I’ve been keen to tap into some research that Tina Catling (oneof the founders of otb) has been doing for some time now on the effect ofcommunications on a company’s success.
Over 25 years in business Tina Catling has been exposed tohundreds of different company types and cultures. Catling has recently been studyinglinguistics and corporate cultures and was struck by two insights that seemedto replicate themselves in every company, regardless of the size or type.
The first observation relates to the strong tendency of successfulcompanies to use positive language – they praise often, celebrate achievementsand accept failure as a positive and inevitable part of a learningorganization. In other words they are‘Yes …and’ companies.
Moreover, the counter scenario seems to be true. Those companies who are most unpleasant ordifficult to work for – In that they are closed to new thinking and slow tochange, seem to use a lot of negative or aggressive language and seem to beless innovative and successful. They donot seem as flexible and come across as more introspective and less likely towelcome innovation.
For this work positive language is defined as language whichhas a positive resonance and takes projects and people forward: Positive language would include - Yes, Yes and, Good, Well Done, Wonderful,Positive, Yes we can, let’s do it , success…
Negative language is defined therefore as language which hasa negative resonance and takes people and projects back or down: Negativelanguage would include: We can’t, No, we tried that before, this won’t work,try, failure …
The second observation relates to the stronger congruence betweeninternal and external communications of successful companies. Their message to the outside world appears tobe aligned with their internal communications. Again, the less successful companies indeed showed more incongruence.They use positive language for external communications but negative languageused on internal communications.
These twofold of observations have led to the formulation ofa hypothesis regarding the usage of language in companies. By using an onlinetool, company language is measured with the aim of researching the prevalenceand ratio of positive and negative language. Subsequently, this is related to thesuccess of those companies.
To test the hypnosis’s with the tool 11 companies werecontacted and asked for samples of their internal documents. Of the 11companies invited to participate 7 companies offered their internaldocuments. These 7 companies werefurther researched to obtain samples of their external text.
Both the internal and external text was harvested from arange of materials – company reports, emails, proposals, presentations andwebsites.
The text of both internal and external copy was stripped outinto a plain text word document and dropped into the tool. The scores were then transferred to ratios sothat they could be compared against each other.
Finally the success of each company was considered. This was a challenge as successes incompanies could be a number of measures. However for this research it was decided that successes would be definedas growth in profits.
There were many interesting findings within this analysis, wedo indeed find correlations between the linguistics used by companies and theirrelative success but it was not the straightforward answers Catling wasexpecting to find.
Have I got you intrigued?
Well you will just have to wait for more exciting...positive...feedbackover the coming weeks!
...or if you can’t wait...email tina.catling@outsidethebox.co.ukI’m sure she will answer some of your questions.
