Pedal to the Metal.

The young basketball coach delivered a post-game speech to her team of 10 year olds.

‘Next week, we’ve got to put the pedal to the metal!’

‘What does that mean?’ one player asked - as only ten year olds who don’t drive cars and therefore don’t understand the workings of an accelerator pedal, could.

The coach paused, then said, ‘You know… like … when you’re … riding your bike. Pedalling along. It means … go …faster….’ The coach didn’t know the literal meaning either. She just knew - correctly - it meant play hard and don’t slack off. Probably from the context she had heard it used by other coaches.

At first I thought this was a lesson in the importance of our audience knowing our metaphor. You have to have driven a car to apply the metaphor to your context.

Then I realised it represented a more common behaviour of deeper significance.

‘Excellence.’ ‘Committed To.’ ‘Totally Committed To.’ ‘Paramount Importance.’ ‘Team.’ ‘Service.’ ‘Continuous Improvement.’ ‘Agile.’ ‘Community.’ ‘Learning Organisation.’ ‘Customer Focussed.’‘Partnership.’ ‘Leadership.’

Everybody has read, heard or used these words and slogans like them. There’s an assumption that the audience knows what each word literally means.

That’s a patently dumb assumption.

What is ‘Excellence’? ‘Team’? ‘Leadership’? My ‘Agile’ might be your ‘Meh’.

But unlike the ten year old basketballer, few in your audience will ask ‘What does ‘Excellence’ mean?’ - even if we’ve never seen Excellence in the wild in our organisation. No. We’ll nod, reach for a mint, and check our phones beneath the table. Even if we do tempt fate to ask, like the young coach, the speaker or author may well pause, and fumble some unsatisfactory explanation and move on.

Why? Because like the coach, we don’t know what these words literally mean.

And we know that doesn’t matter.

Nobody expects us to. We know they’re not used literally.

We’re only expected to hear the music, not read the lyrics.

We’re only expected to know what using those catch cries signals. We know, like the music score of a movie designed to heighten arousal, these lofty words are a performance.

Most of the time what they signal is that the speaker is exhorting us to do something better or differently. The speaker is almost always a person in positional power, someone engaged by the person in positional power over us to ‘train’ us, or someone trying to sell us something. Like a bugler awakening sleeping troops.

In other words, like the ten year olds who’ve never pressed on an accelerator but knew from the context, that their coach is urging them on, nobody stops to think ‘Hang on - do these people know what ‘Excellence’ looks like? How can they expect ‘Excellence’ from us when we’re so poorly led?’ Instead, we’ve learned from the organisational context that this word coleslaw is just another power flex performance from the boss or someone selling us something. Words don’t matter.

I wonder what would happen if next time you’re being clichéd by catch cries from a motivational speaker, consultant, or boss, you dare to ask ‘When you say ‘Agile’, what does that look like in my context, motivational speaker? What is an example of ‘Agile’, consultant? What do you want me to do, boss?

Or otherwise, just reach for another mint and check your socials.