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"We all will make inferences; one aspect of leadership concentrates on minimizing our tendency to drift apart in how we assign meaning. "
"I am saying society is based on shared meanings, which constitute the culture. If we don't share coherent meaning, we do not make much of a society. ... I find that something like [dialogue] is necessary for society to function properly and for society to survive. Otherwise it will all fall apart. This shared meaning is really the cement that holds society together, and you could say that the present society has some very poor quality cement."
- David Bohm
1) Background
I have invested the most recent half-dozen years of my working life engaged in leadership development in a variety of contexts. I've worked as an internal consultant in a Fortune 500 company. I've worked as an adjunct faculty member in a liberal arts university. I've served as the Board Chair for a regional nonprofit. It surprises some to hear that semantics has a role to play in leadership development. The only time most people seem to refer to semantics at all occurs during an exchange such as this:
Person A, plaintively:
I think you've glossed over a key point that's not about leadership, that's management!
Person B, dismissively:
Oh, you're just arguing semantics!
Well, yes, what we mean by the words we use does concern semantics. Furthermore, effective leadership requires a rich understanding of the role semantics plays in everyday communications. Effective leadership requires the creation of shared meanings because, as Bohm points out in the above quote, these shared meanings constitute our collective culture.
The overall framework my colleagues and I created for leadership development used the graduate seminar as the basic model. We would work with adults experienced in the worlds of working and learning. We focused on their learning instead of our teaching. Each group met for a block of time (four-to-five hours) once each week for about twelve weeks. We would deliberately revisit the topic of communications and the particular importance of effective communications. In one particular session, we would bring semantics to the very center of focus. In that session (typically about the fourth) we would turn to two tools, suggesting that the learners...