The gown card reads “Opportunity is a dirty word.”
The thing about opportunity is that it is nonsense.
Oh, it looks good. The dictionary definition is that it is a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something.
The set of circumstances and the definition of something is deliberately undefined.
But people love to talk about opportunity as if the playing field is the same for everyone. That every one of us can go out there and invent the next big thing. Or write the Great American Novel. Or go to bed with a full stomach.
It is not.
Which is why it is a dirty word.
In my fourth class as a PhD student, there was a lot of class discussion on what a paradigm is. And how to shift the paradigm in nursing. Also discussed were the meta paradigms of nursing.
Patterns.
A paradigm is a pattern.
There are 4 meta paradigms in nursing, that filter down into the patterns. Person, Nursing, Environment, and Health. Nursing looks at the meta paradigms and breaks them down into the paradigms or patterns. We use these patterns to guide how we care for patients.
When I walked into that class, the last thing I had read about paradigm was a Dilbert comic making fun of management speak. I was definitely confused for a moment.
Another buzzword that gets thrown around too often is spearhead.
I’m rather a literal minded person. To me, a spear head is a sharpened stone, used to hunt.
In management buzzspeak, it refers to the person being the boss of a project. Or being the point person, but might be TOO literal. You get it, right? Sharp stone, point?
The buzzwords are used to obfuscate (confuse) the true meaning. They can be useful speaking shorthand, but can also be used as a blunt instrument against the subordinates.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 