Published
In his 2022 book, Language vs Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists, Nick Enfield describes language as a tool for social coordination. The purpose of language is to enable us to collaborate and one of the main ways in which we do this is by aligning everyone involved around a shared view of reality.
As delivery professionals, we create this coordination by framing things as a project (or a programme). We write a business case, define scope requirements, timescale, budgets and we unconsciously use language (and respond to others use of language) as we go.
On the plus side, it is exactly this social coordination that enables us to achieve the extraordinary things we sometimes deliver. Those involved can understand the vision, the requirements and the actions they need to follow for their work. Unfortunately, there are a number of downsides because our shared language is packed full of assumptions and heuristics. Thus, if I ask you to build a wall, all I need to specify are start and end points, number of courses of bricks wide and high, and even though I haven’t explicitly told you it should describe a straight-line, that is what you will build, because our default understanding of walls (from Humpty Dumpty onwards) is that walls are straight lines. Or, if I give you an estimated cost or estimated schedule for a project, these estimates will become written in stone because they act as anchors in our mind.
And alongside the words themselves we develop a language of analogy and metaphor to describe projects. Thus, for example, projects are Waterfall or Agile, EPC, EPCM or maybe they are transformational.
All of this comes down to the fact that language is essentially a shorthand. It allows us to define a ‘quick and dirty’ definition of reality for the purpose of efficient collaboration. Over the last 40 years we have developed a sophisticated language for major project delivery, a language has become established by convention but it is a language that is creaking under the strain of trying to encompass the huge variety of vastly different projects (and programmes) now associated with complex delivery.
We struggle to find new language to describe today’s project forms because our thinking is constrained by the language we have used in the past. If a project isn’t agile or waterfall, then what is it? And the challenge associated with social, economic and technical change means that don’t have readily available and collectively shared vocabulary to capture the emergent, uncertain or socially transformative projects to which we aspire.
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