There’s a great example of spin that’s attached to a story that is dominating the US political news in the first few days of this week. It will pass, of course, but spin itself will never die. The story is that Hillary Clinton claimed that she was personally in danger when she landed in Bosnia in March 1996. She said:
“I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
It never happened, of course, and provably so, because there are videos of Hillary landing and being met on the tarmac by a happy crowd, including a young girl, who read her a poem. So is the Clinton campaign faced with “being caught in a lie”? Yes, if you believe The Washington Post, which awarded her “four Pinocchios” for her statement. But apparently not if you listen to her spokesman Howard Wolfson, who bravely admitted that Hillary “may have misspoke”.
“may”?
This is not “may”, this is “did”.
“misspoke”?
The Merriam Webster online dictionary informs us that the verb “to misspeak” has the following meanings:
- to speak (as a word) incorrectly
- to express (oneself) imperfectly or incorrectly
- as an intransitive verb: to speak incorrectly: misspeak oneself
Hillary Clinton did not misspeak, but using definition 2, Howard Wolfson, her spokesman, actually did misspeak, when he explained her behavior as “misspeaking”.
The Obama camp will probably claim that this incident demonstrates that Hillary doesn’t have the foreign policy experience that she claims – and that will be spin too, because imho, visiting Bosnia during that time period had to be useful experience, even if she wasn’t negotiating treaties or directly solving problems.
We expect spin from every political campaign and I have learned to also expect spin of a similar nature from IT vendors when it comes to marketing literature. To this point, the most egregious word used in IT marketing is “solution”. It’s a dirty little word and it’s abuse has now spread well beyond IT to all areas of the consumer market where, for example, a sleep solution isn’t medicine you take if you suffer from insomnia, but a bed.
The Merriam Webster online dictionary informs us that “solution” has the following two relevant meanings:
- a method for solving a problem; e.g. “the easy solution is to look it up in the handbook”
- the successful action of solving a problem; e. g. “the solution took three hours”
Clearly, a solution can never be an inanimate object such as a bed or an electronic object such as a computer program. To suggest that it could be is misspeaking. The only things in IT that get close to being solutions are services like Google’s search capability, where the method is inherent in the service and all you need to do is enter some search words. Since the only part of the method not spoonfed to you is the entry of some words, it is very close to being a solution.
However, even if you allow it to qualify as a solution, it doesn’t mean that it’s a good solution. That depends on measurement. Google’s search produces many false positives and thus it is clearly not a perfect solution to search. A rain dance is a solution to a drought, it just doesn’t happen to work every time.
Next time an IT vendor presents me with the word solution, I’m gonna call them on it. That’s my solution to the current epidemic of misspeaking that’s engulfing the world.
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The way in which the word ’solution’ has worked its way into the vocabulary of the IT industry is interesting. Vendors most often use it as an alternative to the word ‘product’. The S word sounds better than the P word because it is objective rather than subjective. It is also handy for referring to collections of products or pseudo-tangible stuff like architecture.
While I, like most others, slip into using the S word freely, I have an issue with it in that it perpetuates the myth that IT requirements can be thought of as a series of discrete problems. Jon, myself, and the two Neils tried to tackle this “buy something, implement it, job done” mindset when we wrote the Technology Garden book, the premise being that just like gardening, doing IT requires attention to be paid to interactions and dependencies. The other similarity is that also like gardening, doing IT is not something you can ever ‘finish’.
The implication is that we need to consider the macro level stuff a bit more than we necessarily do at the moment. By this I mean direction, governance, architecture (in the true sense) and so on.
Returning to the question of vocabulary, another couple of words I find myself using a lot are ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’. While I was designing a research questionnaire a few weeks ago, though, a reviewer pointed out that what I really meant by these in the context I was working in at the time was ‘critical’ and ‘non-critical’.
Dale
I’d become so used to the abuse of the word “solution” that I was actually surprised when I discovered that its actual meaning excluded any kind of product. I believed that the meaning of the word was being bent rather than being invented.
Strategic and tactical, I agree, are also much abused words. And here’s a thing: often both are regarded as good but “strategic” is somehow regarded as better than “tactical”. In practice, in war and games like chess, where the words apply directly, it is tactics that normally triumph over strategy.
Robin
Couldn’t agree more with the relative importance of strategy and tactics.
It usually causes a raised eyebrow when I tell people that at Freeform Dynamics we specialise in tactical research studies aimed at helping people with activity in current/next budget cycle.
That’s where most people need most help though – both buyers/uers and sellers or IT.