Heat Maps & Traffic Lights

This week at the Post Office Scandal enquiry has opened up a complete can of verbal wormiage, as various members of the Shareholder's Executive [the government's 'eyes' into the Post Office boardroom: make of that what you will] are giving testimony in the kind of insouciant tones that only 'top executives' can manage without curling up with embarrassment in the process. The language employed by these upper echelon 'lifers' is frankly - and deliberately - baffling to anyone actually living in the real world outside of their boardroom bubble. Words like 'process' take on an almost magical-realist hue in their world of lexical totems and 'best practices'. Reporting, surfacing, capturing, risk-socialisation, the C-Suite [anyone whose title starts with Chief, basically], all fantastically characterising the - to be honest - banal and mundane mechanics of running a business, in the Harvard Newspeak that is now the lingua franca of the ghetto that corporate UK business has become since we started listening to our cousins across the pond on such matters. Heat maps and traffic light analysis took over from bar graphs and pie charts to similar small effect. Communication Lite™.

The true purpose of this cryptic modus operandi of 'communication' - this Biz'o'Babble™ - is of course to deflect and obfuscate from the simple, uncomfortable and unconscionable fact that the people who work at these stratospheric strata of society more often than not do very little actual real work in return for enormous pecuniary rewards: a few hours a week at one company, a few hours at another, and so on. 'That'll be a million quid thank you, and mind you remember my bonus at year-end'. Judging by those interviewed for the enquiry thus far, these types seem to be the most incurious, ineffective and insubstantial individuals one could wish to head up one's corrupt and failing asset-stripping enterprise: for example, the UK government of the day, or should I say the corporate spooks department of the seamier depths of Whitehall needing to off the turkey that they had created out of an otherwise august Crown institution, viz, exhibit one: The Post Office.

Yesterday we heard much talk of The Civil Service Code and yet, tellingly, no mention of The Official Secrets Act. Today we learned of chains of corporate-government communications conveniently obscured or missing altogether [oh, please] with the responsible agents, the shareholder executive, apparently blind to what must have been the screamingly obvious, staring them in their faces. But of course, they didn't like the heat, ignored the red lights and drove on regardless, and the rest is becoming history. Although that, of course, is not the actual truth underlying their (in)actions...