I know its early in the year, but I’d like Lake State University to already select its word to be banished from the English language for 2018. My nomination is “the process”.
If you listened to all of the news conference announcing Brian Gutekunst as the new General Manager of the Green Bay Packers yesterday, you would have heard team President Mark Murphy use the term “the process” nine times in about a six minute speech–and Gutekunst use it 23 times-and that was before he started taking questions from the media.
“The process” became a hot buzzword a couple of years ago (especially in sports) thanks to the Philadelphia 76ers “rebuilding effort”. The team was intentionally losing games to better its odds of winning the NBA Draft Lottery. But you can’t just tell fans paying big bucks to attend games that you are not going to even try to win them. So their braintrust came up with the strategy of “Trust the Process”–as if there was a grand scheme in place that would guarantee championships if you are willing to sit through absolute dreck for the next couple of seasons.
Instead of becoming a national joke, Philly fans actually jumped onto the “Trust the Process” bandwagon–even buying t-shirts with the stupid saying on it, like their gullibility was somehow going to make the team better. Yet here they are–several years into “the process”–and the Sixers are still terrible–even with all of their high draft picks.
Obsiously, other sports executives have decided to mimic Philadelphia–so now everything involved in sports strategy is “the process”. Mike McCarthy used it often to explain Brett Hundley’s clueless performances while filling in for Aaron Rodgers this past season. And now it is creeping into the world of business and politics–with leaders in both making “Well, we are going through the process of determining…..” a common phrase.
Maybe it does make you sound like you have a master plan for everything you do–when you usually don’t. Maybe it makes you sound like you are putting in a lot of work on something–when you likely aren’t. But let’s start the process of determining the process to get “the process” out of the lexicon.
