Flashcards: Terms of Art

The power in a poetics of business

When one of my clients was ending our coaching relationship after a few years of work together, she came to our last session with a list. She called them “flashcards” – notes of the phrases I used throughout our work together and why they were important to her.

I write poetry, and I like the concept of a poetics of business;  an intentional use of language to inspire and influence people. I use what I call “terms of art.” According to Merriam Webster, a term of art is “a term that has a specialized meaning in a particular field or profession.”

My use of the phrase is also seasoned with neologism, which means coining “a new word, usage, or expression.” For me, a term of art isn’t just an in phrase or acronym. I believe the best terms of art distill a complex concept or important message into a phrase that sticks. Take a phrase or word that has an existing meaning, and then add in your own elements or influence in context to deepen the existing meaning. Like good poetry. Once you have that word or phrase, use it intentionally and repeatedly to signal a specific concept or idea. Many of us can’t remember the name of our third-grade teachers, but we can remember the slogans or jingles of whatever ads we heard at the age of ten. Because they were clever phrases repeated to us.

A term of art is meant to be a memory aid, but it can become more. Used within an organization it can become a yardstick, litmus test or rallying cry.

I once worked at a creative agency that painted its rallying cry in gold leaf on a wall. In it was the phrase “we are brave crusaders.” It resonated, and people in the agency would look at one another and say, “is this a brave crusader idea?” Or “do we need to go brave crusader on this client request?”

To get a term of art picked up by an organization is tricky. I remember when clients would come to us and say, “make us a viral video.” There are some things you can’t account for or control, and often what sticks in a company is as unpredictable as what makes a piece of content take off.

But using terms of art in leadership is something any individual leader can do. And I recommend it to my clients. Terms of art are useful when you want to boil down a new concept into something short enough to fit on the front of an imaginary flashcard so you can get your team to do it more. Explain the concept - what’s on the back of the flashcard - and then keep using the phrase.

Here’s an example. I use the phrase “reframe your narrative.” The concept behind it is multi-layered.

·      Humans are meaning making machines, and we will make up stories about everything. In much the same way that we like to see faces in objects that have no faces, like the man in the moon, we like stories. Stories have villains (usually the other person) victims (often us) good and bad, retribution and revenge.

·      Stories are often fictions. Being mindful that a story is not always accurate is useful in examining assumptions you bring into any interaction. I often ask my clients “what story are you telling yourself about what happened?” I use this example. A man calls his wife at work and asks her to stop and get milk on the way home. She shows up at home without the milk. He can immediately tell himself a story about how she’s inconsiderate and doesn’t understand how hard it’s been for him to be home with the kids all day, and decide she takes him for granted. Or he can get curious and ask her where the milk is. If she responds that she witnessed a car accident and waited for the ambulance to arrive that’s a very different scenario than if she chose not to get the milk because he should have shopped better when he went to the store.

·      To reframe a narrative, we can get curious about the first story that pops into our head, try to get more information about what actually happened, and keep an open mind.

Once I’ve gone over those concepts with a client, I don’t need to go through them all again. I can just ask them if there is a way to reframe a particular narrative.

I worked on a thought leadership series for a client throughout the pandemic. In it, we interviewed women executives, many of them in Fortune 500 C Suite positions. Almost all of them had terms of art that they used to galvanize, rally and inspire their teams. Need to change a culture? What’s your term of art? Almost each one of those guests used a specific phrase or term that landed like a kind of business poetry.

Practice listening for terms of art in your organization. Watch for them in the news, in podcasts or other content. Look at good advertising, poetry you like, weigh the phrases or terms that stand out for you like they have emotional highlighter.

I keep my client list confidential, so most of my clients don’t know who my other clients are. I showed up to one coaching session and my client told me triumphantly that she was listening to a podcast of a woman being interviewed. The woman being interviewed was the CEO of a tech company, and the CEO used two of my terms of art. “She said that thing you say! And that other thing you say! And I knew she was your client!”

She was right. That CEO is my client. To me, that’s the power of a term of art. It not only educates, it identifies, builds connection and continues to grow.