the meaning of words

we did an exercise the other day that surprised me. If you get 2-3 people and put a single word or pair of words then have everyone write down words that match. You know the game. I say birds. You say bees. I say red. You say room because you watched the Shining the other night and everyone in the room questions your sanity. The word that we had was trust. The exercise is to list 10-15 words that are synonyms for the word trust. Once you are finished match your words with theirs and see how many matches you come up with. We did this with a room of 30 people broken into 10 groups and the most exact matches that we came up with was one group with one match.

Next time someone comes in your office and says that they can improve your productivity, what do they really mean? I will be more carefull with my words in the future.