Mind your language

“I hate Kodak,” said a creative director I used to work with. “Everything has to be about ‘moments’ now. They’ve ruined the concept of moments.”

I feel something similar about a lot of the language that gets used in consultancy (and in business). I’m sure I’m not alone. There are the abstract nouns: vision, purpose, strategy. The adjectives: agile, innovative, disruptive. And — oh god — the metaphors: north star, hymn sheet, blue sky.

Like clichés, language of this kind has evolved through necessity. It functions as a shorthand for important concepts that are vital to the successful running of any business. This utility helps to explain the ubiquity of the words.

The problems of ubiquity

But ubiquity brings with it two related problems. The first is that the words are so common that their meanings end up diluted and misconstrued. Ask any group of businesspeople to explain their definition of, say, a strategy, and you are likely to get divergent answers. 

This lack of clarity predicts poor application. If you are not sure what a strategy is, it will be difficult to create an effective one. That’s even before you get to questions of strategic competency. (Metaphors are a particular culprit here. An example in my own practice was a senior team that couldn’t agree on a precise definition of north star. This made it a little tricky for them to define one.) And the sad reality is that poor application is common. Gartner reports that up to seven in ten transformation projects fail to achieve their aims.

The sheer frequency of poor application predicts the second problem. It’s that people’s historic experience of these words in action might well have been terrible. What leaders presented as a Panglossian ticket to some corporate utopia might have instead created collateral damage in people’s careers or lives, or the careers or lives of treasured colleagues.

So the very use of these words can bring up a whole range of negative associations. People do not vote for experiences where the associations are unpleasant. That remains true no matter how much Pied Piper cosplay leaders or consultants engage in.

To see this in action, try using the word purpose (or vision or indeed strategy) with a group of business people. Keep your emotional antennae attuned to the response. It might surprise you.

Linguistic fatigue

Welcome to a phenomenon that I call linguistic fatigue. This is where the very mention of generally sensible, if overused, words and phrases yields a negative emotional reaction. It often takes the form of a blink-and-you-might-miss-it drop-shoulders-and-sigh moment. An often unvocalised but very real sense of Oh god, here we go again.

It’s a response that suggests the road ahead (boom!) is going to involve an undesirable level of friction.

For your average consultant, linguistic fatigue poses a unique challenge. Conceptual language of this sort can feel essential in helping us describe what we do. Indeed, vision and purpose and strategy and blue-sky thinking often sit at the core of our work. How do we navigate the fact that such words can yield a negative Pavlovian response?

Elevate your consciousness (no, not like that)

Part of the answer lies in the act of being conscious of the reactions that your choice of language can generate. Be on the lookout for any energetic shifts that occur when you use a word like, say, purpose. It can prime you to ask all sorts of questions.

You might choose to explore the organisation’s historic experience. This can yield fresh insights about ways in which it has struggled with purpose work (or even consultancy in this space) in the past. You might probe whether everyone around the table has a shared understanding of what the word means. You might even be able to create an opportunity to recontextualise your own work. In doing so you could set your project up for success by agreeing with your client what will be different now.

As the old saying goes, you can’t heal what you can’t feel. If you observe linguistic fatigue, don’t barrel on regardless. Lean into what it’s trying to tell you.

Keep it simple (but not stupid)

It is also worth exploring where you can avoid linguistic fatigue by opting not to use the words. 

This process should not involve scurrying off to find a rare synonym for the word in question. Instead, embrace simplicity and directness of language. 

A “high-level plan”, for example, can be a different (and accurate) way of saying strategy. 

“Ensuring that we all say the same thing about what we’re doing and why” might feel a bit unwieldy. But it’s less open to interpretation than clumsy metaphors involving singing and hymn sheets. 

Studies prove that simplicity of language improves other perceptions of our intelligence. The more accessible our choice of words is, the more others believe our contributions worthy of consideration.

Working this way takes discipline. Like any shorthand, this sort of language is comfortable, even second nature, for most of us. (A confession: I have been on a mission to purge my vocabulary of it for three years. And I still fall down all the time.) 

But it is striking, the impact that words can have. After all, we live our lives in language. Finding a means of expression that energises rather than exhausts can only increase your chances of success. Who knows, it might even lead to some breakthrough moments that even my old creative director would deem Kodak-worthy.

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What to take from this article

Language matters. Spotting and seeking to avoid linguistic fatigue is a skill that will help set your projects up for success.

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