Words shape our perception

This image was used in a really fascinating study on color perception and language. In Russian, there are two different "blues" - goluboy and siniy. A Russian speaker would not call those both blue, they would call them just goluboy and siniy. Similarly in English, we have red and pink. Many languages identify only red. Pink is a light red but it's not its own color. 

Why does that matter? Because when shown the scale above, Russian speakers were very quick to identify matches in colors in that range. Their language has built a perception in their brain that 08 and 13 are not different shades, they are different colors. 

In Potawatomi there are very few nouns. Instead it relies mostly on verbs. A "bay" is not a place. It is the energy of life being a bay. A tree is not a thing, it is the energy of life spending some time as a tree. If a place or thing is not a static thing how can you own it? It's part of a whole, not a separate discriminable entity. It shapes the perception of how one navigates the physical world. 

In business, we also shape our perception through language. It shapes how we perceive the actions of others and what our options for performing our roles are. But what language do we use? Here's some examples you've probably heard a lot (and could likely come up with even more – feel free to comment your faves that I missed!)

Personnel & Structure Frontline employees, troops, boots on the ground, chain of command, rank and file, headcount, deploy staff, casualties (layoffs)

Action & Execution Attack the problem, battle-tested, campaign, blitz, bombard, target, execute, rally the troops, mobilize, on the ground

Planning & Strategy War room, war games, strategic offensive, lines of defense, flanking strategy, beachhead market, siege mentality, scorched earth, ammunition (data/budget)

Competition Capture market share, dominate, crush the competition, kill the competition, price war, arms race, competitive intelligence, defensive strategy, hostile takeover

Process & Review Post mortem, tiger team, after action review, battle rhythm, triage, collateral damage, fire drill

Culture & Pressure In the trenches, battle-hardened, soldier on, take no prisoners, fight fires, throw bodies at it, fall on the sword, take a bullet for

You might want to sit with that just a hot second. It's a lot to read it all in one place

But here's what I really want to talk about - 

If you are "Mobilizing your frontline staff to execute the blitz and capture market share in a take-no-prisoners campaign" then I can tell you what the culture looks like in your org. Those employees "in the trenches" know that their value is in throwing their entire body at active firing squads to then accept praise from their hospital bed. Are you really storming the beach at Normandy to save the west from fascism or are you trying to figure out how to squeeze a few more dollars out of an annual contract? 

I do think I have an idea of how we got here, which might be an essay for another day, though I would argue the language of "We're changing the world by ___" might be a contributing factor. 

If you are a leader setting strategy for the challenges facing you right now, are you framing the problem as a battle with winners, losers, and expected casualties? Where success is just a matter of executing the right maneuver. Or, maybe your challenge is to keep your business agile enough to respond to a world where information flows at the speed of light and the product your customers expect is a moving target. Where the network you build is almost as important as the work you do.

A network solution

I live in the Pacific Northwest, which is one of the most gorgeous places on the planet. It's also very wet and very fungal. Everywhere I go right now, there are mushrooms – tiny ones in my yard, giant fans spiraling down tree trunks, small caps pushing through leaf litter, even slime molds crawling over my mud patches. But mushrooms are so much bigger and more intelligent than we can comprehend. 

One mushroom (fruiting body) is actually just a teeny, tiny part of the mushroom's network (called mycelium) that pops above the surface in order to send spores out into the world. Under the soil there may be no part of the dirt that isn't held together by the springy, stringy tangle of mycelium. 

In fact, the largest organism is right near my home town. It's a honey fungus in the Malheur Forest and it is estimated to be 3.5–3.7 square miles or 9–10 km2. Why so big? Well because it can grow in places few other things can. But it also turns out to serve an incredible function. The network that exists between those tendrils of fungus and plants appears to manage the communication network for entire forests. Using the mycorrhizal network, trees can communicate draught, flooding, pest infestations, viral attacks, and even forest destruction. Trees can even send support to each other, including keeping trees alive after being cut down. 

There is no hierarchy – information flows in all directions and the network adapts to whatever happens in the most efficient ways possible. The mycorrhizal network doesn't have a frontline. It has contact points. Every node both receives and transmits — nothing is deployed, nothing is expended. Every part of the mycorrhizal network has access to all the resources that can be carried. It's really quite marvelous. And effective.

If we want to have workplaces that are efficient, responsive, and adaptive, we can take cues from mycorrhizal networks to coach us. They can give us language that will align our brains with the wisdom of these ancient communicators.

So here's what I propose: let's start thinking of alternate words for our old, battle-worn terms. Term updates like:

Frontline Staff → Contact layer - where the organization meets the customer. It gathers the information the organization needs to function.

War Room/Post-mortem → The understory - where the real processing happens, below the visible canopy, connecting everything.

Capturing market share → expanding the network 

Dominating → becoming load-bearing in the ecosystem 

Price war → resource competition

What would change about the way you approach work if the language created a reality of teamwork and gave language to the way we connect with everything else in our world? I suspect it would be more impactful than we realize. After all, language becomes unconscious. It builds our reality into the foundation of the words we speak. It gives form to what you can say. It builds a different reality.