Here are some phrases about communicating that I learned in my nine years in big business:
Reports get to the point using bullets
We fire off emails
It's better to target messages than to use a scattergun approach
Sometimes it's good to be blunt, to shoot from the hip
We coordinate our messages into a strategic campaign
It's all very slick. Then we wonder why people aren't responding. We despair that they aren't connecting with the things we tell them.
They just seem to be so difficult to get through to. Defensive, almost.
This could have something to do with the sheer number of demands on their attention, from all angles.
But look as well at the language around business communications.
point bullets fire target scattergun blunt shoot strategy campaign
It's no wonder they're defensive. They're getting not just an offense of messages, the messages are contrived from a truly offensive place. Even if the messengers want to achieve rapport, collaboration, and relationship, it will not happen if their minds are wired in this way.
It's like sending roses out of the barrel of a tank. They'd still blast, still stink of the metal, and would still carry the history and circumstances that got the tank there in the first place.
I noticed this pattern in communications a few years back and have been collecting examples ever since. To my absolute delight, it is almost the first 'system' George Lakoff uses in Metaphors We Live By to illustrate that the words we use to think about stuff, change our feelings and behaviours toward those things.
He and Mark Johnson point out how different communications would be if we were to treat them as a dance. Communications would be born from a place of partnership, giving, listening, instinct, expression, emotion, discipline, practice, perfection. Art wouldn't be a nice-to-have add-on when there's a bit of budget or time leftover. It would be intrinsically part of it.
Imagine a company where the directors wanted their communications with their people to be a dance, to be a truly reciprocal and deeply pleasurable, even physical, experience. As with all systems we communicate by, it would transform the relationships between all other aspects of the organisation. Collaboration and consultation would grow. 'Fat' would be driven out, and all would become lean and focussed. Sharing would grow, and all would delight in each others' success.
Maybe you're wary of seeing your words in tights. But isn't the image of seeing all your people up and giving it their all, throwing themselves into the choreography of business, preferable to the image of your people holding each other at gunpoint to get things done?
