Stop Lying To People
Strong language, but needed.
The zeitgeist is going more direct.
Direct doesn’t mean bad or rude or unfair.
It can mean truthful, and sometimes that can rub someone the wrong way.
The opposite of direct leads to an inflation of communication.
Saying a lot, while perhaps good intentioned, one can often end up obfuscating things.
obfuscation: the action of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible.
Good intentioned, “purposeful” but perhaps also misleading and confusing.
Shaping expectations in a way that can’t be met.
Some anecdotes to illustrate....
A friend doing a research project about change spoke with someone at well known technology company. When the subject of transformation came up it paused the interviewee. Paraphrasing here but it went something like...
“If we had a transformation agenda or program here I don’t think it would ever be called that. There’s a chaotic but positive energy to things here where initiative is rewarded and people organize around compelling projects. That’s what keeps pushing and leading us forward.”
I liked this story a lot as it relates to my last post on chaos.
Chaos can be good, and also bad.
Depending on preferences, expectations and capabilities.
It’s not always distributed evenly and is often sold to people under other terms.
We’ve all come across those job ads requiring a ninja and rockstar; someone who needs no support, thrives in ambiguity and where they will do the best work of their life!
Sounds a bit needle in a haystack and too good to be true at the same time.
It’s either being truthful or masking something.
What type of chaos is it supporting?
These types of posts always made me cringe, even before they started to come out of fashion.
With the company referenced above, I think it can make sense - there are some truly special places out there.
But the zeitgeist ran wild and this type of language become commonplace and instead was used to attract people to environments where in fact things were a bit crazy, processes lacking, perhaps low pay, no career development pathways, and some wild personalities (and not the romanticized versions of those in the Office).
Earlier this winter, I ran a 8 week “narrative immersion” program for a pair of co-founders and their company. It was a hybrid mix of consulting, coaching and leadership development.
They needed a new story, positioning and value proposition (for a variety of reasons - all positive). They were fantastic and I could throw emergent tasks at them that I felt responded to the moment.
In the middle of the engagement, a new job posting came up and I read the description and thought here’s an opportunity to try something different.
I reacted a bit to the description because it was using language and vocabulary and perhaps a bit more wishful than what we had been discussing in those weeks.
They were great people and had built a great culture and business, but I wanted to encourage them to try and be a bit more opinionated and beefy. To have a piece of communication that you couldn’t just swap out with another company in their category and not to try please everyone, instead the someone they were looking to hire.
Here was the brief...
I saw your Linkedin post sharing the new recruitment.
I read your, and the company page original post, and thought they are definitely nicely written but also felt there's an opportunity to go further with them.
The activity/invitation is to rewrite one or both of them - with no pressure to publish and just to share with between us as part of this project.
The brief and encouragement is to...
"how could I write this differently to gain some haters?"
Thinking back to our conversation last week I think there's an opportunity to be more direct, bold, and even clearer on the type of talent you really want to come on board. The context you are in, the mission, the type of clients and work, the talent needs to succeed etc.
How does that sound?
One of the co-founders had the bandwidth to lean in and create a new one responding to the brief. The other when able to review it a few days later shared they were a bit uncomfortable with the new tone and approach (he had missed the brief on being as beefy as possible!).
In the end, it wasn’t to get them to use that language specifically in the re-written job description, but instead use the extreme example to find that new ground that was true and distinctly them.
Later on in that engagement I did a workshop with their team on what I called narrative-driven businesses that are direct in their communications, which I share below.
Part of the language obfuscation era we have been in has led to a lot of purpose-washing as well.
Purpose-washing for me is using an inflated set of vocabulary to describe something that’s rather simple in order to appear to be more important or signal more virtue than meets the eye. Sometimes aspirational statements are needed, but one need be cautious not to over rely on them, risking devaluing what it is they are trying to say.
I spar (and work) a lot with my friend Nick Bennett. He runs Commercial Futures and works with Mischief Makers. We are former colleagues at Hyper Island and I of course have been working under my Narrative Dynamics umbrella the past couple years.
Along with my other friend Claude, I had some fun creating this table exploring what I call a pragmatic missions vs purpose-washed alternative.
For the record the only one’s I fed Claude were Shopify and Stripe because those are pragmatic missions they public share. I should also add that for the rest these were AI created based on source material (websites and About Us statements) and my prompting.
But reading through these you can imagine how I felt and how much energy I took gravitating to the left hand column.
Clear and direct - especially for me/mine.
Wish you a great summer,
Jamie
