3. Build language which 'draws us forward'

A simple future focus is not enough. Humane and effective organisations pay attention to how language works to draw people forward, rather than keep them turning back.

‘Focusing on the future’ sound so simple, doesn’t it? Something that every organisation should do, something that is obvious, something that scarcely needs saying. Except, in my experience, it’s a practice that is less common than it might be, and is also not enough.

The bewitching draw of explanations

Of course, there are lots of alternatives to future focus. One of the things that might seem to be future-focused but isn’t is to get pulled into explanations for how things have arisen. These may seem plausible, but they are surprisingly ineffective at helping us move forward. Let’s look at an example:

“My team is not performing well; they lack motivation.”

It may well be the case the the team is not performing as you might wish. But what is the role of ‘lack motivation’ in this sentence. It’s an apparent explanation hiding in plain site. If only their motivation could be improved, things would get better.

There are immediately some problems here. First, the explanation turns out to have an accusatory quality to it¹ (as most explanations do); the team is to blame for their lack of motivation, rather than anyone else (like the team leader/manager, the general state of the organisation, the fall in sales, etc etc).

Secondly, it is ascribing a causal relation to something which is a best a correlation and at worst a muddle. The team is said to be not performing well BECAUSE of their lack of motivation. I heard a politician on the radio recently falling into this trap when he said “prices are going up because of inflation”. No! Prices are going up which IS inflation! You might as well try to claim that the room is hot because the thermometer reads 28 degrees C. And in the same way the team lacking motivation IS them performing poorly, not because of it.

Is it hot because the thermometer is high? Of course not!

Thirdly, what use is this explanation? If we go to the team and ask them to improve their motivation, what is the likely outcome? (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to imagine the possibilities, from exasperation to frustration to back-stabbing to blaming the manager to who knows what.) It’s a bit of word play which sounds important but is actually worse than useless in moving things along in a useful way.

And, by the way, it’s also what I like to call a $5000 word; one which sounds very important and valuable but is mostly a distraction from the detail of what is going on with the people concerned. You may find some people who are excellent in talking $5000 words but not at all accustomed to talking in $5 words - small, detailed, concrete, descriptive words. We’ll come back to that later in this piece.

“There is a time for specificity and a time for abstractions, and a great deal of nonsense is generated by people who don’t know what time it is.” Neil Postman (1931-2003), American educator, media theorist and cultural critic who was way ahead of his time.

Explanations seem to be offering ways forward, but they are highly suspect. In a complex and inter-connected world there are many possible explanations, all of which have subtleties and dependencies. We tend to find one that satisfies our conscious minds, lock it in and leave it there.

Explanations and causes seem to have a particular hold. People used to assume that ‘you can’t move on without addressing the root cause of the issue’. Presumably the ‘root cause’ is a particularly fundamental explanation, subject to all the usual caveats above. One particularly nasty aspect of this way of thinking is that no progress can be expected until the cause has been found and addressed. This may make good sense for the consultant paid by the hour, but it’s a poor way to attempt to move let alone draw people forward.

Future focus?

If explanations and causes force us into looking at the past, then what might be some future focused alternatives? When organisations, leaders and managers try to focus on the future, some of the things they usually do might include:

• Setting goals - “achieve X by date Y” (possibly with bonuses, prizes for achievement etc)

• Having a ‘vision’ of some sort, which may need to be ‘sold’ to the people

• Restricting or eliminating talk of the past (“It’s time to move on…”)

I’ve seen all these in action. They make leaders and managers feel great (for a few moments). The trouble is, of course, that these things are usually set by managers and imposed on the workforce. They are decidedly NOT language that draws us forward.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that goals, deadlines, priorities and choices are all part of organisational life. The magazine needs to go to press on the 15th of the month. The widgets must be produced on time and to quality. These things form a key background to the work of organising effectively and humanely. And yet, they are usually not enough on their own.

Diagnostic vs dialogic

Both approaches described above might be thought of as ‘diagnostic’ in nature. One looked for causes (in the past), the other imposed goals (in the future), both the result of some kind of analysis and decision. This basic methodology of ‘planned change’ works well for situations where things are broadly fixed; mending a washing machine, completing a tax return.

