3.2 Hidden meanings and internal communications

In the same way that saying nothing communicates something, without intending to we can fold a range of information into our communications. The way we structure our communications – the grammar, the words or the images we use, the platforms or medium, and the behavioural norms we adopt or seek to challenge – all say something.

When you are working in a small team you often have a shared understanding – a shared view of what the enterprise is about, its values, its norms, a way of communicating about the business. When someone communicates, these norms are folded into the message – think of it as a hidden code. When we hear or see these messages we need to decode them.

However, this process of encoding and decoding is far from perfect, as race and power cultural theorist Stuart Hall explains in Encoding/Decoding (1980). You might ask, what does a cultural theorist interested in race and power have to contribute to entrepreneurship? However, his work on communication can teach us a great deal about misunderstanding, and how ideas outside the norm are received and understood, which can help to develop a richer sense of how messages are received and understood by customers, funders and the people we work closely with.

In Encoding/Decoding, Hall (1980) suggested we should see how an audience derives meaning from communications in relation to:

• A dominant position – the meaning of the communication is understood as the person who made the message intended, because the audience accepts the established norms of communication and the views expressed within the message fit with their own.

• A negotiated position – the audience accepts the views in the message because they generally accept the ways in which the message is communicated, and they understand the views expressed are the mainstream, but they still retain their own views.

• An oppositional position – the audience understands the meaning of the message but rejects the dominant meanings of the words and the norms it suggests, preferring their own reading of the situation.

Part of being an entrepreneur is being able to see problems and solutions in different ways from others, often pushing against dominant meanings. This sense of communication as having norms (which you may seek to embrace) or challenges is at the heart of being an entrepreneur and can be a source of frustration. For example, think of an instance where a customer seems to accept the premise but is not convinced by your product or service.

The challenge of winning over customers, or even funders, is probably familiar, but what about winning over your employees? How you do this will vary depending on the context, as internal communications are social and situated. Growing a business involves building teams to take tasks forward. Those ‘in at the start’ may be invested in the idea – they understand the potential of an oppositional or a negotiated position and share the reading of the situation.

As the team grows it becomes more difficult to develop a shared understanding. Some companies are very good at setting themselves up as being ‘different from everyone else’, and people are attracted by the image the organisation presents to the world. An early example of this might be the UK ethical toiletries company The Body Shop, or one might think of the way a corporate monolith like Google presents itself as being different, an impact somewhat dimmed now that many other companies have copied those differences.

What Hall’s work suggests, is that if your message proposes a solution that puts your venture into either a negotiated or an oppositional position, and the message is only received and understood in relation to the dominant narratives about the range of potential problems or solutions, then the strength of the argument will be undermined. Part of growing your business involves moving your oppositional view to being the dominant one, but on the journey you need to take people with you, especially those who work alongside you.