Recently, I was shown a criminal PowerPoint slide with 184 words of bullet-pointed text on it. Thirty-five of them were in bold. Three of the words on the slide were the noun form of the word ‘deliverable’. This was emboldened once, and at regular weight in the two other instances.

Another slide in the same deck had the noun form of ’deliverable’ used twice in once sentence.

Yet another talked about ‘barriers’ to the ‘delivery’ of ‘deliverables’, creating an unacknowledged philosophical vortex—if a ‘deliverable’ cannot be ’delivered’, then is it still a ’deliverable’? Is it possible to have an ‘undeliverable deliverable’?

Reader: I must confess, I don’t know what a ‘deliverable’ is. I know the dictionary definition, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what it means in the context of these slides. And that’s a problem: if someone is putting together a slide deck with the aim of communicating an idea to me, and I can’t follow what they are trying to say, then that is—plainly—a failed interaction.

Giles Turnbull recently gave three good reasons why governments need more writers. Jeanette Winterson makes a similar point in 12 Bytes, albeit it aimed more at scientists than governments. I’d like to contribute three more to the discussion.

Firstly—and most fundamentally, in my view—we need writers to help call out unclear communication. We need zero-tolerance for inexcusably vague terms like ‘deliverables’. If leaders are unable to see it themselves, then let’s equip them with writers to provide assistance and training.

Secondly, we need writers to highlight when ambiguous language is disguising disagreement. This is occasionally a deliberate and useful strategy, but more often—in my experience—poor drafting unintentionally means different things to different people, resulting in conflict and inconsistency of interpretation. By drafting precise language up front, the disagreements can be considered early. Without precise language, even the thinking behind decisions can be muddy.

Thirdly, we need writers to pare our natural tendency towards euphemism, particularly given that Governments are often making difficult choices for large numbers of people. A colleague was recently in a meeting where it was suggested that a group of people would ‘enter the unaccommodated stream’: like my colleague, a writer could help pierce through the protective jargon and help decision makers see that they are really talking about ‘making families homeless’.

But mostly, we need writers to bring deliverance from ‘deliverables’.

The image at the top of this post was generated by asking Midjourney to imagine ‘a large pile of deliverables’. It possibly makes my point more clearly than the text in this post.