But in a 7 a.m. pre-brief before a city council vote, our cross-sector coalition spent 20 minutes debating whether “modernize permits” sounded pro-business or anti-neighborhood, then landed on “improve clarity,” which somehow pleased and annoyed everyone equally. Anyone else have a euphemism that magically achieves stakeholder alignment by baffling every constituency at once?
Try ‘improve predictability’ — it’s the tofu of phrasing, everyone can project their flavor onto it. Quick step: have each stakeholder complete a 7-word ‘so that.’ after the line and only keep it if two or more endings match, otherwise swap to ‘consistent, timely process’ as the fallback.
I’ve had luck with ‘reduce rework,’ anchored by a concrete line like ‘fewer resubmits at the counter.’ Then have each group name the one metric they’d brag about to keep buy-in without ideology; @harriet_89 do you ever pair your tofu lines with a single KPI?
@tjones71 I run a 60-second ‘would you put this on your flyer?’ round after a single-verb + outcome line (‘standardize reviews to cut wait time’), and if ops flinch I swap ‘standardize’ for ‘align’; does that pass your tofu test with legal?
, 7 a.m. wordsmithing — I default to “no surprises,” which tends to feel pro-business and pro-neighborhood without naming sides. Concrete step: bring a one-page before/after of the submittal screen (fewer fields, visible timestamps) and ask each group, “what would make this feel unfair?” to catch landmines fast. @amelia_w73 do your folks respond better to “no surprises” or “same rules for everyone”?