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Rouse the Rabble!                     Return to Views Directory Page
A few of weeks ago, I went on the road with a client. It was a week-long video shoot in three cities, and the night before we returned home the client, the crew and I sat down over a few beers to celebrate our success.  The conversation quickly turned to the challenges (problems) the client's organization is facing as its business environment changes.

The client is frustrated.  He has solid ideas about what his organization should to do to survive, even succeed, in the future.  He just can't get people in the organization moving in the same direction.  Like the feudal lords and vassals of medieval times, his managers and employees feel threatened by the renaissance looming beyond the walls of their cubicles.  Each is desperately protecting his own hard-won turf.

My client, on the other hand, sees the opportunities as well as the threats.  Focusing on the opportunities, he created a brief document outlining the situation and proposing five specific steps to start everyone down the most painless and productive path.  The ideas are dramatic.  They have real potential.  But the paper is, well, a report--clinical and precise and couched in organizational jargon.  It's not what the situation requires: rousing rhetoric.

People resist few things as stubbornly as they resist change.  They might know deep inside that the change is for the better, but their natural fear of uncertainty freezes them like armadillos in bright headlights.  And when several hundred or several thousand people face uncertainty together, their fears feed on one another, creating an emotional obstacle that no amount of judicious reasoning can overcome.  The only chance a leader has is to fight with equally strong emotion.

My solution was to recast the paper in The Spoken Word.  Full of sound bites and battle cries, supercharged with determination and optimism, it reads like a campaign speech delivered in a strong voice.  It marches like a Wagner overture, radiating confidence and pitching ideas like thunderbolts.    It frames change as a solution rather than a threat and shrinks seemingly overwhelming obstacles to manageable size.  At least, that's how it reads in my head.  So far, my client's colleagues seem to agree.  They describe it as "exhilarating" and "motivating."  Two wrote back to him, "I think your ideas are right on track!"  All, as far as I know, had read the original draft a couple weeks ago, without reaction.

What's my point?  The Spoken Word isn't just for the podium or the camera.  It's a style that can be just as effective for reaching readers as for reaching viewers.  Because it flows like speech--the form of language with which we are all most comfortable--it comes across as personal and familiar and puts the audience at ease.  At the same time, it fuses written ideas with the music of speech, adding an artistry that recalls language in its purest form (back before words were written at all) and imitates the most modern and widespread use of language (the language of radio and television).

So if what you're writing isn't motivating people the way you want it to, maybe the problem isn't your ideas but the way you're presenting them.    Try saying them on paper instead of writing them on paper.    Try The Spoken Word.

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