Consulting jargon: LOW HANGING FRUIT and GRANULAR

By The English Farm on August 27 2022
Word cloud of business jargon
Image Credit
Gavin Llewellyn via Flickr

As consultants, you have the tough job of having to get as much useful information from someone as you can in the shortest amount of time possible. You also need to explain complex ideas in simple, easy-to-understand ways. A great and fun way of helping to speed up the process is by using your language skills to establish rapport. The words we use give people a peek at how we view the world, and as humans, we like talking to people who have the ability to see the world as we do. 

This is where consulting and business jargon come into play. If you have a good knowledge of idioms and jargon, you can communicate complex ideas quickly and smoothly. It will also improve your speaking test score!

Today, let's start with the low-hanging fruit.

Low-hanging fruit

As the image shows, we use the phrase low-hanging fruit when we want to talk about the initial opportunities that are easiest to cover; the quick wins. 

  1. I think that we should go after the low-hanging fruit first.
  2. You can't let the client overlook the low-hanging fruit.
  3. What are the low-hanging fruit here?
  4. In order to succeed in the short term, we're going to have to take care of the low-hanging fruit. 

Our next word is granular, which refers to a tiny part of something larger, like a grain of sand on the beach.

Granular [adjective] / Granularity [noun]

The word granular (pronounced: GRAN-yuh-ler) is also a good word to know. It basically means a detailed level of analysis (see 1 below), although sometimes it can mean too much detail (see 2). Granularity (pronounced: gran-yuh-LAE-ri-tee, -dee) is the noun form of the word.

  1. You should talk to him. He has a granular understanding of how the industry operates in Japan.
  2. You're being too granular here. Can you summarize this for me?
  3. The client insists on a high degree of granularity before we take any action. 

Try to use these words in your next lesson. The more you practice them, the easier it will be to work them into your speaking test answers or conversations with colleagues and clients.
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Images
low-hanging fruit: Ian Carroll via Flickr
granularity: Luisella Planeta Leoni via Pixabay

Consulting
Jargon