“We won’t be able to rebuild trust in institutions until leaders learn how

to communicate honestly—and create organizations where that’s the

norm.” – from “A Culture of Candor” by James O’Toole and Warren Bennis; Harvard Business Review, 2009

The above passage is from a Harvard Business Review reprint distributed as a pre-read to a group of corporate leaders gathering for a two-and-a-half day strategy session. The purpose of the piece below is to analyze the concept of honesty by shining a light on the nature of language.

In common usage, when we talk about honesty we mean that a person is giving an accurate account. We say the truth is a correct correspondence of one thing to another – a simple equation. We expect that the words used to express these relationships are stable currency – to the common understanding, honesty probably doesn’t mean much if the words we use one day mean something different the next.

I’ve been listening to podcasts of a lecture course on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, given by Hubert Dreyfus, a noted Heidegger scholar and philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley. What’s struck me are the moments when Dreyfus seems to be struggling, reaching, for an understanding of a text he must be very familiar with. During these moments, he comes upon a passage that doesn’t yield the meaning he had come to expect. How is it possible that someone like Dreyfus could come to passages he’s probably read dozens if not hundreds of times only to struggle, reach, for understanding, as if reading them now is different than all the times before, as if the words themselves are different?

Well, this is one of Heidegger’s central concepts: words are not terms. That is, they are not like buckets out of which we scoop meaning. They are rather, “wellsprings that must be found and dug up again and again [my italics]”

This seems to suggest that honesty is something other an accurate account, a correct correspondence. Honesty uncommonly understood is this struggle, this reaching for understanding, even of something that just yesterday was clearly understood.

I’m concerned that the deliberately open-ended language we use to describe CoH is instantly converted to terminology – tamped down, reigned in, deflated, dried up and withered. “Coming together,” “dialogue-driven,” “what the community most wants for itself,” “a sense of belonging,” etc. There is always the risk with language that we are not equal to its essential nature. Common understanding is what we resort to when we avoid this essential nature. Uncommonly understood honesty again and again finds and digs up the wellspring of, say, belonging. Failing that, we assume a common understanding of belonging, which will always tend to one degree or another to un-belonging.