Company language: the words that reveal strategy

In the video, in Italian, I say that the words used inside a company show whether the strategy has been absorbed, and I quote Martin Heidegger. Here I tell the discovery of an Oxford philosopher, John L. Austin, that some words do not describe but do, and what it changes for whoever runs a company.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

Listen to the words a company uses internally. Not those of its press releases. Those of meetings, emails, hallways.

That is where you understand everything. You understand whether there is a shared direction or whether everyone speaks a different language. You understand whether the strategy has been absorbed or has remained a document no one has made their own.

Language is not the clothing of thought. It is thought itself.

Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, wrote in the Letter on Humanism that language is the house of being. We live inside the words we use. They set the boundaries of what we can think and build.

The same principle holds for a company. A company that talks about “problems” lives in a different world from one that talks about “challenges.” Whoever uses the language of blame inhabits a different culture from whoever uses the language of responsibility.

Changing an organization’s language is not a rhetorical exercise. It is one of the deepest strategic acts.

Because before changing what a company does, you have to change what a company says.

The ship named by the wrong person

In 1955 the Oxford philosopher John L. Austin gave a series of lectures at Harvard, published in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words. Among the first examples is the launching of a ship. Whoever says “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth” while smashing the bottle against the bow is not describing an action but performing it: the sentence is neither true nor false, and from that moment the ship has a name.

The words of meetings and hallways show whether the strategy has become everyone’s or has remained a document.

A little further on Austin turns the scene around, with very English humor. I see a ship in the shipyard, walk up, smash the bottle hanging at the bow, proclaim “I name this ship the Mr. Stalin” and, for good measure, kick away the chocks. The trouble is that I was not the person chosen to name it, and Austin concludes that we will all agree on two things: the ship has not been named, and it is a shame. The words and the gesture were all there. The right person was missing.

Language as clothing, or as a house

The video opens with a sentence that answers someone without naming him. In 1779 Samuel Johnson, in his life of the poet Abraham Cowley, wrote that language is the dress of thought. Thought comes first, words clothe it, and the wrong clothes spoil it. It is still the idea with which many companies treat internal communication: first you decide, then you look for the words to say it.

Martin Heidegger, in the Letter on Humanism, written in 1946 and published the following year, reverses the image: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.” Words, in this image, are not worn: they are lived in. And whatever has no word in that house struggles to enter our thoughts.

For a company the difference is concrete. If language is clothing, changing the words is cosmetic. If it is a house, words decide what people are able to see and propose. You notice it every time a strategy really enters a company: after a few months, words appear in meetings that were not there before, and with the words come questions no one used to ask.

Words that do: the language of responsibility

Austin adds the tool Heidegger lacks. Sentences that perform an action, which he calls performative utterances, succeed only under certain conditions. There must be a procedure everyone accepts, and the people and circumstances must be the right ones. The ship named by a passerby is the example of an act that fails, and Austin devotes whole lectures to all the ways a promise, an appointment or a decision can fail even though it was spoken.

Companies are full of acts of this kind. “We have decided,” said by someone without the power to decide. “I’ll take care of it,” said without time or resources. “This is a priority,” said of ten things in the same meeting. They have the form of a commitment and none of the substance, and those who hear them understand perfectly well, even if no one says so.

Some words do not describe, they do: promising, deciding, assigning a responsibility are acts, and a company changes when these change.

This is the difference between the language of blame and the language of responsibility I talk about in the video. The first tells what went wrong and whose fault it is: it describes. The second says who commits to doing what, by when, and it is said by the person who can do it: it acts. A company that moves from the first to the second has changed much more than its vocabulary, because it has changed who answers for what. It is the heart of every move toward clear roles and delegation, as I explain in Bringing professional management into the company.

There is a simple exercise to notice it. In any meeting, write down the sentences that take the form of a commitment, such as “we decide,” “I’ll handle it,” “by Friday,” and next to each who said it and whether they could. At the next meeting, look at how many became facts. The ratio between sentences spoken and facts that followed says more about the state of a company than many indicators, and it also shows where the strategy stalled. That is why, at the end of an engagement, I leave the company written criteria in precise words, not just principles.

When changing the words is not enough

The video’s example, “problems” and “challenges,” should be taken with caution. Calling problems challenges can be precisely the way not to see them: positive vocabulary is one of the most elegant forms of defense, and anyone who works in companies recognizes it on first hearing. A company does not become braver by adopting nicer words. It becomes different when the commitments people make in speaking change, and when the person speaking is the one who can keep them.

Changing the words without changing the decisions breeds distrust, not culture.

There is also an irony in Austin’s story that I like to recall. The editor of the lectures noted that the philosopher had realized too late to correct it that “I do,” his most famous example, is not actually said in the marriage ceremony. Even the philosopher of words that do things had got the formula wrong. The words that matter in a company are learned the same way: by listening to how people really speak before deciding how they should speak. It is one of the ways I read a company when I work on organization and culture, and the reason I spend a lot of time talking to everyone, from executives to factory workers.

What to do and what not to do

• Listen to the words of meetings before rewriting those of documents.
• Tie every “we have decided” to the person who decides, and every “I’ll take care of it” to a date.
• Choose a few shared words for the direction and the criteria, and always use them in the same sense.
• Do not rename problems to soften them.
• Do not launch a new vocabulary without also changing the decisions that go with it.

Sources

• John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson, Clarendon Press, 1962, lectures I and II.
• Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (original edition Brief über den Humanismus, Francke, Bern, 1947), in Pathmarks, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Samuel Johnson, “Cowley,” in Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, vol. I, 1779. https://www.archive.org/download/livesofenglishpo01john/livesofenglishpo01john_djvu.txt