Mind-Based Linguistics 101 for Managers: How Language Really Works

March 9, 2017 • STRATEGY & MANAGEMENT, Editor's choice, Leadership and Organisation

By Bart Tkaczyk

Managers will fulfil their managerial potential once they realise how to effectively communicate. This article seeks to unpack and ignite an alternative way of thinking (and talking) and understanding about management and managing.


Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

– William Shakespeare, Hamlet


When you ask managers what they do, they will often tell you that they administer, supervise, plan, organise, staff, direct, coordinate, report – and budget. However, the reality suggests otherwise. Much of what you “do” is… “talk”. Evidently, in two classic British studies, managers spent an average 66% and 80% of their time in oral communication (Burns, 1954, Stewart, 1988). Likewise, in Henry Mintzberg’s seminal “structural observation” study of five American CEOs of middle- to large-sized enterprises – a consulting firm, a tech company, a consumer goods company, a hospital, and a school system – the statistic was 78% (Mintzberg, 1973).

Studying how language really works provides us with very deep insights into how managers actually manage, in other words, how they think, behave and communicate.

We live in a world of language that is multifaceted, metaphorical and multimodal. We talk with our employees, clients, customers, investors and partners. We talk face-to-face, and we talk on Facebook. Hardly a moment from our professional working lives is free from the exchange of words, emails, linguistic representations such as org charts, job descriptions, product specs, action items, metrics, mission/vision statements, corporate-speak, even if it is “empty talk”, or cultural artefacts like meetings, rituals or other visual symbols as logos. In reality, managers “consume” popular management concepts, identities and discourse (Corbett-Etchevers and Mounoud, 2011, Wilhelm and Bort, 2013). Therefore, to understand the manager’s job, we must better understand the complex nature of language that makes us manager. Yet, we seldom find the study of linguistics in management literature or on MBA programs. This is a pity – as studying how language really works provides us with very deep insights into how managers actually manage, in other words, how they think, behave and communicate.


From Molecule to Metaphor: Language is Embodied

Nowadays, many agree that language is not an abstract symbol system (language without meaning is meaningless!). The notable exception is Noam Chomsky who has focused on pure linguistic form and has claimed that language is a modular system independent of the rest of cognition. And yet research shows that the human brain does not separate words into form and meaning. In fact, there is no such thing as a language module; rather it is “embodied” construction grammar that is a product of networks in the brain and a system of learned neural connections, purposed to communicate meaning. Language, therefore, is always a pairing of linguistic form and meaning. Consequently, language is a biological ability that we can study as a function of the brain.

So how does the human brain – a super mysterious and super structured biological, electrical and chemical organ made up of some 100 billions of neurons, each connected to thousands of other neurons (this amounts to some 100 trillion connections; the neurons and their connections – axons, dendrites, and synapses) and that operates via flowing ions and neurotransmitters… and which functions as the coordinating centrE of sensation, intellectual and nervous activity – how does the physical brain create language, ideas and thought?

Jerry Feldman, Chuck Fillmore, George Lakoff, my cognitive science mentors, as well as their other colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley (the Berkeley Linguistics Department was the first Department of Linguistics in the Western Hemisphere), cracked the enigma, and proposed a landmark theory linking the biology of neurons and neural circuits to neural computation and to cognitive linguistics. To make a long (and extremely technical) story fairly short and exceptionally manager-friendly, the neural theory of language is based on a few foundational propositions and brain’s concepts (Feldman, 2006, Gallese and Lakoff, 2005):

• The brain is a system of neurons linked together, and neurons work via electrochemistry.

• Your thought is structured neural activity.

• Your language is inseparable from thought and basic human experience – your thought and language arise from your genetic endowment, and from your direct experience and learning.

• Your language is embodied, grounded in the sensory-motor system – thought and language are products of our bodies, and mental connections are active neural connections. This means that, from an embodied neural perspective, language understanding involves active, imaginative, mental simulation (basically, if you cannot imagine someone writing a check, you cannot understand the meaning of the sentence the boss wrote a check). As an aside, this is also how you understand stories – you understand stories by simulating them, viz. by imagining yourself in them. Circuitry across brain regions links modalities, and so the sensory-motor system is “multimodal” rather than modular. Accordingly, language is inherently multimodal, namely, it uses hearing, sight, touch, motor actions and so forth. Primarily, language makes direct use of the same brain structures employed in action observation (seeing) and action execution (doing) – the so-called “mirror neurons” are at work then.

• You also experience the world in the so-called “frames”, as observed by Chuck Fillmore. When George Lakoff lectures on the research into framing at UC Berkeley, in Cognitive Science 101, the first thing he likes to do is to give his Cal students a puzzle. The puzzle is: Don’t think of an elephant! Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant. He has never found anyone who is able to do this. Every word, like elephant, activates a “frame” in your brain, which can be a mental image or other know-how, e.g. elephants are heavy, have a trunk, long curved ivory tusks, and large ears, and so on. Or, now take the “commercial event frame” in which the main “participants” are buyer and seller. Other frame entities and elements are money and goods. Frames also have “scenarios” (e.g. trading) which have multiple “states” (e.g. 1. Buyer has money and wants goods. Seller has goods and wants money. 2. Money and goods get exchanged. 3. The buyer has goods. The seller has money). Possibly, actual memories are activated then, too.

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About the Author

Bart Tkaczyk, a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, is in the business of energising extremely good leaders around the globe to aim even higher. On Twitter: @DrBTkaczykMBA

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