From the late 1980s onwards there have been a flowering of practices in the world of organisational change and organisation development (OD) which have taken a different route. These ‘dialogic’ methods do not focus on planning and implementing the plans, but rather on engaging those involved in a series of conversations from which new ideas emerge. Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT), which I learned in the early 1990s and took into organisational work as Solutions Focus, was one of them. Appreciative Inquiry was another.

In 2016 Canadian author, consultant and academic Gervase Bushe and his colleague Bob Marshak had identified forty forms of dialogic practice. (I am delighted that Solution Focused Dialogue is number 30 on the list!) These forms all focus on what’s known as ‘discursive practices’ - the ways that change emerges in dialogue and language, in a participative rather than instructional manner. My book Hosting Generative Change (2020) is part of the Bushe Marshal Institute series.

The new psychology: discursive practices not internal forces

This move to dialogic focus is not only happening in the organisational world. In 2007 my colleague Kirsten Dierolf interviewed Professor Rom Harré (1927-2019), one of the pioneers of discursive psychology. Harré and his colleagues take very seriously the principles of science, and his book Psychology For The Third Millennium (co-authored with Georgetown University colleague Fathali M Moghaddam, which I reviewed here) put discursive practice as way of integrating cultural and neuroscience perspectives. It’s a bold ambition.

Rom Harré, who I was thrilled to meet at the SOLWorld 2012 conference in Oxford.

In the interview (which you can read here and/or watch here), Kirsten asks Prof Harré how he might think about a team who were said to lack motivation. They discuss how it would be a mistake to see ‘motivation’ as a kind of internal causal driving force, which if present would make the team work better. Harré says:

[The manager] is trying to tell you that the way that the team is explaining what they’re doing is not according to his likes, what it should be. You see, the whole idea is that why people do things is primarily because they committed themselves to doing them. So it’s looking at action as going forward rather than being driven forward. So if you’re talking about team motivation, what you have to do is to give the team a discursive practice which is all the time drawing them forward. So my motivation is to get this thing done rather than the idea of some kind of force pushing me. So it is all a matter of getting people to commit themselves to doing stuff.

In this way of thinking the ‘motivation’ is bound up in the way people are thinking, perceiving and acting. It is a by-product (if it ‘is’ at all) of people working in what an onlooker might say is a motivated way. So how might we help them in this direction?

Language that draws people forward

What might we say about how to help people into these discursive practices, language that draws them forward? This is the first time I’ve written a list in these terms, so here goes…

Language that draws people forward tends to be:

1. Their own words (built on all their experience and sense-making)

2. About the future, and mostly about the potential near future (days or weeks rather than years away)

3. About signs of progress in that near future; what will let us know we are moving forward

4. About details and specifics rather than abstractions

5. About shared understandings of these signs, details and specifics with colleagues

6. About conversations which continue from time to time (check-ins, ‘retrospectives’, reviews which look forward more than look back

7. And conversations which acknowledge current difficulties rather than trying to fix them, belittle them, ignore them, assign blame for them, and so on.

This sounds so simple - and yet it takes practice to go to these linguistic places and stick there.

In closing, we might have a bit of fun and see what the opposite kind of language might look like. Have you ever seen leaders and managers impose their words about the far future (or the past), talking about how good these ‘sunlit uplands’ will be, in abstract terms, without building a shared understanding, as a one-off event, without acknowledging the hard parts? Yes, so have I.

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Dialogic OD Authors Salon, Tuesday 7 February, 4pm UK time, online

I am hosting the third Bushe-Marshak Institute ‘authors salon’ event in a couple of weeks. This global conversation will explore the the relationship between dialogue and action. As dialogic OD consultants, practitioners and author we think that dialogue is vital to generative organisational change. But how does that connect to action? How do we help people into action, does it matter (as talk is just a kind of action anyway), are there ways to action which don’t just turn into ‘planned change’ but stay emergent…? The group will include Gervase Bushe, Bob Marshak, Gwen Stirling-Wilkie, Tova Averbach and other Dialogic OD practitioners and experts.

Details and booking information here. Free, just a few places left (more than 250 registered already).

1. I first heard that term ‘accusatory explanation’ from Finnish Solution Focus author, consultant and practitioner Ben Furman, author of Reteaming and Kids’ Skills among many other books in English, German, Finnish and Chinese. Thank you Ben, it’s a wonderful phrase.