Can You Invent Something New If Your Words Are Old?

Is “Orange Is the New Black” or “House of Cards” a TV show?  We can watch them on our smartphone, tablet, computer or TV.  And, unlike traditional TV shows, which are released an episode per week, we can watch the whole season at once, totally disrupting the sense of time the television channels have taught us to expect. And yet, as Kevin Spacey recently pointed out at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, we still talk about that form of media in terms of its traditional viewing source.  It’s still a TV show, even if it’s more like an episodically-punctuated-video-feed.

Many of our words are archaic, not just “TV show.”  How many of us still say, “Will you tape that show for me?” when no tape is involved.  We talk about albums, records, and filming.  We “dial” and “hang up” the phone.  At the tollbooth, we “roll down the window” even though we’re not rolling anything.  We refer to a child as a “carbon copy” of her dad. Even our icons are out of date.  You click a magnifying glass to search. (Perhaps Sherlock Holmes, somewhere, approves.) You click a floppy disc to save. (Do your kids even know what that is?) Your mail icon is an envelope. (Too bad for the post office that you don’t need a stamp.)

The words and images we use to describe things affect our thinking. What if the words we use are limiting the solutions we can create?

What if instead of being asked to create a “TV show”, we were asked to create a story using video?  Would it open our mind to more options than broadcast or cable TV? A YouTube channel? Vine or Instagram videos? Something entirely different? What if, when you need a package for your new product, instead of thinking of a package as a separate container to be discarded, it was part of the product itself in some way? Would it still be a package? Would it still need to be thrown out? At a much simpler level, will the solution change if we change our words from “satisfying customer needs” to “delighting customers”? What if we “thrill our customers with easy service” instead of “making it easy to talk to customer service”?  Just by using different language, we can find more ways to be innovative in how we approach problems and opportunities.

Language is paradoxical.  In some ways, it doesn’t keep pace with the rate of societal and technological change (e.g., TV show, carbon copy) and in others, new words are created almost daily in response to our fast-changing world (e.g., selfie, MOOC).  There is a balance between using the past to understand the present and guide the future, on the one hand, and on the other, creating something fresh that leaves the old behind.  We need analogies to understand the new (eg, horseless carriage) yet they also hold us back by it constraining our thinking (eg, horseless carriage).

So I have a challenge for you. Watch your language and the language of those around you.  See what words you are using and how you’re using them. Do they help you and your organization move forward? View the world differently? Open your mind to new possibilities? Or do they constrain how you view the world?

And when you change the words, does the world change as well?

by Deborah Mills-Scofield HBR