Rhetorical Mastery | The Perfect Response

Mission statements go to a different level to serve as “eulogistic coverings” that gloss over the human complexities underneath.

Anyone who has worked in an organization has met a boss or a consultant who urges the group to revisit their mission statement. It is a given that eyes will roll at the thought. No aspect of self-assessment is more susceptible to our cynicism. In our heart-of-hearts we know an organization is less an “it” than a multifaceted conglomeration. Singularity of function is partly a fiction.

In the course of a long career, I’ve been a party to perhaps five or six different efforts to take time–usually more than a few hours–to codify the goals and aspirations of the group. Academics in particular have turned this challenge into a kind of sport. But organizations that offer a range of complex services especially need to identify what they see as in and out of their purview. What are the essential goals and purposes of an organization? What is at the core of its service to others? Notwithstanding the problems, questions like hold out the chance of learning something useful.

But any talk of objectives and goals can be a long way from what is going on down on the ground. What can be proclaimed to the world without shame? A formal mission statement is a sort of bath that is supposed to cleanse an organization of the petty interpersonal and political motivations that can tear it apart. A teacher’s daily goals may include real instrumentalities like getting to class on time, finding a computer and internet connection that will work, or dealing with a nonstop talker. These are essential day-to-day functions, but they are not going to appear in a statement to an external audience.

The rhetoric of a mission statement is almost always earnest and panoramic: taking the high road to fulfilling goals that are self-evidently good. One version of McDonald’s statement is “to be our customers’ favorite place and way to eat and drink.” For Chick-fil-A it is “to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us.” That’s a high road indeed. But by the time of yet another go-around–especially for those of us who have been at a place since it was wired for electricity–it is easy to notice that the day-to-day work of the organization involves functions that are mostly disconnected from the lofty ideals frothed up in any statement. For my part, in terms of anxiety about success or failure, making sure that the electronic equipment in my teaching space would actually work was always at the top of my list. Creating transformative insights might come in due course.

Other concerns that would not soar in a mission statement might include ending the infighting between units or individuals, defusing interpersonal hostility that is saps productivity and morale, or dealing with defections of individuals who have functionally left the organization. None of these problems are communicated to customers or stakeholders. Mission statements go to a different level to serve as “eulogistic coverings” that can be draped over the more frail human mechanisms underneath.

Aside from their distance from the day-to-day work of an organization, another problem with these declarations of noble intent is that there is always a considerable gap between goals that we can imagine, and the actual reasons we behave as we do. An organization is a tool to achieve something. But it also is a community of needs-driven people. And parsing intentionality informed by those needs is a tricky business. We can declare our reasons for engaging in a single action or some grand collective effort. But the expression of these is usually a long way from more authentic and sometimes unknowable motivations. Ask a person why they took that selfie, and you are apt to get a reason that deflects attention away from a more likely reason. It simply won’t do to say that we took the picture because we think we are pretty, or that we would like to stir up a little envy in those who receive it.* We’ve seen great comedy made out of these rituals with subterranean origins. My favorites include NBC’s The Office and the BBC’s WIA.*

To take a more complex case, a group can claim that they exist to serve their customers and the larger community. But the performance of tasks they take on may suggest more strategic motives: to reassure nervous shareholders, to increase profits by cutting staff pensions or benefits, or perhaps to streamline operations by outsourcing various functions. None of these immediate goals will appear in gold and bold type on the first page of an annual report. Indeed, some corporate strategies are so hostile to customers and employees that a perverse kind of institutional success occurs if their objectives never see the light of day.

A simple recommendation to a group gathered over stale coffee and rolls is cut down on the amount of time formulating these statements, recognizing that what is produced is an exercise in aspirational rhetoric. Since the purposes of a group of individuals are partly unknowable, spending time on them can consume the energy needed to face tough challenges. It’s better to get on with the work of making the most of the financial and human resources that are realistically available. In addition, though a single document offers no easy way to acknowledge how individuals deploy their varied talents, it helps to at least signal their existence.

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*Exploring how we mostly fail to discover and accurately name intentions is the subject of the author’s The Rhetoric of Intention in Human Affairs (2013).

