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.