So the other day I heard someone complain about an unintelligible instruction given to junior workers in her organisation. This message had, it seems, “cascaded” from the company’s directors.
There should have been more synergy, she said, but if you ask me the real problem in this situation is that deceptively pretty word “cascade”.
As an example of obfuscating workspeak, cascade is not the newest villain, nor is it even the most annoying.
A few of the most irritating business buzzwords of 2021, according to TrustRadius political analyst and researcher John Ferguson, are “the new normal”, “trying times”, “thought leader”, “pivot”, “deep dive” and “alignment”.
So cascade shares its etymological family tree with a bunch of cheats, thieves, clumsy criminals and rotting corpses, but hey, nobody’s perfect.
These join other clichés still clinging hard to their miserable lives, including “reach out”, “low-hanging fruit”, “think outside the box”, “disambiguate”, “learnings”, “blue sky”, “synergise”, “paradigm shift”, “take it offline”, “guesstimate”, “circle back”, “bandwidth”, “upskill” and (shudder) “restructuring”.
But let’s stick with cascade. The Macmillan Dictionary gives three meanings for this Latin-derived word. Two are considered to be “mainly literary”, in other words more likely to be used by poets than by plain speakers.
The first type of literary cascade is “a small waterfall” and the second is “something that hangs down in large amounts, for example cloth or hair”.
Both words also serve as verbs: in the first instance, a babbling brook cascades merrily over rocks, and in the second, poor Rapunzel’s long hair cascaded down the walls of her tower, enabling a hefty prince to cause great pain to her tender roots while heaving himself up over the window sill, using her tresses as a climbing rope.
The third definition of cascade is even more painful. It is “a series of things that come quickly one after the other”, say the Macmillan lexicographers, giving the example, “The bank’s collapse led to a cascade of business failures”.
If only it ended there. Unfortunately, cascade continued to fall a few more thousand stories until it crashed onto the heads of powerless personnel perpetually pummelled by puerile platitudes.
If we track cascade back to its origins, it springs from the ancient Proto-Indo European root *kad, meaning “to fall”, whence cometh also accident, cadaver, cadence, casual, chance, coincide, decadence, decay and recidivist.
Also on the list of *kad children is “cheat”, which in the 1300s was spelt “escheat” and meant the seizing of land by an overlord upon the death or defaulting of a peasant or some such underling.
So cascade shares its etymological family tree with a bunch of cheats, thieves, clumsy criminals and rotting corpses, but hey, nobody’s perfect.
If one were to be charitable, cascade in a business sense should mean “share” or “discuss”, but these things are not implemented in a way understood by rational humans. In practice, what cascade means is “ram the things the up-aboves want down the throats of the down-belows, whether they like it or not”.
The people to blame for the warping and watering down of this once not terrible word seem to be the compilers of A Dictionary of Human Resource Management, published in 2008, which first mooted “cascade communication” as “a process of passing information down from the top of the organisation, through all the levels in the hierarchy”.
But wait, there’s more. This dictionary says the benefit of cascade communication is: “that it involves managers more directly in the communication process, thereby forcing them to take ownership of the information and to present it in a way that is meaningful and justifiable to their subordinates. The people on the receiving end of the message at each stage are more likely to listen because there is less power difference between them and the sender (their line manager) than there would be if the communication were a ‘message from the top’.”
Put this way, cascading sounds not dissimilar to that other insulting concept, the “trickle-down effect”. This allegedly happens when a hungry ant crawling over the toes of a statue hopes desperately to be “gifted” a nourishing drop of guano from the pigeons shitting, sorry, I mean sitting, on the statue’s head.
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