Belonging. Where is that in the Maslow hierarchy? Oh yeah, it is pretty basic and important, right after safety and just before “Esteem”.

All of us want to belong to a group. There are even those who belong to the group that doesn’t belong to the group.

In business, or for instance, in any occupation, discipline, even in sports or a hobby; there is a particular jargon that gets developed. In the beginning, these are shorthands for things that are: 1.- recurring themes in the trade, and 2.- they would take a lot of time to explain them every single time.

This is how musicians and surfers talk about the “pocket”, even though they mean different things for both. Photographers have “chimping”, “moiré”, and “Uncle Bob”, and people in the IT business talk about “disty”, “demo”, and then the onslaught of acronyms, both technical and not, everything from ML, VM, RFP, QBR, SMT and well, etc.

So jargon surfaces because it saves a lot of time. If I don’t have to say “senior management team”, or even worse, “all the direct reports of the Chief Executive Officer”, but I only say SMT, that saves me a lot.

But then jargon starts to provide an identity. There is a certain way that someone in the trade talks, that allows you to recognize them as an insider. In some cases, it may even have been designed to keep “regular” people out, like in the case of law enforcement and the military. Love it or hate it, Jargon provides a level of trust that at least you live in the same world.

What’s your favorite business expression?