Going Forward, We Must Leverage This Piece: A Survival Guide to the British Corporate Memo
Going Forward, We Must Leverage This Situation: A Survival Guide to the British Corporate Memo
It arrived on a Tuesday morning, as they always do. The subject line read: 'Important Update RE: Strategic Alignment — Action Required.' There was no action required. There was, in fact, nothing required of anyone, except perhaps a quiet moment of reflection on the choices that had led them to this inbox.
The email was 340 words long. It contained eleven distinct pieces of corporate jargon, four calls to 'reach out,' and a request to 'circle back offline.' It had been sent to 'All Staff UK.' Nobody knew who had written it. Nobody would ever know. It had simply emerged, fully formed, from the organisation's collective subconscious, like a fog that smells faintly of KPIs.
Welcome to the British corporate memo. Population: everyone. Casualties: mounting.
A Brief Taxonomy of the Form
The corporate memo, in its modern incarnation, is not really a communication. It is a performance of communication — a ritual gesture toward the idea that information is being shared, without the inconvenience of actually sharing any. It exists in several distinct species, each with its own distinctive plumage.
There is the Strategic Update, which announces that the organisation is 'entering an exciting new phase' without specifying what the old phase was, what the new phase involves, or when it starts. There is the Values Reminder, which informs staff that the organisation 'puts people first' and 'thrives on collaboration,' usually sent the week before a redundancy consultation. And there is the Process Enhancement Communication, which notifies you that something you did one way will now be done a slightly different way, explained across six paragraphs that somehow fail to specify what the difference is.
All three share a common ancestor: the conviction that the appearance of transparency is an adequate substitute for the thing itself.
The Jargon Ecosystem: A Field Guide
No corporate memo functions without its native vocabulary. These phrases have evolved over decades of management consultancy and LinkedIn thought leadership into a dialect so thoroughly drained of meaning that they now operate as pure social signal — tribal markers indicating membership of the professional class, rather than vessels of actual information.
'Going forward' — This phrase announces that what follows concerns the future, a piece of information that was already implicit in the concept of making a plan, but which apparently needed stating. It also subtly implies that what came before is not to be examined. Going forward, we do not look backward.
'Low-hanging fruit' — The organisation wishes to achieve easy wins before tackling harder problems. This is presented as insight. It is, in fact, the same logic applied by anyone who has ever eaten a biscuit before starting a diet, but it sounds considerably better in a slide deck.
'Move the needle' — Something should change, measurably. Which needle? On which instrument? Measuring what? In which direction? These are not questions the memo will answer. The needle is metaphorical. The movement is aspirational. The metric is TBC.
'Synergy' — Two things together will be better than those two things separately. This is sometimes true. It is stated as though it were always true, and as though its truth were remarkable, rather than being the premise of every collaboration since the invention of the wheel.
'Leverage' — We will use a thing we have to obtain a thing we want. Again: sometimes true, always stated with the gravity of a strategic breakthrough.
'Circle back' — We will speak again, later, about this thing we are currently not resolving. Circle back is the corporate memo's way of closing a loop it has not opened, answering a question it has not addressed, and moving on from a problem it has not solved. It is the conversational equivalent of a roundabout with no exits.
Decoding a Real Specimen
Let us examine a composite memo, assembled from genuine examples that any British office worker will recognise with the weary clarity of someone who has seen a thing too many times:
'As we move into the next quarter, it's important that we remain agile in our approach and leverage existing synergies across the business. Going forward, I'd encourage all teams to identify low-hanging fruit within their remit and think about how we can move the needle on our key priorities. Please do reach out if you have any questions, and let's look to circle back on this in our next all-hands.'
Translation: Nothing is changing. Nobody knows what you should do. There will be another meeting. It will also resolve nothing.
Why Does This Keep Happening
The persistence of corporate jargon in British organisations is not accidental, and it is not stupidity. It is, in a perverse way, entirely rational. Jargon provides cover. A memo stuffed with strategic language cannot be held accountable for specific outcomes, because it has not specified any. It cannot be wrong, because it has not said anything precise enough to be falsified. It cannot be ignored, because it sounds important, even if — particularly if — you cannot say what it means.
There is also the mimicry factor. Junior managers write like senior managers because senior managers write like this. Senior managers write like this because they learned it from consultants. Consultants write like this because clients pay more for it than they would pay for clarity. Clarity, it turns out, is cheap. Obfuscation commands a premium.
A Modest Proposal
Nonsense Watch UK would like to propose a simple test for all internal communications, which we are calling the Grandparent Standard: if you cannot read the memo aloud to your grandmother and have her understand what you need her to do, the memo has failed, and should be rewritten.
We anticipate this proposal will be taken on board, explored in a working group, socialised across relevant stakeholders, and ultimately tabled pending further review.
Which is, we suppose, a kind of answer.
