For two years in my twenties I was a part-time university professor, leading and teaching even though I understood neither activity. I learned on the job, and by the end of my self-directed apprenticeship I was not terrible. It was a compulsory English class for non-humanities students, so of course they resented the class and resented me. One thing I did, to keep the students listening and to show them we all have flaws to fix, was to admit one of my failures. When speaking, I used the phrase “like” superfluously, and I said variations on “Um” and “Uh” before new thoughts and phrases. We talked about Ivan Pavlov, and we set up an experiment. When I was in the middle of speaking, making my way through an idea, the last thing I wanted was to be interrupted. I despised it. So I invited my students to interrupt. Every time I used the word “like” as filler, or prefaced a thought with an “Um” or an “Uh,” they clapped. It was a game to them. And, in the beginning, it was a humiliating game. I had not been joking with them about my problem. It was a problem.
(My first day as a teacher, in this building, I was so nervous I threw up)
The first two days were so clappy that I had trouble following my lesson plan. It was so exhausting, listening to them clap at my verbal tics, that I ended up asking them to do in-class work so they could achieve something meaningful and I could stew in silent shame. By the third class, there were less than twenty claps. It took a few weeks but soon the claps were scarce. By the end of that semester, I drew less than a clap per day. In my teaching evaluations, some students admitted they would normally have skipped an English class but they were so keen on correcting me they had — unbelievably — perfect attendance. The chair of the department asked me what it was all about. In the moment, not wanting to seem selfish, manipulative, or dangerous, I said it was a live lesson about oral communication, which we don’t teach anymore. Many of these students will go on to make presentations for a living, and the university did little to help them.
He could tell I was bullshitting him, in some way, but we had a good relationship and he knew my future was not in the academy. “Stick to your course outline,” he said.
Despite the technological invasions of the last twenty years, and massive changes to the way we live our lives, we still value rhetoric, elegance, wit, theatricality, and charm. We use technology to do a very old-fashioned thing. We share videos and podcasts of speechmakers, which is really just a modern version of the public lecture. The public lecture itself is extraordinarily popular. Many of us, most of us, work at least part-time in the persuasion business. If we’re lucky, we’ll have mentors who will show us how to write a sentence, how to speak in public. But apart from debate clubs and Toastmasters organizations, it’s entirely absent from our education system.
I once overheard one of my daughters tell her friends what I do. “He writes books for fun,” she said. “But in his job I think he just talks.”
(“In his job I think he just talks”)
It hurt my feelings, to hear myself so reduced. But she was on to something. I listen to people. I write down what they say and together we build things with it. I do make speeches and presentations.
I am skeptical of all the books about “storytelling” for leaders and presenters. They often read like extra boring versions of joke books for wedding MCs. But there is truth at the heart of it. We wouldn’t need books about talking in public if people knew how to talk in public, or even how to write an email — let alone a strategic plan. And anyone bothering to read this understands it isn’t frivolous. There is a direct, cause-and-effect relationship between what we say and how we say it and our success.
It’s relatively easy to create a master story for an individual leader, to teach it, to bring it to life through action. It’s much more time-consuming for a corporation. And it’s monumentally difficult for something as large and complex as a city.
Clearing nonsense from our language is step one.
What I hope, for the 29 people who took my English class, is that they stripped “like” and “um” and “uh” and other verbal tics from their own conversations. Later in the course we moved on to words we should all avoid, inspired by George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, which I forced them to read. If they heard me say any universal synonyms of corporate goodness, they clapped.
There are words we should all avoid, because they no longer mean anything. Here is a short list of adjectives. You’ll think of others.
Innovative
Sustainable
Resilient
Strategic
Agile
Disruptive
Inclusive
World-class
Holistic
Organic
Diversified
Ask someone to clap when you use one of these and, instead of using it, be specific. Say innovate without saying it, by telling us what and how and why with grace and clarity. Give us a concrete example to show us what you mean. If on a go-forward basis you have the bandwidth to make space to think outside the box and synergise your buzzword-avoidance impacts, the outcomes will be game-changing. It’s like, uh… low-hanging fruit!