I previously mentioned the ambiguity of words (attention and constellations), they are much more elusive than we imagine. Rather than deducing their meaning in a conversation, we start from sensations to constitute a word. I’m starting to recommend to certain clients the use of these protocol words.

Sometimes in my private life I need a protective space without having to launch into a long explanation. When the situation becomes complicated for one or the other, rather than clumsily trying to restore it, we give each other space. Or again, the other person hasn’t understood that you’ve touched a sensitive point, or that they had been unintentionally clumsy. Here too there’s a need for space, for time. In all these cases in my private life I’ve instituted what I call “protocol words”. A protocol as in diplomacy, the establishment of a convention. A sort of meta-communication that sends a simple but clear signal: for example, Porcelain equates to “great fragility, kind of catatonia that’s better to avoid having simultaneously.”, Ballerina equates to “taking a ballerina to the face, not feeling up to the task”, or again Piano equates to “broken harmony, dissonant chords. Go piano: take it easy”.

Proust’s Madeleine

It’s enough to pronounce one of these words for everyone to embark on their story, their painting, their fresco, their memory. We’ve experienced a situation with one or more people, we place a word on it: like a smell, like a Proust madeleine*. The word carries the sensation of the moment, the memory of the moment, for each person, in their own way, in their own fashion. A meaning created in common that dispenses with explanations, precisions. By wanting to be too precise, we often lose the meaning of things. These words therefore dispense with precisions. Protocol words are nourished by a situation experienced by two or more people to establish a convention that we will invoke at lower cost and which will carry great precision in sensations, and therefore in its understanding.

• A Proust madeleine is an element of daily life, an object or gesture for example, that never fails to bring a memory back to someone’s mind, as a madeleine does to that of the narrator of In Search of Lost Time in Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s novel. (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_de_Proust)

Organizational Coaching and Protocol Words

I increasingly use skits* to embody retrospectives or debriefs during my organizational work. A true catharsis: affective remembrance. Recently this was an opportunity for a group to discuss questions of trust and transparency. Not to oppose autonomy, empowerment and transparency and feedback but not to push transparency to the point of oppression. So we performed a skit with the actors involved to clear the question and we seized this opportunity to use protocol words in organizations.

Here is the last dialogue of the skit (performed in everyone’s presence during a debrief):

“We just have to use ‘protocol’ words. A sort of meta-communication. We continue as before but when we feel that you are too much in intrusion mode and we need to let you know without offending you we say budweiser it’s our protocol word to give us a bit of air :). When we really aren’t giving you enough feedback without realizing it, when we’re driving you crazy, you tell us paprika then we must know without getting offended that we need to stop for a moment and clarify the situation as best as possible. And well it’s not open bar, we try not to exceed three uses per word per month for each group. Anyway we’ll see how it goes. It should remain exceptional. When a paprika responds to a budweiser we must discuss it immediately off-site, over a beer.”

We’ve experienced situations and communication doesn’t manage to unfold properly. We’re going to give a framework and space to each party to reappropriate this moment without going through a dialogue that doesn’t work a priori. The reminder of the sensation recalls the meaning. Another kind of catharsis, an affective remembrance.

Be careful as this calls upon memory, too frequent use wears out and makes this memory disappear and therefore the possibility of using it. But too infrequent use makes this memory disappear.

• Yes it’s the correct spelling, with surprise I discovered that a saynète is historically the small piece of fat with which falcons were rewarded on their return, a kind of appetizer: Guaranteed success for anyone who, in a spelling competition, would propose to their flock a “saynète by the late Mack Sennett”! But, with this word, we’re not done with our surprises: before flourishing on stage, it belonged to the small world of… hunting! Didn’t it designate – think of the “sain” of wild boar, and also our “saindoux” (lard) – the small piece of fat with which falcons were rewarded on their return? A kind of appetizer, therefore, in the same way as the comedic one-act play given as an interlude during the intermission… – Bruno Dewaele (http://www.projet-voltaire.fr/blog/regle-orthographe/scenette-ou-saynete)

Aside

Small aside on all the models that flourish around Jungian profiles like Process comm, Enneagram, DISC, the colors (red, yellow, blue, green) of the Nova concept, etc. whether we like or dislike the underlying idea, what I take from it is also meta-communication. I therefore sometimes recommend it as a communication facilitator, an anchor point that avoids slippage, a framework without precision but at least to establish valid communication. It’s not the same thing as the protocol words I’m discussing which are nourished by an experienced situation to establish a convention, but in the refusal to imagine being able to explain everything with words but to institute a space in communication that’s often much more uncertain than we imagine, they’re similar.