEO of TCI.

“On the video side, all the things that we have started to do will be more broadly applied. We’re now up-linking north of 340 services out of our facility in Denver…so those will be available to all our ‘foot-print’
customers and the vast bulk of our affiliated customers at an increasing pace. It’s already started to happen.
Our vender GI is also sitting on 16 million set-top box orders…so, on the video side it’s happening and happening fast.”

Nailed it? Not quite. The news conference was broadcast live on CNN and chances are most viewers had turned away by the time another reporter asked substantially the same question. “If I’m a home owner, how would that actually work?”

“Mrs. Jones, I’m here to install your new digital converter,” said Malone, taking on the persona of the installer. He went on to explain that, with a new converter the Jones family would "be able to order Viagra while watching their favorite entertainment show – point and click.”

Better? You think?

What you need to do in an interview or a speech is have a second language wardrobe. That’s a language wardrobe you use outside the company or outside your area of expertise. Then, you won’t talk “geek talk” and you’ll be understood.

So, the problem is “geekification.” And the solution is a different language wardrobe.