Simon Lancaster
London
Simon Lancaster runs Bespoke Speechwriting Services and has written speeches for a number of top Cabinet Ministers and FTSE CEOs. He is the author of Speechwriting: The Expert Guide and is highly sought after as a speaker at business conferences.
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Comment on: NHS managers' car metaphors belong on the scrapheap
Hi Steven Thanks very much for the thoughtful comment. I've already read both the documents - the compassion drive and the engagement toolkit. They are both excellent resources and I don't doubt for one second they were both well-intended. My point is about the metaphorically imagery that was contained (deliberately or not) in the titles. The compassion DRIVE and the engagement TOOLKIT both feed into this wider metaphor of THE NHS IS A CAR - a mechanistic metaphor, regularly used across the NHS. Because these images appear in the title, those images then evidently shaped thinking in the drafting process (e.g. the engagement toolkit describes tools and levers etc) and also the press reporting (lead story on BBC News reported a compassion drive). This meant that the image of a DRIVE and a TOOLKIT then dominated and determined how people thought, felt and acted on the whole propositions. Hence the metaphors both wound up defeating the aims they were intended to serve. The image of a compassion DRIVE is not going to motivate greater humanity, because cars are not known for being humane - they are precisely the opposite: mechanistic. Nor is an engagement TOOLKIT a helpful image because it suggests staff are nuts and bolts, with NHS managers standing there with screwdrivers, hammers and spanners ready to nail them down! I'd be happy to talk about this more if you like, or indeed to come and speak at an NHS Employers conference more about this. The NHS will never change unless the language changes. Change the language and you change the thinking and you change the behaviours. Best wishes, Simon Lancaster
