A “comic” of collective nouns

Originally published on ManageWithoutThem, 2012-09-05.

And so I present, the collective nouns for many of those groups I’m well acquainted with after 20 years at this game:

• the “burden” of architects – who blessed with superior knowledge of something – it doesn’t really matter what – use it to protect themselves from everything else
• the “career” of project managers – who seem to forget that they are there for the project and that the project isn’t there as a means to display their many talents
• the “negation” of business process analysts – who will always define themselves by what they are not – they promo-tweet “it’s not about the technology” without any clear sense of irony
• the “anticipation” of change managers – who are by now so convinced that change is continuous and never ending that they must be ever poised for the next change, no matter what it is, without regard to the vast market of ‘everybody else’ who can collectively adapt to ’good’ change well before the precious change-resistant change manager can understand the details of ’bad’ change
• the “deck” of strategists – who make a clear distinction between ’strategy’ and ’implementation’ not because they have a clear view of the rich dimensions of strategy but rather because their two-dimensional view of the world divides real life into “things I’m aware of that I call strategy” and “things I find confusing and complicated that I call implementation”
• the “haggle” of general managers who are struggling just to preserve the pretence of a ‘strong management team’ and thus are happy if they can just keep up and appear to agree with the team, or strategically act contrarian, during an increasingly overlapping portfolio of meetings with people just like them only too scared to say

But I jest. And I’m well aware that the quality is in the exceptions.