Communication Ammo, by Sean Williams

A friend of mine, Big D, is a highly educated and experienced business person who happens to work in PR for a large, international company. I wrote a post not long ago on the limits of communication in business, specifically about the “say-do” gap that exists in many organizations and the need for management problem-solving to address it.  Big D wrote me a fascinating email to disagree with what he termed my assertion that “communication is inferior to action in structuring perceptions,” saying: “The words we use are strong/they make reality.”

I don’t disagree that words are important – in fact, there is a whole theory of public relations (Rhetorical) that supports that statement. I answered him, saying in part: “Behavior is a demonstration of values; language is limited in its ability to demonstrate.”

Both the Rhetorical Theory and much general communication theory are at odds with Excellence Theory, Big D says. Excellence sees public relations as a management function, which necessarily separates the tactics of public relations from its strategy, “this idea that communication is one thing and an organization’s action/behavior is something else.”

I made the argument that language can’t bridge the “say-do” gap if the behavior in question is oppositional to the language, and provided an example of an organization claiming that it values its employees and communities, having a problem if it is engaged in laying off employees and closing plants. Big D replied:

I disagree. Granted, the communication challenge in sustaining that identity claim is greater and the communicator must be smarter and work harder, but a company can indeed lay people off and close plants and still credibly state that it values employees and communities. It happens all the time, and it happens because of the ways in which communicators can influence elements of context and shift the agreed meanings represented by words like “values,” “employees” and “communities.” That’s the magic of the artful use of discourse (or call it strategic discourse, if that’s more marketable). (emphasis mine.)

We often call “influence elements of context and shift the agreed meanings” reframing. Non PR-people call it spin, mostly inaccurately, but still, they aren’t complimenting us. I counsel leaders to avoid words and phrases that can too easily be labeled spin, and be subject to the perception of the say-do disconnect. The “artful use of discourse” is (and should be) a stock-in-trade for any communication professional, and we should beware of reframing ourselves straight into propaganda.

Big D goes on to say that when a country’s leader says, “I value the lives of the men and women in uniform who are willing to sacrifice everything to keep our country free,” sending them to die on the field of battle will not invalidate his/her claim, depending on is how effective the leader is at controlling the meanings of the words in the statement.

This seems relativistic – again, I wouldn’t counsel a leader to say those words, as the claim seems specious at best, if not outright insulting. The leader values the work the soldiers do and the results they will attain more than their lives – he or she has to, otherwise there is little chance he or she will deploy troops in combat. There are political leaders who do not see the value in this sacrifice.

There are many ways of aligning these two seeming contradictions. In fact, Prof. Robert Heath writes in his discussion of Rhetorical Theory that “Cynicism is the outcome of any rhetorical process that is not founded on good reasoning or good reasons.” We absolutely do need to choose our words very carefully because of their ability to create perception and contribute to the development of meaning.

More from the discussion with Big D in the next post.