Swaps for Change

Just published: front page of the Financial Times, UK edition, Wednesday 26 March https://t.co/GpS5H21HER pic.twitter.com/Dky7LqVem5

— Financial Times (@FT) March 25, 2025

Dirty word, 'change'.

From my earliest cubrep days, it was impressed upon me by the experienced sages around my first salesteam to try and avoid using the very term.

No-one buys change, I was told. Most people recoil against it. Try to avoid touching on the concept in any way.

After all, there's the ol' adage, now immortalised as ever-present meme;

everybody loves progress, but nobody likes change.

I recall surprise within a salesforce early in my career where the pitch was specifically one of 'change'. Within the first quarter it'd been replaced for one of 'value'.

In my book, 101 Diagrams That Sell, the postface features an essay [p.113] on the tricky issue of broaching change when trying to sell your wares, idea or even yourself.

I listed sixty-plus alternate words for change.

You might argue switching in a synonym is mere semantics. Yet they work.

So it was with a smile I happened across the splash for today's Financial Times print edition.

Describing the economically illiterate bumbling of the present pusher of the British finance levers, and her upcoming panic-stricken mini-Budget of the year's 'Spring Statement', their chosen headline deploys a slice of wonderful vocab;

"Reeves to leaven grim spring outlook with £2.2bn defence spending boost".

Let's move beyond the grammatical issue of the year's seasons being proper nouns.

Most people that recognise this word I sense may do so in the context of bread. As in the unleavened sort.

Yet (as both noun or verb) it has another meaning;

modify or transform (something) for the better.

This notion of transformation appears throughout definitions.

It can be wrought by a pervasive influence, or something that permeates something to this affect.

Thinking of the specific bread-sense, an unleavened bread is one without the yeast. Meaning it does not rise when cooked. The yeast being the agent of transformation. Which if used could be said to make it potentially 'better'.

So you can see how, in the business application here, to leaven would have also come to say how to make something also rise, to be 'better'.

Another reminder how a simple tweak to our sales language can bring a smoother path to prosperity.

"Shall we leaven the outlook for you?"