26 Fruits

“Only connect” is my favourite quotation. It comes from EM Forster’s Howards End. It came to mind again when I was asked to sum up at the end of last week’s ‘narrative conference for the Welsh public service’ in Llandudno. It’s a powerful phrase and, for me, the best advice for living and writing well.

For this post I’d also promised to make a connection between the mythological white crows of Apollo I’d written about last week and the all-too-real issues of working and writing in 2010. The conference made the connection.

I enjoyed the first speaker, Geoff Mead, a policeman turned academic. His focus is on leadership and the role of storytelling (actually ‘narrative’ as the academic world generally prefers the more difficult choice of word). He said many interesting things, among them his preference for using the active verb ‘leading’ rather than the inert noun ‘leadership’. So we were on the same wavelength. He talked too about the difference between story and factual argument, between ‘mythos’ and ‘logos’. This seemed to set things in the right direction.

The afternoon was mainly given over to workshops run by myself, Stuart Delves and Jamie Jauncey – the dark angels www.dark-angels.org.uk. For my workshops I concentrated on mythology, the most fundamental form of storytelling. First I got people to discuss those words – generally abstract nouns – that are the formulaic words in the communication of their own sector. Having flushed them out, the words were ready to be explored, given new meaning and perhaps even laughed out of existence through the creation of myths about them.

The words and phrases were: sustainability, performance improvement, social inclusion, content management, evaluation, equality, change programme, participation, standards, accessibility, knowledge management, partnership. The dirty dozen words of public sector management. Or perhaps not confined only to the public sector? We all recognise and shudder at many of those phrases.

Why? Because they are empty vessels. Intended to convey vast amounts of meaning in shorthand form, they do very little except tick boxes on evaluation forms. So people explored what they really meant – through their own storytelling. And in the words of one participant: ‘You made a roomful of civil servants manic’. Was I doing a public service? Probably.

I’m not trying to ban these or other words. Many of them are unlikely candidates for classification as jargon. But I find it sad that language gets devalued through lazy and often bureaucratic use, ending up as management-speak. I feel for good words like ‘partnership’ and ‘participation’. It seems they have been suffering from abuse. We should restore them – and others like them – to a healthier life full of meaning. Stories help us to discover and reveal that meaning.