Coordinating Our Actions and Activities
“During the industrial age and the current electro-informational age, we have become technically powerful but we have not cultivated our powers of action. People who speak of moving from talk to action are apparently not awake to the fact that talk is the essence of action. We are in fact deeply influenced by how we speak to one another.”
~ Bill Torbert* (emphasis added)
What if every sentence out of your mouth had an effect in the world? How might your attention and behavior shift?
Not everything we say creates action in the world, but there are certain ways in which we speak that do, indeed, produce action, and which have “real world” consequences. Learning what these “speech acts” are, and how to use them skillfully, provides us with tremendous power to shape our speaking and listening so that we can live and work together more harmoniously, and achieve our desired outcomes more easily.
Some of the parts of our speaking and listening which produce action include:
- Assessments
- Assertions
- Declarations
- Requests
- Offers
- Promises
If we are to successfully work together toward any desired future, the ability to distinguish an assessment from an assertion, to make powerful declarations, compelling offers, clear requests, and reasonable promises will prove very useful. We'll also need to learn the art of re-negotiating our promises when something gets in the way of our fulfilling them.
*Bill Torbert as quoted in Leverage Points, March 25, 2005 published by Pegasus Communications