Getting along in teams without losing our own quirks
Transcript of this video:
My friend, Chris Rodgers is very good at finding pieces of cliched business jargon and unpicking them in LinkedIn posts, and this morning he shared a paragraph with me from an email he’d received and I’m gonna share it with you.
It reads like this, “It’s really hard to write clear goals that effectively shift the needle on your business at every level of the organisation. But what if you could mine the data and use artificial intelligence to present the best most articulate phrasing of your goals and objectives in a way that everyone in your organisation can easily understand.”
Now I want to use this video to unpick the strange perfectionism and slightly ugly, boring nature of the language in this paragraph, but I’m gonna resist that temptation, and instead, I’m gonna share a joke with you.
It’s a joke that’s been on my mind a bit the past few weeks and it suddenly felt very connected to the paragraph that Chris shared, and it’s the story of the wide-mouthed frog which roams the jungle and every time it meets a new creature it says, “Hello, what sort of creature are you? And what do you like to eat?”
So the first creature it meets is a bee and the bee says, “Oh, I’m a bee, and I eat nectar.” and the wide-mouthed frog replies, “Oh, that’s nice, I’m a wide-mouthed frog and I eat flies.”
It’s a shaggy dog story so imagine going through several repetitions: each time he meets a creature the creature says what it eats, and he replies, “I’m a wide-mouthed frog and I eat flies.”
And finally he meets a creature and the creature says, “Oh, I’m a crocodile and I eat wide-mouthed frogs.”
And the frog replies, “Ooh, you don’t see many of them around here.”
And I thought of this when I read that paragraph because I was wondering why is it that so many people seem to go along with language that feels so so bereft of humour and life?
And I think people speak it a bit like the wide-mouthed frog out of fear rather than because it really speaks to them, and sometimes it might seem as if we live in a world where we’ve got to be, we are wide-mouthed frogs having to pretend to be narrow.
But I think, I think for me all the really creative thinking and a great deal of the satisfaction comes when we allow ourselves to be wide-mouthed frogs and so much effort in organisations seems in the end to have the effect of forcing everyone in it to be a narrow-mouthed frog.
I think that’s, I think I wanna support wide-mouthed frogs in being wide-mouthed frogs.
Photo by Jack Hamilton on Unsplash
