Talking the walk

This month marked the end of the Indian general election process that ran over 50 days, involving more than 970 million eligible voters, to elect the new government. A daunting task indeed! No wonder there was an explosion in political messaging, a parade of smiling and crying faces of pollsters over national media, achievement scorecards of political parties plastered all over and candidate roadshows. I am sure all the heat generated by the vitriolic campaigning would have contributed to the hot Indian summer of 2024. Arguably, Indian elections beat IPL in terms of excitement, drama, powerplay shenanigans, worthy impact players and last minute suspense.

Any discussion around politics always takes me back to the iconic British satire series ‘Yes Minister’. Though it is almost 40 years old by now, the messages rhyme even today. One of the episodes introduces the ‘Law of Inverse Relevance’- let’s call it LOIR for brevity. Sir Arnold (the principal secretary to the British PM) advises Bernard (a junior bureaucrat) to keep on agreeing with his minister all the time as the minister will then mistake all the talking for action. LOIR, in a nutshell, is:

The less you intend to do about something, the more you have to keep talking about it.

Politics is the most obvious manifestation of LOIR. But, come to think of it, LOIR pops up every now and then in many other avatars. Here are a couple:

• An employee who always talks about how she is keen to take up newer challenges or opportunities, may not actually do anything about it.
• Companies that continuously talk about brand purpose may not actually follow these promises through actions

?As homo sapiens, we have two hands, two feet and one mouth. As humans, we started using our hands & feet for actions much before we started using our mouth to speak. Actions always spoke louder than words. The advent of smartphones and social media meant we talk (~type) and act (~type) using our hands all the time. Reflect on our typical day. We typically use our hands more than our mouth for ‘talking’. We also use our hands more than our feet for ‘actions’. Kind of crazy!

My feeling is that LOIR will be even more widespread in future as our technology usage goes up and attention spans drop. Walking the talk (i.e. actual actions that follow through what we say) may get replaced by talking the walk (i.e. I have said something so I have acted my part).

What do you do? Do you walk the talk or talk the walk?