Change the Language not the Terminology

I remember picking up Dan Mezick's book The Culture Game and turning it over to read Jeff Suthlerland's quote on the back that if you can change the language in an organisation then you can change the culture. I thought this was a fascinating quote, not least because I wasn't sure how much I agreed with it.

I thought back to some of the teams that I'd worked with or alongside and some of the fundamental challenges they faced from an outdated and unaligned organisational culture - even though they'd shifted the language they used to a new way of working. I had fundamental questions about how much a shift in language really can lead to a shift in culture. Lots of teams are using a new language, so why are so many of those teams struggling to change the culture?

Then I realised something. On deeper thought, had those teams shifted their language at all? They'd adopted a new terminology but in doing so were essentially just using new words to layer over an existing paradigm.

If we take the following definition of language: a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalised signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/language) then we can suppose that a change in language should result in two main outcomes:

- Communication of new ideas and concepts
- A shared understanding around the new ideas and concepts

Teams that merely adopt a new terminology arguably fail to deliver on both of these points and their shift in language is only ever shallow. Using lots of surface level language, most of the time focused around Scrum, such as sprints, stories, points, epics etc doesn't by itself communicate a new idea or build a shared understanding around it. Moreover, the new terminology just layers over existing ideas and is often banded around so freely that it lacks any real shared understanding of what it actually means.

Changing culture requires deeper language change. Shifting to a new language which doesn't even shift the thinking around ideas and concepts will never lead to a change in culture. Actually it could, but probably towards some sort of cargo-cult oriented thing   (http://agilecoachingcircle.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/were-agile-were-doing-stand-ups-ever.html). Effective and meaningful culture change requires a change in the way that we think about and represent ideas and concepts. In an agile context that means shifting the language towards core principles of collaboration and early and continuous delivery of value.

Adopting terminology is easy and is probably why most teams start and stop at that point.
Beneath the surface though they're still firmly plugged into the conceptual and behavioural language of yesteryear. Shift the language, Mindlessly adopt new terminology and dress up the status quo or truly shift the language, shift the thinking and shift the culture. To me, the difference is now clear.