Talking like a consultant

I have spent most of my career in consultative or delivery roles. In order to be successful in these roles you must master the unique language of consultant-speak. For the benefit of my blog subscribers I will now reveal these words and their meanings to you.

• Heuristic – Rules of thumb and ways of comparing how crappy your company is to other companies that are slightly less crappy
• Iterate – When you don’t get it right the first time and are trying to say that you meant it that way
• Robust – Adding more pages to the presentation or report so it seems like a lot of work
• Remediate – To fix your crap
• Buckets – Ways of taking information from you and putting it into categories
• 50,000 foot view – Summarizing information that we do not understand the details of. Synonomous with “At the end of the day”
• Boil the ocean – Staying focused on a portion of the work so we don’t have to do all of it
• Elevator speech – The result of practiced presentations to senior management
• Touching base – A follow up to someone that we don’t trust will get the work done in time or correctly
• Leverage – Stealing other work to repackage and call as new work
• Getting on the same page – Telling someone else that they are wrong because they don’t agree with what we are saying

I hope this has shed some light for some of you on consulting words. If not, then view it as a 50,000 foot view of a robust iteration and then get on the same page.