"We're here to put a ding in the universe."
Steve Jobs declared to his first employees.
It made them feel like being part of something great. Something bigger than simply building electronics. Yet there was no proof that this would be happening. It lived only in the conversations between Jobs and his engineers and investors.
But there was something Steve did that created the Apple company into existence.
He declared it.
A declaration alters how things occur for us. It changes what we believe would happen without our declaring so. And it changes how things show up after the declaration.
Imagine these engineers. How they have worked on technology before. But after hearing Steve declare the future, and them giving him the authority to do so, their working on technology occurred differently to them. It altered how they saw themselves and their work, and by that, it altered what they did, what they were willing to do, and for how long they would do it.
Declarations have an enormous power if they are spoken by someone who is committed to fulfilling on one's word, or who is seen as someone who is.
If you remember back to the time someone with authority made declarations to you and how much that altered what you did or didn't do, what you thought or didn't think, what do you see?
As a leader, oftentimes you are the person declaring the kind of future you and your team are working towards, or the team is declaring the future in an act of agreeing on a shared declaration. Someone declares, "This is where we are going. This is the future we are building," and then people say yes or no. After saying yes something different happens than when people say no.
Imagine when the Declaration of Independence from the United States was altered, and everybody would say, "No, we don't agree." Would the United States be created? No, but enough people agreed on the Declaration to create a country called the United States of America. Enough people agreeing with you, declaring a future you're working towards, creates a company and creates actions in accordance with where we say we go.
Most people pay very limited attention to what language actually does and how much it coordinates and creates our shared reality. In my work, I've seen the power of making key distinctions in the act of speaking about our speech acts (look up the theory on speech acts). This can make you not only a more effective communicator but a more effective actor and interactor overall.
Declarations are deeply powerful in altering how reality occurs for you and the people around you. Our text declarations, assertions, assessments, promises, requests, and offers have enormous power and are what, for the most part, create a huge amount of what we're dealing with every day.
Your company is making offers to potential clients. You're making decisions on what the promise of your offers is, and your ability to keep those promises is then determining the quality and perceived quality of your products or services.
The interactions between your people are being coordinated, created, and maintained through acts in speaking, by words, written communication, or nonverbal gestures, symbols, and moods. Language does way more than just describe the world we live in; it, for a large part, creates it.
In the next articles, we'll look more deeply into the domain of language and what becomes available by mastering it. If you're interested in going deeper yourself, here are a few recommendations:
- Language and the Pursuit of Happiness by Chalmers Brothers
- The Three Laws of Performance by Steve Safran and Dave Logan
- Fernando Flores' work on speech acts and organizations as networks of commitments
- Humberto Maturana, biologist and neurobiologist, and his work on how language alters brain structure
- Book: Speaking Being
And with that, start paying attention to the declarations people around you make and how they alter the shared reality.