The ways in which language is used can have a huge impact on business, says Steve Doswell 

"How can communicators adapt to change?"

Last time in this column, I mentioned some of the changes we’ve noted at IoIC within the landscape of internal communication. Sometimes change is cyclical – centralise, decentralise, then centralise again (before the next decentralisation, and so on). It’s always disruptive in the sense that it breaks the pattern established by the previous phase. To an extent, organisational change happens so frequently that we almost become inured to it. Almost, but not quite.

The human mind has been described as brilliantly uncreative in the sense that it tries to pigeon-hole what it experiences into known categories. With each new wave of change, we quickly try to establish a pattern of normality by stabilising the newness of the structures, the job-titles, the practices. We’re so good at this pigeon-holing and settling quickly into a new state of business-as-usual, that we greet each following wave of change with something akin to surprise. Then we acknowledge, it, adjust to it and quickly adapt to it, although we may not welcome it immediately. If Lenin had been born half a century later and on the American side of the Bering Strait he would probably have conceived a Theory of Permanent Business Change and made his name and fortune teaching it to the executive masses of his time.

Back to the idea of our ‘brilliantly uncreative’ minds, which I was reminded of in a laugh-out-loud moment on a flight last week. A piece in The Linguist magazine about the origin of words revealed that ‘ostrich’ derives from an early Greek phrase meaning ‘big sparrow.’ It takes some feat of categorisation to bracket two birds of such unequal dimensions together. The mere addition of ‘big’ to convey the difference makes for a laughably vivid understatement.

The language of change is a business dialect of its own. While its use makes perfect sense

within the change ‘community’ itself, it can be disengaging for the wider workforce and should be used sparingly. So it’s all the more bizarre to see change terminology used outside the corporate bubble. A sign currently to be found in Birmingham clearly has the noble aim of informing the general public about

the fate of the fire station premises on which it appears. It announces that ‘This building is being sold owing to transformation.’ Even allowing for the location’s proximity to Birmingham Business School, the message is likely to mystify most of those who see it.

Back to change within internal communication: in a lively discussion with senior communications practitioners from major government departments last month, we recently identified the following shifts: from the high mediation of organisational communication by IC specialists to low or no mediation, enabled by technology, where those who want to create content and share it can do so without necessarily calling in the experts. The benefits are the removal of production costs and the greater authenticity and immediacy of content. The challenges are to do with consistency, quality and authority – who has the ‘right’ to communicate and to whom. And for the IC practitioners, there’s a potential existential threat (we’re talking here about role redundancy not Jean-Paul Sartre).

Happily, other shifts – from control to moderation, from producing outputs to consulting and facilitating outcomes – attest to the adaptability of the IC professional. Stay on top of our professional development needs and we’ll surf this latest wave of change. There’s no mileage in getting stranded by it and as for sticking heads in the sand, let’s leave that to the big sparrow.

Steve Doswell is chief executive of the Institute of Internal Communication You can find him on Twitter @stevedoswell