Transcript

GILL EREAUT

I am completely convinced, because I’ve seen it so often, that the way an organisation talks on the inside about its products, about its customers – about its citizens, if it’s a government organisation – absolutely makes its way to the outside. Whether it does so overtly by an organisation simply using internal jargon externally. That happens, but it’s less frequent now. Much more pernicious actually is the leakage out of a particular way of structuring talk, which holds within it a particular set of attitudes or relationships. So the core – almost like existential – questions of who we are, and what we do and what matters around here, who they are out there – whether they’re customers, citizens, patients, whatever – and the nature of the relationship between us. So we have sometimes found some quite surprisingly toxic relationships being subtly but persistently leaked to the outside world as an organisation. You would never let anything go out of the door that effectively said ‘Actually customers are a bit stupid’, but we have found that as an unspoken persistent assumption. I mean, interestingly, what sits at that level was always once sensible. It always once made sense.

But times change, that doesn’t change, because nobody can see it going on, and so the organisation can get really out of sync with its market or its environment. In that particular case it was a financial services organisation; so they were providing pensions and life insurance and, you know, big serious stuff. And in the old days actually what people wanted from a financial services provider was expertise and authority. So, in a sense, 30, 40 years ago, if I couldn’t understand what my financial services provider was saying, then, actually, that’s probably OK, because it meant they were very clever and they knew what they were doing, and I didn’t have to worry about understanding it myself. And, so, organisationally, institutionally, it was adaptive to assume a position of superiority.

The difficulty is that in today’s market we don’t operate like that anymore. People now expect and want to be more involved in decisions about their own affairs, and they expect and want big organisations to be speaking to them in a respectful way that they can understand. The answer to the question of how much technical detail we share with clients is a little bit complicated and it definitely falls into two parts. One is how much technical detail we talk about at the point where we are persuading them to buy the stuff from us, and so what we’re aiming to do at that point is to make it clear to clients that this is theoretically based – it’s based in something: we didn’t make it up and it’s based in some really well-grounded empirical work across a very wide range of academic subjects. And also just to get the idea, the core idea that language is not a transparent medium through which we talk about a fixed reality, but that language is constitutive of that reality. I mean, to be honest, it doesn’t actually take much technical persuasion: most people are quite interested. They get, intuitively, the idea that how we talk about things matters. The second context in which we need to think about how far we talk about the technical aspects of the work is one where sharing findings and presenting work to clients; and there it’s a question of judgement. So I suppose again it divides into two. One is how much we want to talk dirty and technical. And I will often just sprinkle in even just one or two technical terms into a presentation just to remind them that this came from somewhere. So I might talk about transitivity or I might talk about conversation analysis. I might talk about adjacency pairs or whatever it is – just a tiny little bit. And then the other thing we do, which can sometimes lead us into slightly more technical kind of conversations or illustration, is we illustrate the findings. It’s very powerful for an organisation for people to see their own language played back to them with a set of annotations around it that allow them to see it in a different way.