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December 4, 2009 by Patti

Fernando Flores, Speech Acts, and Networks

One of the most powerful learning experiences in my time at Digital Equipment included immersion in a set of practices for effective communication. What I and my colleagues called “Contextual Management” was derived from philosophies articulated and propagated by Fernando Flores. At the heart of these philosophies are speech acts, a linguistic concept identified by John Searle and refined by Flores into a communication structure for effective management. These same speech acts are at the foundation of Landmark Education.


To me, the concept of speech acts is about being mindful that our language — what we say and how we say it — is creating the world we live in, as we live it. If we can identify — just think — about how we are being heard and the potential results, we can work more effectively. Speech acts include:
  • Declarations: statements about the world as it might be, that create a powerful future, and for which there is no evidence. “The US will put a man on the moon and bring him back before the end of the decade,” famous words from President John Kennedy, are an example. At the time he spoke this, NASA did not have the technology to accomplish this, but by saying it, Kennedy created the future in which this happened.
  • Requests, or offers: a request can also create the future, in that it is possible to ask someone to do something that they do not know how to do. But in daily work life, we make requests all the time. We do not often enough, however, make well-formed requests, which are in the form, “will you please do x-action BY time-y?” The specificity of x-action and time-y make it clear that the requestor is asking for something that is important.
  • Promises: promises are commitments to do perform specific actions by specific times. Obviously, a goal of a request is to acceptance (a promise) to respond to the request, in its specificity, by the designated time. (One may also respond to a request by negotiating the deliverable, the time that is is requested for, and so on; or may decline it, respectfully.)
From these, and other speech act building blocks, a number of communication patterns unfold. I’d like to take some of these up in future posts, but my inspiration for starting this thread is a terrific article about Fernando Flores that has just come out in strategy+business, “Fernando Flores Wants to Make You an Offer.”

In the article, Lawrence Fisher provides a biography of Flores, whose life represents a journey from a Chilean prison to work at Stanford with Terry Winograd, developing a successful consulting business, and ultimately a return to Chile as a statesman. The book he co-authored with Winograd, Understanding Computers and Cognition, describes how software programs could be used to enable more productive relationships in the workplace — using the speech acts as a basis for communication.

It’s a rich article (you will learn more about speech acts) that comes at a time that Flores is shifting into a new phase of his life and work, returning to business consulting to bring his perspective into how we work in networks. His concern is that:

“How do you educate people for the future world, in which an important part of activity is going to be networks?” he asks. “In my opinion, we human beings are not prepared at all for the explosion of new practices the Internet will produce. Education is going to be in networks and it will not be about knowledge. It will be about being successful in relationships, about how to make offers, how to build trust, how to cultivate prudence and emotional resilience.”

I’m excited about the possibilities in net work thinking opened up by the questions Flores is raising. The social web is opening up entirely new ways of communicating — both means and modes — and my head is already spinning at the thought of integrating these past and new ideas into my work.

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