In my other (writing) life, I do quite a lot of writing work for Woolworths – a client I love for many reasons.  I love the brand, I love the way the company thinks and, in my fairly limited experience of them, I find it incredibly refreshing working with people who are all loved up about what they do. Like any big corporation, they have their own language which inevitably becomes a shorthand for meetings and the like. One of the terms they have long used which I have taken up with enthusiasm is the idea of being on a journey. Of course, they also use it their customer environment with the good food journey and good business journey which is not quite the same thing. Internally, when people tell a group that ‘we are presently on a journey’, it means ‘we haven’t actually got it right yet and we may not be totally sure how we’re going to’.  What I like about it is that it is such a questing, positive idea and it has the added advantage of deflecting the prospective negativity of one’s peers. The ”Ok lads, it’s not gone that well so far and we’re  buggered if we know what to do next” you might get in more butch corporations could, quite rightly, could open you up for criticism. If someone tells you they’re on a journey, there’s such an air of hopeful travelling about it that it would seem incredibly churlish to make nasty remarks about their present, undeniably sub-optimal situation.  You sort of want to cheer them on and pack them some sandwiches.

I mention all that mainly to give you the chance of benefitting from such a superbly smooth term. Next time someone is about to have a go at you for not coming up wtih goods, just come up with the journey spiel and watch them get all considerate and serious on you.  It’s a win. All part of the service.

I was toying with the phrase, in fact, because it is also true that anyone involved in podcasting – especially when it comes to the business world - is also on a journey. Ours, however, is slightly different. It’s not so much that we haven’t got it right yet, it’s more that we don’t really know what right is. We can only rely on our instincts, which tell us that there is huge power here to be harnessed and that everyone – audiences (potential podcatchers all), businesses and podcast producers – can have a rare old time.  One thing that I have noticed is that instinctively, we are all saying the same thing – engage, entertain, create unique content, interact, do whatever it takes to take people to the ‘pass it on’ point, you can’t fake it, you really can’t.   We kind of know where we want to get, we can all feel that the destination’s a good one but we actually don’t know (some might say they do but they don’t really – that’s why those conference people are making a killing) exactly how to get there. We are really on a journey…