You had to admire the way perfectly innocent words were mugged, ravished, stripped of all true meaning and decency, and then sent to walk the gutter for Reacher Gilt, although “synergistically” had probably been a whore from the start.
— Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
There’s an art to speaking without meaning. To talking for minutes at a time, without ever communicating a position. Giving the impression that you’re agreeing, you’re sympathizing, you’re on the listener’s side… without ever committing to that, or giving any details.
Someone’s asking a question, and the honest answer is going to upset them. So you talk around it and, even if ultimately the dodge is plain, they’re not left with a direct quote from you saying that. They’ll have to paraphrase you, and you can always quibble with that.
Congratulations, you’re talking like an executive. A corpo, if you will.
“Can you rule out cutting your prices for other non-Creative Cloud products?” journalist David Ramli asked.
Narayen said: “You know we’re always looking at pricing around the world and I think the meeting today is all about sharing where we’re heading as a company with the Creative Cloud and the Marketing Cloud.
This is a skill people cultivate because it’s surprisingly effective. Some people won’t notice you’re doing it, and will be happily brushed aside without realizing they’ve been misled. Others will realize, but won’t be able to push back against you, because of politeness, format constraints, or structural imbalances. If you’re in an interview or Q&A of some sort, signalling that any question want to dodge is going to cost the questioner a big chunk of their question-asking time and require follow-up questions to see if they can pin you down is often enough to make them decide it’s not worth it.
(Insofar as executives are a specialized form of politician, you can see the parallels with political communication. Politicians are often better at it, because they tend to know to couch their initial communication in more normal-sounding speech, and just fall back on the media-training for questions, tending more towards repeating practiced talking-points rather than obscuring through circuitous language.)
The problem with this is twofold.
- Once people are sensitized to this, it becomes incredibly grating to listen to.
- Many executives spend so much time immersed in this type of communication that they think it’s normal. It’s just how they talk now. They misdirect even when there’s no point to it, when plain speech would serve them better.
If you want people to trust you, you should probably work out how to talk to them in a way that doesn’t inherently read as insincere.