Corporate America has developed its own dialect, a beautiful and frustrating dance of syllables designed to sound productive while carefully avoiding any actual commitment. It is a language where no one ever says “no,” but everyone says they’ll “put a pin in it.”
Chief among these phrases is the dreaded “Let’s circle back.” On the surface, it sounds collaborative. It implies that we are all on a journey together, and we will return to this very spot once we have more information. In reality, “Let’s circle back” is a professional ejector seat. It is what a person says when they have no answer, no resources, and a desperate hope that you will be hit with a minor case of amnesia by next Tuesday.
We live in a world of “synergy,” “low-hanging fruit,” and “bandwidth.” We don’t have meetings anymore; we have “synchronization touchpoints.” We don’t have problems; we have “growth opportunities.” This jargon serves as a sort of corporate camouflage. If you use enough buzzwords, you can spend an entire hour talking without actually saying anything at all.
If we actually “circled back” as much as we claimed we would, we would all be in a permanent state of vertigo. The irony is that the more “aligned” we try to be, the more we end up in a circular loop of emails that could have been a single sentence. “I’ll circle back to you on that” has become the “I have read the terms and conditions” of the office—a lie we all tell to move on to the next screen.
Welcome to Kelly’s Korner: “Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, and the ridiculous in everything else.”
