“Crack” is a Gaelic word for a good time. So if you spend any time in Scotland, you’ll repeatedly hear people saying to each other on Friday night, “Where’s the crack?”, i.e. “Where’s the party?” or “Where is everyone going tonight?”

It’s been this way for a long time, however, it changed recently in Scotland. After spelling it “crack” for hundreds of years, now the Scots are spelling it in the Gaelic fashion, “craic,” just like they do in Ireland.

This is because for many years after the Battle of Culloden in 1745, speaking Gaelic was stigmatized, taken as a sign of downward mobility, in much the same way the Southern accent was in the US after 1865.

But then sometime in the 1990s, after Scotland got its own regional Parliament and Scottish Independence from the UK started becoming a mainstream idea, Gaelic culture started making a comeback, as a badge of identity and a political statement.

A small consequence of this was this simple shift in spelling as a way to differentiate themselves culturally from everyone else in the UK, to reinforce a particular Scots narrative.

In other words, through a simple change in language, the Scots moved to alter their reality, from something “British” to something more “Scottish.”

And they’re not the only ones. We all do it. 

And yet we rarely discuss the impact it can have. This is especially true in business. If we want to change the outcomes of our businesses, first we have to change behaviors. And to do that, we have to change the way people talk to each other.

If we want people to be more accountable, our language has to be more accountable. We have to go from saying “I might have this done by Tuesday, we’ll see,” to “I will have this done by Tuesday, even if I have to work the weekend.” If we want our teams to be more innovative, we have to encourage more curiosity: “Let’s see if this will work,” and less “This will never work.”

Bear in mind, this is not a recipe or a big pile of phrases that will result in automatic success. 

The point is if we’re trying to make big changes, and we’re not seeing big changes in the way people communicate, something is not working.

Sadly most business communication is boring, unreadable, and lacking intention. Not because the people writing it are stupid, but because somewhere along the line someone high up decided that communications wasn’t a core part of their business, but something peripheral- something that had to be done for professional reasons, but not something that people generally had to CARE that much about.

We couldn’t disagree more. Communication is key to culture. Culture is key to change.