Mots Maudits #7: Transversal

Today, I want to look at a word of business jargon that frequently crops up in discussions of organisational design: “transversal”. An apparently simple term that is deceptively tricky to translate because it is highly context-dependent.

Football fans may recognise the term from the “barre transversale” (the crossbar) — a horizontal bar that connects the two vertical posts that run to the ground. The comparison with usage in football terminology is not a wholly pointless digression; it actually represents a decent metaphor for how the term is used in business. If you imagine that the two posts are two different departments in a company (say HR and finance), “équipes/fonctions transversales” work like the aforementioned crossbar, connecting (or working between or simultaneously with) two departments or entities. They might share human, financial, or material resources, and like in “flat organisational structures" work is carried out across team boundaries. Likewise, a “sujet/projet transversal” will connect staff from teams across several departments or functions to work on a joint project in order to share ideas and expertise. You might refer to it as a cross-cutting, inter-departmental, or even a corporate project in some cases.

The qualifier “cross-cutting” is very useful when you don’t have much information about the roles and responsibilities of the parties involves, but a “tâche transversale”, for example, could refer to a “cross-functional”, “cross-departmental” task, so it is useful to ask the author for clarification of who or what the task is connecting, if possible.

And finally, when the term is used more generally to refer to business methods, like in “une approche transversale”, it might even be possible to rephrase and refer to “an approach that covers all areas of the business”, to talk about “working across boundaries”, or to reference “de-siloing” and avoid repeating the same term several times.