Technical jargon: What does "sounden" actually mean?
In his column «Fachchinesisch,» Benno Maggi explains terms from the fields of marketing and communications. This time, he shares his thoughts on the term «sounden.».
Clubhouse hype, countless podcasts that you should have listened to, Alexa and Friends: everything auditory is in high demand at the moment, even in marketing. This means that a word that has been floating around in the corporate world for some time now has rapidly risen up the hit parade of buzzwords: sound. We no longer do it in a training basement, but in meeting rooms in sounding boards. Here, senior employees from different departments or divisions usually take part in moderated discussions. Their voices on a defined topic are recorded unfiltered and then mixed. The problem is that when everyone is talking, no one understands anything in the end.
If you sound right, you find the groove
The inflationary installation of sounding boards as committees that accompany creation, change or innovation processes in an advisory capacity without having the authority to issue directives has been around for some time. "Consultative body" was what it was once called, but for most people that sounded too much like politics, social work or trade unions and less like organizational development or even change management.
Sounden has to be learned. This is the crux of the matter: Very few people are willing to learn. Instead of being a barometer of mood and inspiration in creative or change processes, sounding off then either delays decisions ("We have to go to the sounding board again with this") or degenerates into an alibi exercise ("Yes, we heard you, but we're not interested"). Both are wrong. The advantage would be that the management, project team or creatives leave their echo chambers during sounding and honestly ask themselves the most important questions: Does what we're trying to do here make sense? Will it be understood by the people it affects? Or, to stay in the language of music: Does it groove or sound more like marching music or muzak?
* Benno Maggi is co-founder and CEO of Partner & Partner. He has been eavesdropping on the industry for over 30 years, discovering words and terms for us that can either be used for small talk, pomposity, excitement, playing Scrabble, or just because.
