If we ask a random person in the street, what’s the point of language, we may expect to hear something like, “it allows us to communicate with each other.”
Fair. But language is a lot more than that. It’s how we actually build reality.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great Austrian philosopher at the University of Cambridge said it well: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world”, i.e. If you can’t say it, it doesn’t exist.
As we’ve been saying for a long time: All transformation is fundamentally linguistic.
In 1989 in his inaugural address, when President George H. Bush reframed America as a “kinder, gentler nation,” he wasn’t describing, he was creating.
And when Elon Musk took over Twitter, and called for “extremely hardcore” and “high intensity,” he reshaped the company’s culture through his narrative.
Even Tolstoy’s opening to “Anna Karenina:” “All happy families are the same, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way” wasn’t just clever, he was framing the entire story.
The organizations that win don’t just communicate, they deliberately design language to influence behavior.
Did you get a venti pumpkin spice latte this morning? Starbucks isn’t just selling coffee, they’re selling membership into a community where tall means small and Pumpkin spice is a time of year people get excited about.
Words don’t just describe the world around us, they build it. Choose them wisely.
