Inoculation from the poetic voice; desolation of the wilderness called conversation.

"The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is some one outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; some one strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammeled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary currents of human action."

- Winston Churchill (in reference to T.E. Lawrence.

"Stop the boats, axe the tax, stop the waste"- Tony Abbott.

Recently our PM, Mr Turnbull, spoke to the Business Council of Australia about Reform- with a deliberate capital 'R'. It's a capital 'R' topic at the moment. He warned against the habit of our citizens to see reform as a reactive, seismic wrenching of the status quo every 25 years; instead he reckoned reform should be a part of the every day decisions of an alert and agile government.

What made my ears prick up was how he communicated the message. He used the metaphor of a sailor, of one that is attuned to the shifts of wind and the deeper, invisible currents of the wild sea who decides whether to make use of the strong gusts or to find other patterns when she detects that the weather is turning. His language was poetic: full and rounded, his metaphor florid and evocative. To my mind the use of such an image successfully painted the world of a leader in an ever changing situation, the choices they make, and the emotional landscape that accompanies the endeavour that is moment-by-moment navigation. 

What disappointed me, however, was the reaction to that use of that metaphor by members of the commentariat. Criticism that essentially said that "the every-man" or "every-woman" would see that as waffle and pointless. That it highlighted his distance from the general public. The theory being that the general public would find that language so inaccessible, so foreign, they would react as if to a threat.

I'm afraid that a corner of my heart agreed.

I am not here to argue the merit of his Reform argument. Rather it brought to the surface within me something I have been wrangling with for some time: that of the gradual and institutional inoculation to the poetic imagination that has become the norm in our schools, our universities and, critically, in the domain of our work lives. Our use of language has deteriorated to such an extent that the simple use of metaphor can provoke what becomes, in essence, a bloody rebellion, a revolt; a river of torch bearing townsfolk casting the witch into the waters. 

One of my favourite plays "Knives in Hens" by David Harrower, explores how a young woman, who has found herself married off to a man chosen by her parents in what was the usual, ritualised way of betrothal in agrarian, pre-industrial English life, finds an emancipation through the gradual expansion of her language. 

At the beginning of the play her vocabulary is small; as such the scope of her imagination and her ability to converse with the wild, a metaphor for life and the soul, was limited. As it expands through the injection of ideas she receives through conversation with the Miller, and through the eager confrontation she maintains with the natural world, she reinvents herself and sheds the shackles that bind her to an otherwise unconscious and unfulfilled life.

This is a powerful representation of the kind of interaction we have with the wilderness of our lives, and the language we use to shape that interaction. At it's heart, poetry expands our experience of the world, and our conversation with it. That's why in revolutions, it is the writers and poets that are put to the sword, so to speak.

In the play, the husband cannot stand her growth and so seeks to destroy her. This speaks to me of the way we seem to want to shy away from language that threatens to de-simplify the lived experience, one that forces us to assume a form of being that is devoid of control and comfortable in the mystery that is the road of our lives. 

I think this shying away, this rejection, is dangerous- certainly to our engagement with the world, but, for the purposes of this blog, dangerous to our work. To results, to performance, to the human soul caught in the wild terrain that is our working lives- howsoever much we'd like to say that isn't so.

In Clear Mind, Wild Heart, poet David Whyte describes a yearning that exists to bring to our working lives a larger conversation, a larger experience through work; yet one that is constrained, hobbled, by the architecture, the interiors of the towers of glass and steel, and the dearth of poetic imagination in our workplaces.

Recently I was working with a company that is undergoing such pain as it restructures and retrenches people. The arbiters of that change are so often not the ones that have to deal with the human element. That instead is left with the  human resources people (in and of itself a worryingly Orwellian phrase I sometimes think), people who no doubt entered the life in a desire to engage and inspire human performance.

In the context of a project designed to usher people through this change, I mentioned the word "grief" as a guiding phrase to begin internal wandering. As in the grief that will be experienced through job loss, and the landscape that comes with that word.

Now, in a business whose sole frame of language has been DMAIC (six sigma) and the usual brutalist IR dialects for over a year, that word, that deviation from accepted lingual norms, such as "problem-statements", "root-cause" and "redeployment" provoked such a strong, such a fierce reaction, such an emotional rejection, it was as if I was Gallileo announcing the possibility that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.

Fear of that word- grief- as if by its utterance a whole undoing of order, a hitherto un-summoned demon of chaos was being brought into the world. The unwillingness to face into an uncontrollable and immeasurable human experience, the wilderness of the conversation, was undeniable. 

And the outcome was an suppression of certain conversational landscapes, and evocations of others that shaped the ensuing sets of decisions. I wont pass judgment of those decisions, because that is not the point of my blog. I just know that the lands were annexed, the boundaries redrawn, and the whole field of potentiality was contained.

My point here is not to attack these hard working, dedicated people. They are the long suffering stewards of the many painful rituals humans endure in corporate life. And as such, boundaries and fences are made to protect, to sustain.

My point is: the reduction of language, whether weasel words often attributed to the political class, twitter-esque short hand conventions of communication, or the mechanistic, severe language of business improvement methodology will not linguistically, and therefore imaginatively unveil the kind of organisational landscapes that are needed in order to support the type of work we want to be doing, that we crave, and, just as importantly, is required to enable us to tackle the wilderness of the world in which we live.

If it helps to begin building a bridge from one bank to the other, think of this as that if we need to be agile, innovative and adaptive to economic uncertainty, volatility and ambiguity (although I'm sick of those phrases to be truthful- they have become simply modules in a curriculum of uncertain capability strategies); if this is the need, it is required that we possess a broader lexicon, are able to mine the moment through poetic imagery and bold enough to wander into the wilderness of the conversation, with all its hidden species, its fossils, its ores and minerals, its shifting humidity and topographic melodies; its evolution, its weeds, its overgrown and shriveled, its directions and desires, its griefs and its births.

We need to stop inoculating ourselves from the poetic experience.

And allow the full measure of the conversation to emancipate us from the rituals the unconscious action that is of the demesne of the mechanistic and sterile.