'What kind of flower is that flower?'

Clean Language and how it can enhance communications

Imagine a flower. 

Have you got that image firmly fixed in your mind’s eye?

Is your flower a single stem, blood red poppy, sprouting through tarmac in an otherwise barren car park?

No?

Well, it would be a surprise if it were.

And that’s the point. 

Asked to think of a flower, focused on the task in hand, we somehow imagine everyone sees the same flower as us, in the same setting.  

Clearly a problem when we communicate. We know exactly what we mean, but how others interpret what we say can be vastly different. 

In business we ask people to imagine all the time. ‘Imagine our business in five years’ we say, as we share our vision for something different, coupled with the strategy to get us there. We’re painting a bigger and better picture to rally people. Yet how many are imagining the same picture? 

Magical metaphor 

Language constantly invites us to imagine, to think in pictures because it’s littered with metaphors. Indeed, our use of metaphor is prolific. Research suggests we use a staggering six metaphors a minute¹, often without realising it. We use it as a short cut to communicate the complex and intangible. Whenever we describe something in terms of something else, we’re using metaphor. 

Our language, for example, isn’t actually ‘littered with metaphors’, but we immediately get it. Yet the picture that ‘littered’ conjures in your mind will likely be as different for me as our flowers were. Little wonder that things are so frequently lost in translation!

Two elements fundamentally underpin effective leadership (and all Liebfrog’s leadership development work) - clarity and decency, and it is clarity that’s the focus here. While we sometimes need to embrace metaphor and story to engage audiences and bring our messages to life, there are other times when our language, laden with metaphor and assumption, doesn’t serve us well - indeed it clouds the clarity of our conversations and thinking. 

And that’s when ‘clean language’ can be useful. 

Open versus ultra-open questions

Clean language is a set of ultra-open questions that incorporates a person’s own words to help us get better information from others, together with a clearer understanding of what they mean. 

Anyone who uses coaching skills as part of their leadership toolkit will be familiar with the art of asking open questions, but what’s special about these ultra-open questions is that they’re ‘clean’ of assumption and metaphor - as far as possible. This gives the other person answering maximum freedom to decide how they answer. 

When is clean language useful? 

We can use ultra-open questions to enquire into anything someone says, but they’re most illuminating when used to explore the metaphors that underpin someone’s thinking. That’s because metaphoric language and metaphoric thought are like (excuse the metaphor) you and your shadow… inseparable. 

So, if we want to better understand how someone thinks, what they mean by what they say and what motivates them, then clean language is a tool to help us do so. 

This line of questioning can be particularly useful in a coaching-style conversation if we want to help someone gain clarity about their own way of thinking, or if they are seeking to change. 

Those who use this clean line of questioning find that it reduces misunderstandings, improves working relationships and provides greater insight into what others want. 

What does clean questioning sound like? 

There are only 12 basic questions in the standard clean language toolkit, so it doesn’t take too long to remember them and start using them in conversation. 

Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees clearly set out all 12 questions in their book: ‘Clean language: Revealing metaphors and opening minds’. It would be easy to list them all here. However, to really appreciate how these questions work and why they’re crafted the way they are, it’s much better to look at the context, together with example transcripts of people asking and answering clean questions. 

If you haven’t already tried it and want to see if clean language is something you might find useful to explore further, here is the most common of the clean questions: 

(And) what kind of X (is that X)?  

It’s not grammatically correct and it looks a little odd when written on the page, but it’s deliberately constructed to avoid leading or shaping the thinking of the person who answers to elicit their fullest response. 

So, let’s try it by going back to imagining a flower. 

Rather than assuming the type of flower someone else is imagining, the next question could be: 

And what kind of flower is that flower? 

There’s very little assumption implied in this question and, if we really seek to understand, we must begin by listening and challenging our assumptions. Because, let’s face it, even if my flower were red and yours blue, even if mine grows alone in tarmac and yours is in a field brimming with others just like it, somebody else’s may be cut, dead or even silk. Suddenly, something as simple as a flower begins to look very different. And, if a single ultra-open question can help illuminate that, perhaps it’s unsurprising that clean language advocates describe this as the ‘universal language of inquiry’. 

Vital for clear and effective communications.             

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¹ Pollio, H.R., Barlow, J.M., Fine, H.J. and Pollio, M.R. (1977) Psychology and the Poetics of Growth: Figurative Language in Psychology, Psychotherapy, and Education, Hillsdale, NJ: L Erlbaum