They used to mean step-change. That in itself is turkey-talk. Marketing speak. Change is a good enough word. You could perhaps refer to dramatic change, great change or, rapid change. Step-change is supposed to indicate a change of instant and usually upward or positive nature. No shilly-shallying. No gradual developmental or steady evolutionary change. But change, now. Instant. Immediate. Because that’s the kind of change which, although it’s almost always impossible to create instantaneous change in anything except Semtex, is the kind of change which folk like to hear about.
Step-change, though, isn’t good enough for those with a message to sell. The phrase doesn’t indicate degree, see? That’s how sea-change came about. Sea change implies massive, irresistible, wide-ranging and far-reaching change. Change on a simply oceanic scale, with unstoppable tidal energy, change with depth, with gravity. Big value change.
Time was, when a lad went to sea, or even ran away to sea, which was often what they did then, he was a callow youth. Full of his own ideas, bold and brassy. By his own measure, ready to take on the world.
One trip to South America or Australia would change all that. He’d be shamed, fooled, levelled, both by the sea and his shipmates. He’d come back if not older and wiser, certainly different. He’d be changed in ways his mother and his schoolmates couldn’t change him. Changed at a depth that only things like fear, fatigue and true friendship could touch. Changed by the sight and sound and smell of people and places he never dreamed existed. Changed by the profoundly humbling world of nought but sea and sky, and the clumsy wooden deck beneath your feet, for weeks on end.
That’s the change they called a sea-change. A big one, and an irreversible one, with mysterious causes and, sometimes, equally mysterious effects.
So, the next time you hear about the organisation implementing a sea change, wish them luck as they set sail. Hope they’ll have fair winds on their way across the great waters. And pray that, when they get where they’re going, they stay there.
