Language for Leadership
“A pre-school toddler asks on average 28 questions an hour, on going to school though this very quickly falls to just two.”
According to Hugh Macleod, everyone is born creative, then the crayons are taken away and replaced with dry, uninspiring books on algebra and history.
Evolution has determined that we are hard-wired to be active seekers of meaning as Aristotle put it, or meaning makers, as A J Ayer coined more than two thousand years later.
We are explorers and map makers because of a primal and visceral need for permanence. It’s the evolutionary drive to find our place and position in a world of nature, beauty, complexity and death, and how and where we fit into our tribe, team, group, or organisation.
And we are driven to make sense of things as we travel through time and space by asking questions, telling stories and creating myths. Perhaps because reality can seem too complex, we need tradition, metaphors, and other linguistic devices to make meaning and to understand. Whilst language, both the universal and particular, frames, shapes, reframes and reshapes our world.
However, it is so much more than just the words with which we communicate. The vocabulary we use, grammar, choice of phrases, and modalities of language create the lens through which we see and process the world, and how we…
