conversation is an engine

The Role of the Declarative in Every Day Life

This has the power to change you: say what you stand for rather than saying over and over what you are against. To declare what you stand for is to say a positive about yourself and your situation in life. Declaring takes courage because others will disagree, they may say “That’s not true!” Others may despise you for saying what you think, they may not believe and many will simply find your declaration irrelevant.

But you must say it anyway.

Declarational speech expresses us at work as agents of truth. –Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Corporations and organizations are at their best when their people take ownership of processes. Taking ownership means making that process one’s own. Remember in school when the teacher said “use your own words” versus cribbing from the encyclopedia? (An encyclopedia was a set of “books” made of “paper” that sat on a “shelf” gathering dust until a “report” was due) That process of using your own words is the very reason for the staying power for your odd assortment of facts from childhood.

Taking ownership and using your own words is the same process that makes you a grown-up human today. A necessary condition of taking ownership is that the result will look different from what someone else might have done. If you are a boss and chide your employee for doing things differently than you,  stop and rethink your relationship with the work and the client and your employee.

No organization can grow—no people in an organization can grow—if they are not using their own words to say what is happening.

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Image credit: Gregory Norman Bossert via Wofford College/thisisnthappiness