Approved terminology

IBBD Glossary of Contemporary Work

Ordinary terms from modern working life, as officially defined after prolonged institutional observation.

Corporate Language

Terms modern organizations use to rephrase simple activities until they sound like management.

Meeting: A scheduled gathering of people whose work consists of discussing the work of others.
Alignment: The process of confirming that persons who previously agreed continue to agree.
Stakeholder: A person whose involvement becomes apparent shortly before completion.
Synergy: A creativity technique for identifying interaction that was not discernible beforehand and usually is not afterwards either.
Ownership: Responsibility transferred without the administrative inconvenience of transferring authority.
Accountability: Responsibility after something has gone wrong. Personal fault is not required.
Value-Add: The value said to have been added after nobody can say precisely what value existed beforehand.
Mission Statement: An organization's inner compass. Binding guidance for employees; primarily external presentation for the organization itself.
Vision: A description of the future far enough away that even its unnoticed disappearance can still count as long-term development.

Project Management

Terms used to plan, coordinate, and report work, including the work required to administer that work.

Project: Temporary work surrounded by permanent reporting structures.
Project Management: The management of work, including the work required to manage the management of work.
Milestone: A date at which everyone formally acknowledges that another date is now required.
Timeline: A visual arrangement of dates whose precision decreases as the project approaches them.
Action Item: A sentence produced by a meeting and assigned to a person who was hoping to leave.
Status Meeting: A meeting held to explain the status report.
Status Report: A report on the status that is explained in the status meeting and then updated for the next status meeting.
Steering Committee: A group established to provide direction to a project already proceeding in several directions.
Project Kick-Off: The ceremonial beginning of work that has usually already begun.
Lessons Learned: A structured process for documenting lessons shortly before ensuring they are forgotten by the next project.

Processes, Governance & Meta-Bureaucracy

Procedures for administering other procedures and structures established to govern other structures.

Process: A standardized method for ensuring that deviations from the standardized method are properly documented.
Process Improvement: The process by which an existing process acquires additional processes.
Process Owner: The person responsible for a process without necessarily having any influence over it.
Methodology: A standardized procedure for selecting the standardized procedure that will subsequently be followed.
Governance: The totality of rules, committees, and responsibilities ensuring that nobody does anything wrong without regulation.
Quality Gate: A formal checkpoint at which work pauses until sufficient evidence exists that work may continue.
Approval Workflow: A process ensuring that a decision passes through everyone except the person capable of making it.
Document Control: The management of documents describing how other documents should be managed.
Working Group: A temporary organization created when the permanent organization cannot determine who should do the work.
Subcommittee: Evidence that the committee has encountered a problem too specialized to remain in the committee.
Escalation: The movement of a decision toward progressively more senior people who have progressively less direct knowledge of it.
Centre of Excellence: A central unit in which so much expertise is concentrated that the rest of the organization must book appointments to access it.

Agile & Transformation

Terms describing adaptive work, particularly after adaptability has been formalized into mandatory procedure.

Agile: The ability to respond rapidly to change through a fixed schedule of mandatory ceremonies.
Sprint: A two-week period during which long-term organizational dysfunction is divided into manageable units.
Daily Stand-Up: A daily meeting in which each team member reports what they would be working on if they were not currently in the Daily Stand-Up.
Retrospective: A recurring meeting in which recurring problems are identified as recurring.
Story Point: A unit for measuring work without making the mistake of measuring work.
Scrum Master: A person responsible for ensuring that spontaneous self-organization occurs according to schedule.
Product Owner: The person authorized to prioritize work within priorities established elsewhere.
Ceremony: A meeting that became legitimate by acquiring an Agile name.
Agile Transformation: The process of making an organization more flexible through mandatory organization-wide procedures.
Digital Transformation: The conversion of existing organizational problems into software-supported organizational problems.

Metrics, Reporting & Performance

Terms for converting organizational reality into numbers and subsequently organizing reality around those numbers.

Dashboard: A visual interface displaying metrics, including metrics whose continued existence depends upon the dashboard.
KPI (Key Performance Indicator): A number selected to represent reality until reality begins optimizing for the number.
Metric: Now considered linguistically outdated and replaced by KPI.
Reporting: The periodic conversion of organizational activity into organizational evidence.
Monthly Report: A document explaining last month's numbers shortly before the next month's numbers arrive.
Traffic Light Status: A system for converting complex organizational problems into three colors. Information loss included.
Benchmark: A number produced elsewhere and therefore presumed relevant here.
Target: A number that begins as an objective and gradually becomes a description of expected reality.

HR & Recruitment

Terms used to translate people, relationships, and judgment into administratively manageable systems.

Talent: A person considered valuable before becoming sufficiently experienced to require a higher salary.
Employer Branding: The management of how employment is described before it is experienced.
People Strategy: A plan for treating people as the organization's most important resource in a standardized manner.
Human Capital: People after translation into a category suitable for financial discussion.
Performance Review: A regular conversation in which two people at different levels of the hierarchy talk past each other in a structured manner.
Employee Engagement: The measured willingness of employees to express enthusiasm about conditions they cannot directly change.
Loyalty: Employees' loyalty to an organization's values, including those values the organization itself does not uphold.
Onboarding: The process of introducing a new employee to systems whose owners are currently unavailable.

Consulting & Strategy

Terms for presenting uncertainty at a level of abstraction suitable for executive decision-making.

Strategy: A description of intended future success at a level of abstraction that prevents immediate falsification.
Roadmap: A visual representation of future certainty produced under conditions of present uncertainty.
Best Practice: A practice considered best until someone asks for evidence.
Operating Model: A diagram explaining how the organization is intended to function when not interrupted by the organization.
Value Creation: An activity believed to produce value, particularly when the value cannot be directly identified.
Business Case: A document demonstrating that a preferred decision was financially inevitable.

IBBD Classification

The five officially recognized forms of bullshit work under the Graeber classification.

Flunky: A role whose essential function is to make important people appear important—through agreement, attendance, and the reliable confirmation that their suggestions are brilliant.
Goon: A role that serves organizations through persuasion, pressure, lobbying, marketing, or defence rather than creating tangible value. Its real product is influence.
Duct Taper: A role that permanently fixes the consequences of a problem because nobody wants to fix the actual problem. The workaround has long since become a business process.
Box Ticker: A role in which satisfying administrative requirements becomes more important than the problem those requirements were originally created to solve. Success is demonstrated through evidence rather than results.
Taskmaster: A role that primarily creates new work for others—through tasks, status requests, reporting requirements, meetings, and approvals—while contributing little to the actual outcome itself.