Building on the premise that a name must come prior to the perception, our rapid growth of awareness in mental crises is abetted by an expanding lexicon of depression terms.

[With theories of communication, the most interesting ideas are also the most difficult to pin down. So it is with the idea of linguistic determinism: the observation that the power to name is the power to see.” Note the reversal of conventional wisdom in the wording. Give this some thought and it turns into a kind of IMAX of communication models. It is a monumental observation and a good reason to take a second look, with a few more caveats now in place. This short piece suggests that we may be victims of our own proliferating mental health language: a justifiable lede that is buried in the very last sentence.]

It’s an old truism in the language arts that we see what we can name. It’s the idea behind the phrase “linguistic determinism.” If so, our national concern about the spreading darkness of suicide and depression in the young is fed by increased usage of these terms, which have become top of mind. Two generations ago, these mental health labels were scarce in our discourse, even though these problems clearly existed. As a child I remember a family we knew well with a son who died while on an academic exchange. There was really no evidence of foul play, but that was the narrative that was accepted. At a certain point most of us will be made aware of concerns about the distress and safety of a young relative or family friend.

Having a term for a condition primes us to notice it. Mental health researchers tell us that rates of clinical depression in the United States have been steadily increasing. One estimate from the Centers for Disease Control is that about one in five Americans carry that condition, with 2.5 percent suffering from persistent depression. Similarly, the still relatively new diagnosis of Attention-deficit/hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) rate grew from five and a half percent in 1997 to nearly ten percent by early 2021.

What’s going on?

Anyone asking the question must be humble when proposing causes. Among other factors, our reporting is probably better than it has ever been. Suicide used to be concealed behind other less stigmatizing causes, such as auto accidents. But the problems of depression and suicide are now a cause for significant national soul-searching. To be sure, taking one’s own life is a rare consequence of depression. But it is the third most common cause of death in people aged 15 to 25, assuming we can sort out true accidents from intentional acts.

Every case is different. But it is probably fair to assume that teens lack the ballast of experience to ride out rough patches, which may include broken relationships, family tensions, and low self-esteem brought on by corrosive comparisons of oneself with others built into a lot of social media.

It also seems as if there has been a sea change in the amount of public mental health talk that is now part of the lives of younger Americans and their families. Institutional mental health services have come out from under a cloud of concealment that was common in mid-twentieth century America. Counseling services have proliferated in schools and universities. And discussions of depression and anxiety are now baked into the formal orientations new college students are likely to hear when they show up on campus. Meanwhile, our media culture is bolder in dwelling on depression episodes, abetted by direct-to-consumer ads for psychoactive drugs that go not just to patients, but sometimes to their friends. Consider as well that just a few years ago no mainstream provider of television content would have touched a series like 13 Reasons Why (2017), Netflix’s fictional account a of a teen’s descent into suicide, or Hulu’s The Girl From Plainville (2022). In myriad ways, our culture has normalized the sources of teen angst that can occasionally turn self-destructive.

It also seems evident that students living on a campus are rarely ‘on their own’ and out of contact in the ways their parents once were. For some, frequent text or phone contact with home keeps family problems in play at a time when, for prior generations, being away at school offered a kind of refuge. But I digress.

Add in linguistic determinism, and you have a perfect storm. Building on this view that a name must come prior to the perception, our rapid growth of awareness in mental crises is abetted by an expanding lexicon of depression terms. And here is the key point: with its emergence out from under its former stigma, perhaps we have inadvertently over-represented mental health issues. This kind of ‘clinicalization’ of our mental lives has now gone on for years, with frequent talk about others in terms of what were once more formal diagnostic categories. We now talk casually about someone’s “anxiety,” “attention deficits” or “paranoia,” mixing subjective judgments with classification categories once limited to the bible of mental illness diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders known as the “DSM.”

Merging these labels into our everyday rhetoric has done its part in putting what were formally considered passing states of mind front and center. Sometimes that can be good. But it also follows that such language gets formalized through diagnosis and treatment. Once a person self-identifies as a victim of a labeled condition, that awareness can hopefully lay the groundwork for recovery. But these terms can also become self-protective justifications that delay it.

The Perfect Response

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

Category Archives: Rhetorical Mastery

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