The expression Verb Sprawl is a label for noisy and counterproductive language in a project plan.

The expression has these objectives:

• Quickly and easily spot the language in a project plan

• Encourage a team to improve the labels it gives to its collaborative, durable work outputs (documents).

Verb Sprawl looks like this.

The expression is a riff off of other kinds of sprawl, such as suburban sprawl. It aims to envision a culture of poor organization, thoughtlessness, hastiness, and being “all over the place.” The benefit is when teams recognize they have sprawl and are able and willing to re-organize work so that is thoughtful, paced, substantial, and elastic. The expression gives a name to a common form of bad innovation management. Diagnosing Verb Sprawl saves a team time and effort organizing and executing wasteful work.

Innovation practitioners use this expression to label noise in their formal project planning.