Communicating for Action
Speech Act Theory in Practice
Most breakdowns in organizational execution trace back not to strategy or structure, but to the quality of everyday conversations — the requests, commitments, assessments, and declarations through which coordinated action actually happens. When these conversational moves are imprecise or poorly understood, intention fails to become execution.
We train teams in performative language grounded in Speech Act Theory (Searle, Flores) — the rigorous discipline of how language does things, not merely describes them. This converts unclear intention into specific, trackable commitments and rebuilds the feedback-channel quality that sustained high performance depends on.
- Understanding the five fundamental speech acts — assertions, declarations, requests, promises, and assessments — and how each functions differently in coordinated action
- Making requests and commitments with the precision that allows them to be tracked, honored, and renegotiated cleanly
- Identifying and dismantling the conversational patterns that suppress feedback or distort information flow
- Building a shared team vocabulary for conversations that produce reliable, coordinated outcomes
- Embedding the practice through workshop-based rehearsal and ongoing coaching support