Rectifications (11) – It’s all about..…

Rectifications (11) – It’s all about..…

Torrey Orton – June 29, 2009

“It’s about trying to find out what it’s all about – life that is – without sounding like a generation-X navel gazer. Is this possible?” This is Sarah Wilson, THE AGE Sunday Life‘s new A Better Life columnist, (June 28, 2009 pg. 6) blurb for her new column. I suspect that she may succeed in finding something life is about but not what it is. Her initial steps in the first column provide a skate around a variety of ‘about’ sources - pop-cultural with handles of deep culture (Asian religious terms, get-a-life coaching mantras and such). That’s her method for finding out I guess.

There’s a market for everything, and everything relentlessly is found by a marketer and transformed into product. I’m sounding bitchy to myself and I want to be clear it doesn’t derive so much from this example. It’s just the one which punched the following button. In the discourse of our public figures “it’s all about…’ is among the commonest sound bites to be had. In those cases, particularly the political speakers, the territory covered by ‘about’ is exactly what saying ‘it’s all about…’ cannot cover.

For example, our Premier, John Brumby, on the latest effort to deflect accountability for public transport by changing the guard without changing the task: it’s about serving the public, the community, which is just not what we the public think they are doing. We do not think so because the government traipses these platitudes (see organisational values below) around with decreasing public accountability, responsiveness or effectiveness in the performance the platitude addresses – transport in this case. Try planning for another.

What is it?
By linguistic nature, what something is about is not what it is. If it really is about something, then what that is is the matter of interest. The ‘about’ part is speculative, aspirational, at best, hopeful. It’s nice to know that the speaker has an aspiration, a hope, but not to know that that’s all they have.

In common usage, for example, we are asked ‘what was the film about?’ We answer it’s about crime, or love, or destinies… And our questioner, if interested in the leading line will ask something about what happens, the story. That’s what it is.

For pollies and CEO’s to ‘about’ things is to attempt a dog-whistle appropriate to their intended listeners – the public or shareholders or bankers. The result of effective aiming is the listeners don’t ask for more because they know what the story is supposed to be. They are playing a historical tune in peoples’ minds.

About values
Our leaders, for instance, say of their organisational values ‘we are about inclusion, transparency’, etc. (they all use a selection from a list of 10 or 12 I guess, for which they’ve originally paid Mckinsey and would-be’s $5K/day for top level consulting inputs, and now everyone can borrow them at the price reduction which comes from market penetration and copycat consulting). This can be found across the full organisational spectrum now.

To the extent such terms are proposed as a leader’s aspiration, they are already twice debased. Once by being potted priorities, and twice by being repeatedly proven (within the science accepted by such leaders – business effectiveness) to be unimplementable, or badly implemented, faultily understood, non-transerable and so on.

Take action
So, what to do? Try this: suppress your next use of ‘it’s all about’. Do it in normal conversation where the habit lies entrenched in standard usage. When you’ve done that 4 or 5 times you may discover that you have developed a capacity for saying what things are or are not. Often the missing material can be supplied be telling someone what struck you, what effect the performance, discussion, activity had on you. This will be the beginning of a short story which others can join through their stories of similar things. It’s for making the world closer to us and us to each other as a result. What it’s about is relationship.