Language is the material of intent

As young children, the mantra we learned to say in response to insults was, sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.

Originally written in the eighteen hundreds, this rhyme has appeared in everything from books to cartoons to sermons to pop music.

Who among us hasn’t used that mantra to defend against verbal bullying and increase resilience?

The point about sticks and stones is, the adage is patently untrue.

Names do hurt us, because our language has the power to cut deeply. Psychologists have proven words to be as damaging to the mind as physical blows are to the body. Scars from verbal assaults can last for years, if not a lifetime.

Think about it, if language didn’t such a dramatic effect on people, then cyber bullying wouldn’t negatively impact a third of teens between the ages of twelve and seventeen. Names will always hurt us.

But all social commentary aside, let’s build off this insight in a positive direction. Because any phenomenon that has that much influence on human emotion and behavior can also be deployed more usefully.

If words possess so much power to harm people, that means they must also possess the power to help us in equal measure. Let’s consider language from the standpoint of an organization.

Starting with the individual. At any given corporation, language is the material of intent. When a given employee is consciously try to make sense of her experience on a daily basis, that becomes an expressly linguistic activity. Their language brings stability to the job and makes explicit sense of the work they do.

It ultimately reflects the way they grasp reality, and also the image of themselves they try to project to others.

But to what degree do words fuel the process of innovation? How does the power of language create value operationally?

Well, language is the system of communication that exists to establish shared meaning. Companies need words to turn ideas into things. After all, human beings retain their concepts by means of language, so part of the job of the organization to invent a lexicon people can use to express certain ideas.

The structure of their words impacts the ability to think through problems and articulate complex ideas.

The mistake many teams make is, they underutilize language as a critical innovation driver. They don’t realize that their words are part of the product they sell.

Follow the linguistic sequence with me for a moment.

Information becomes ideas, ideas turn into concepts, which turn into prototypes, which can become innovative products and services, which can ultimately increase profits.

Sticks and stones can break as many bones as they want, the company is still ringing the register.

Laney’s bestselling book on infonomics summarizes it best:

When organizations embrace information as an economic asset of benefit to the entire enterprise, they’re asserting real significance to information, which means they can attribute measurable financial gain to it. Information is worth big money, and those who don’t exploit its value are leaving valuable resources on the table.

This passage brings us back to the original point, which is language. The better your team gets at honing their unique language, the easier it’s going to be to convert an item of information to a specific monetary outcome.

I remember the first time I wrote a book for one of my employers. Our marketing startup had a theory that big agencies were screwing big companies out of big money, and they wanted to put a stake in the ground from a thought leadership standpoint.

One day our founder was joking around at lunch, and used the expression badvertising. I nearly spit out my sandwich when he said it.

Kevin, what did you just say? Oh, um, badvertising, he repeated with a devilish smirk on his face. It’s just a word we use internally to describe unsavory actors in the industry.

As you can guess, my writer’s brain immediately started brainstorming how we could leverage that one little piece of language for commercial gain.

Sure enough, we spent the next eight months publishing a wealth of resources under that branded title. I ultimately wrote a book on the topic under the direction of our founder, which garnered tons of media exposure, increased credibility in our brand, and generate tons of inbound leads and eventual new business.

That’s the power of language. When your organization possesses information that is relevant, actionable and at least partially based on experience, all you have to do is package it in various ways to appeal to different kinds of markets and users.

Easier said than done, of course. But there are systems you can put in place now to accumulate these assets over time.

The first step is your intention. Strategically as an organization, you have to commit to identifying and pursuing opportunities to generate demonstrable economic benefits from information assets. Without multiple internal champions to lead a knowledge management initiative, it’s unlikely to gain executive buy in and employee traction.

Now, if you’re not large enough to hire a dedicated knowledge manager for such a job, fear not. Most companies have at least one or two obsessive documenting personalities. They’d gladly take on this project as an extracurricular activity to gain greater company visibility for their work.

Second, you have to get into the habit of good information architecture. All team members have to learn how arrange the parts of their ideas to make them understandable and leverageable. They will need a process for turning their linguistic seeds into a forest.

And the leader who’s spearheading the program can help build this. Without such a system, fully fleshing out your ideas into larger opportunities will be sporadic at best.

The third step in the process is, build off your intention and systems with appropriate labeling. When it comes to information, labeling functions as an augmented reality tool. Naming conventions supplement your language with new structure.

Back to my aforementioned boss, he coined the term badvertising to give the broader team a handle by which they could carry a larger principle. Kevin’s information was complete, in that it represented a solid slice of the known marketing universe of such activities or entities. His label was a discrete piece of knowledge we could use to classify our observations and experiences.

Finally, put dedicated time on your calendar to conceive and plan new ways to monetize your information. Now that you’ve branded the unique language your organization uses, brainstorm how to bake those information assets into existing products or services to extend their value.

If the words and concepts you use add structures to the businesses that inform your customers ways that wouldn’t exist without language, then you’ve got yourself a value proposition. Anytime a company makes mental integrations of two or more units which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by a specific definition, that’s smart brand building.

Badvertising, as concept, enabled my company’s customers to hold in the focus of their conscious awareness much more than their purely perceptual capacity would permit. That’s why our book earned us so much new business.

The language was utilitarian, interesting and emotive.

Ultimately, language is material of intent. Every company now is in the ontology business. Each team has its own inventory of concepts that hold specific meaning in a specific context, and should can use that for economic gain.

Sure, not everything will land with people. Critics might even lash out with sticks and stones to try and break your organizational bones.

But words can definitely help you.

Language can become the infrastructure that transforms the way information and knowledge works.

To what degree do words fuel the process of innovation on your team?