A quick note on jargon
In which I fully engage with a learning opportunity
Voodoo management is the term that Linda Woodhead and I used in our book on the collapse of the Church, but perhaps “Cargo cult managerialism” would have been more descriptive, if less evocative. In either case, the problem is the use of managerial phrases with nothing behind them as magical incantations against reality. Yesterday we were told not to worry about the Bishop of Liverpool because “This process concluded that there were no ongoing safeguarding concerns, but a learning outcome was identified with which the bishop fully engaged.”
I think the English for this is “He fucked up, but not too badly and he’s been told not to do it again”. (David Turnbull, in comments below, has a rather more sophisticated understanding. Seriously. Read it.) You may not find the translated version convincing – and it appears that no one who dealt with the bishop did – but at least it’s comprehensible: you can argue with it. That’s exactly the possibility that the waffle exists to exclude. You can’t argue that “a learning outcome was not identified”, because you don’t know what difference it would make if one had been. This vagueness is an invitation to dishonesty. That’s one problem. There is another: when a Christian organisation uses that sort of language it hands over moral and personal judgments to an algorithm that claims to dispense impersonal justice: if we just use the right phrases, the right outcome will emerge. I don’t think that is how bishops are meant to operate — nor how they should be judged.
As someone who has spent a fair (an unfair?) amount of time listening to, reading and sometimes even using management jargon (jargon meaning "special words or expressions used by a profession or group that are difficult for others to understand", per the OED), I think there is further nuance in the statement.
"[N]o ongoing safeguarding concerns" means that no one vulnerable is currently at risk. If (!) you're a bit of a cynic like me, the 'currently', or 'ongoing' in the original, suggests that there was at least one previous occasion that should have raised safeguarding concerns, i.e. someone vulnerable was put at risk.
The second clause is ugly (why is someone engaging with an outcome?) but clearly implies that there was behaviour by the (then) Bishop that should have been different. The "fully engaged" means that the (then) Bishop has agreed to whatever was suggested as an intervention to change his behaviour. Given that the previous behaviour is implied to have put someone vulnerable at risk, you would hope this was a more robust intervention or set of interventions than doing some e-learning, but who knows?
I don't think the intention was necessarily to obscure or be vague - the meaning is quite clear to people who grok the jargon. I think rather it was an attempt to put the issue to bed (as it were) in a way that didn't create any hostages to fortune, particularly any potential legal issues. And, of course, the potential legal issues could be with respect to the person or persons who were deemed to be at risk, or indeed, with respect to the duties of the (then) Bishop's employers.
The jargon problem is a serious one. One of my children's schools recently asked me, in a survey about a parents' evening, "Let us know what went well or even better if ?". Makes perfect sense to someone who works in education and knows the jargon. Tough to understand if you don't.
So what's wrong with using plain, simple English? (Well, it might be clearly understood, and that might prove embarrassing.) We used to have a textbook in some branches of the civil service titled 'The Complete Plain Words' whose aim was to overcome the kind of jargon which is used to obfuscate the hearer / reader.