Use telic verbs to focus on results
Photo by Jacek Dylag / Unsplash
I’d like to share a concept from linguistics that you may find useful when you’re talking about anti-bias work.
It’s telicity.
Let me tell you about the day I started applying telicity to my own everyday life.
I was in grad school, and my boyfriend at the time, also a linguistics graduate student, pulled a dish out of the drying rack on my tiny kitchen counter. He winced, turned to me, and said,
“You know, dishwashing is meant to be a telic activity. Not atelic.”
And I laughed, because his criticism was spot on.
Let me translate out of linguistics and into everyday talk. He basically said:
“You know, dishwashing is an activity with a clear end point. The goal is to have clean dishes. It’s not an activity you’re just doing for its own sake. Just engaging in the washing of dishes isn’t enough. You have to wash the dishes up to the point where they are actually clean.”
Now, although I’m perfectionist about a lot of things, I’ve never been perfectionist about cleaning. It wasn’t weaponized incompetence. I just aimed for “good enough,” since there was always something more urgent or more interesting to do.
But dishes that had to be rewashed? That clearly wasn’t good enough.
So I had to rethink the way I conceptualized and did dishwashing. Instead of just being an activity that I did, I had to refocus on the goal. It wasn’t the action that was important – it was the result of that action.
And that’s telicity for you in a nutshell. (Or a soapy sink.)
Some verbs are goal-oriented or result-oriented. Those are telic verbs. They have an end point built in.
Other verbs are more about the action itself and not that end point. These are atelic verbs.
English syntax doesn’t really make us think about telicity all that much. In some other languages, there are prefixes and suffixes that make it clear there is an end point.* But in English, lots of verbs are ambiguous. So my boyfriend thought of dishwashing one way (clear end point), and I thought of it another (a thing you do).
Photo Tracey Hocking / Unsplash.
So how does this relate to thinking about and doing anti-bias work?
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that my clients often conceptualize and talk about this work using atelic verbs. When, in order to actually change things, we need to be results oriented. Goal oriented. Purposeful.
And using telic verbs and phrases can help us retain that focus on goals, results, and purpose.
Here are some atelic phrases that come my way:
“Suzanne, I’d like to run a training on unconscious bias.”
“We should have you talk with executives about inclusive leadership.”
“I’d like you to coach him on gender issues.”
In these three client requests, the focus is on the activity. The concept feels something like this:
“We did a training, and now it’s done. We did it!”
Which is a lot like,
“I did the activity of washing dishes. I did it!”
Sometimes my dishes ended up clean, and sometimes they didn’t. Once I switched to a focus on results, thought of dishwashing as telic, they ended up a lot cleaner.
So the next time you’re thinking about, talking about, or planning anti-bias work, think about telicity. The desired results. The goal.
“Let’s run a training so everyone can identify and speak accurately about bias.”
“Let’s train executives on 3 ways they can be more inclusive, and set them up with actions they can implement right away.”
“Let’s coach him so he recognizes the top 5 ways gender bias shows up at work. And so he is open to receiving feedback and making changes.”
See the difference? The goal of any given piece of anti-bias work has to be more focused than simply “let’s end bias.” Bias is subtle and embedded and systemic.
But you can do anti-bias work that chips away at the problem. With reachable goals. And wins that you can celebrate.
Using clear language that is purposeful can help you frame problems better. Which makes it more likely that you will achieve your anti-bias goals.
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*This shows up in the lyrics of one of my very favorite songs, which happens to be in Russian. By putting a prefix and suffix on the verb for ‘wait’, a single word means “we waited until it happened.” It’s a very efficient word in a really poetic text.
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