You make it sound easy!
That’s what a co-worker said to me yesterday. Immediately I knew something was off about that statement because what I was suggesting was in fact a very difficult task. After I thought about it for a bit, I realized what my co-worker was saying is that while the task was easy to understand, actually accomplishing the task was going to be a challenge and my framing of the task seemed to ignore the challenge in favor of the clear understanding of what needed to be done.
An example task would be the successful completion of a marathon run. Get a running plan and follow it. That’s easy enough, right? Of course we intuitively understand that the execution of that plan isn’t “easy”.
I work for an international company and many of my colleagues speak english as a second language, most speak english very well in fact. Still, little turns of phrase can be lost in translation (especially humor). I read a book years ago titled Studies in Words by CS Lewis (yup, same author of the children book The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe). In it Lewis points out the precision rightly chosen words can provide and the value of making those choices.
In my career, I deal with terminology unique to my field. I often work to establish the nomenclature required to create new terms, and the semantics required to give those terms specific meaning in the company, giving the company a common lexicon. Why does that matter? Because Peter Drucker was right when he famously stated, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, and culture is fueled by a common language, a common understanding, and common experience.
I’ve wanted to address the topics of language and culture before but because of their importance, I hesitate knowing I can not give the subject the attention it requires. This post is more a placeholder – a passing thought in a much larger topic.
P.S. Originally I was going to refer to my co-worker as a colleague, but because I can’t spell to save my life, I googled colleague and found there is a salient difference between the two terms. Words matter and my conversation was not with a peer (colleague) but with a co-worker (in this case a subordinate). So my substitution of the easier to spell word co-worker was not as much of an Elmer Fudd moment as it set out to be.