Language and Listening

by Frank Garrett

Warning the following Blog may create cognitive dissonance, causing the reader to look for black-and-white definitions from Webster’s, Wikipedia and Wordsworth. Resist this urge and find the meaning you seek through the study of anthropology, philosophy theology and the social sciences.

During the hundreds of language audits I have been involved in, many words do not show up, and what is not said is as important as what is said.

The sign does not say they are a non-profit, and yet thousands of people donate goods to this organization daily thinking they are making a difference, only a small percentage of people donate understanding you must declare you want the proceeds to go to a non-profit and that’s all good for the shareholders to the tune of $150B in 2023.

Many years ago I challenged the communications department of a corporation I worked for saying we should add “moral” to the duty to speak up about hazards in the workplace. We have a moral obligation to speak up instead of just an obligation! They told me the word “moral” carried too much religious connotation and they didn’t think that had a place in our mission/vision verbiage. Everyone we meet has something to teach us, if we open our hearts and minds to them. This exchange and many others taught me there is a significant difference between marketing and communications, these are often passed off as the same and companies think they are doing great things when they hire them. They both rely on words, language, semiotics, semantics and our semiosphere, but ask either group what semiotics is and they will not know.

So what do language audits, semiotics and learning from others have to do with Safety?

I recently attended the SPoR conference in Canberra Australia with 30 others from all over the world, this was my third trip to Australia for the study of The Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR), and it was great to reconnect with many others with whom I haven’t seen since before COVID and an opportunity to meet new like-minded folks on the SPoR journey, each one with a different cultural background, in several cases a different language and certainly different perspectives, which is the most important part of a conference, connecting, relationships and learning from each other.

Very little of our daily language is used consciously, when you are talking to someone from across the globe whose first language is not the same as your own, who comes from a different culture/semiosphere you become more conscious of your words, phrases and metaphors,  forcing us to listen to understand, not just respond. The vocabulary available to us unconsciously is primed by the semisphere we live in, our culture, who we regularly converse with (I swear way more when I come home from the farm) and our social norms. In safety, the language rarely strays from hazards, controls, objects, compliance, performance, policy, procedures, JSA’s and checklists. Why, because that’s what we are all primed with, the banners on the fence, the vision/mission statements, and the orientations. Have you used words like faith, myth, symbolism, paradox, belief/s, sacrifice, embodied learning & connection in your discussions with others?  These words do not show up in language audits. Yet these things are lived each day, we sacrifice our time at home to be in a camp miles away, the myths in safety would need several more blogs to cover, and we embody learning through kinesthetic learning on the job, but we don’t connect the dots for others.

“Language does more than reflect culture, according to radical linguistic determinism, it determines culture by controlling the way people think, predisposing them towards certain interpretive choices” R Long (1995) PhD Thesis Page 436-37

Cultural change in an organization starts with language, learning about different philosophies, and recognizing the limitations of positivism and behaviourism. We can do better, we must do better for the people we work with because it’s not about you, it’s not about me, it is about the relationship in that space between us.