The words blurred, not just from the screen’s harsh backlight, but from the residual sting in my left eye. Shampoo, somehow, always finds a way to remind you of its existence, long after the shower. And then, the email: “We must leverage our core competencies to actionize a paradigm shift, creating synergistic value-adds across key verticals.” My vision was clearing, slowly, but the message remained stubbornly opaque. Was this good news? Bad news? A memo about the upcoming holiday party? I had no idea. It was one of those Friday afternoon bombshells, delivered not with impact, but with a pillow-soft thud of utter incomprehensibility that promised nothing but more confusion for the next 49 hours of my weekend.

This wasn’t just lazy writing, though it certainly felt like it after 9 consecutive hours of staring at spreadsheets, trying to make sense of numbers that told a story but lacked a clear narrative. This was something more insidious. A deliberate obfuscation, carefully crafted to say everything and nothing all at once. It’s a linguistic smokescreen, a strategic fog deployed not to communicate, but to insulate. To defer responsibility. To create an illusion of profound strategic depth where, more often than not, there’s just a gaping, leadership-sized void. We accept it, these verbose declarations of nothing, because we’ve been conditioned to believe they signify importance, gravitas, a deep understanding of complex business landscapes. But what if they signify the exact opposite?

Harper J.-C.: The Auditor’s Dilemma

I remember talking to Harper J.-C. about this once. Harper, an algorithm auditor, of all people-someone whose very job depends on parsing clear, unambiguous code, on identifying the precise logic flaws in a system-found herself constantly wrestling with these corporate hieroglyphics. She once spent 49 precious minutes, perhaps even 59 minutes if you counted the frustrated coffee break, trying to decipher a single, three-sentence email about “optimizing cross-functional synergies for Q3 initiatives.”

She told me, with that wry look she gets when something’s particularly absurd, that it felt like trying to debug a program written in a language that purposefully disguised its own functions. Her finely tuned tools, designed for absolute precision, were utterly useless against such deliberate vagueness. “It’s like they’re writing in a language of implied meaning,” she mused, “where the most important part is always what isn’t said, or what could be interpreted 9 different ways.”

The Safety of Buzzwords

And I get it, really. I’ve been there. There was this one project, years ago, where the client brief was… let’s just say it was less a brief and more a vague aspiration. It was a request for a “transformative digital solution” with “scalable implications” and a budget that was, for 99 days, completely undefined. I remember sitting there, staring at a blank document, feeling the crushing pressure to sound smart, to sound like I had all the answers, even when I had about 109 questions myself.

So, what did I do? I pulled out every buzzword in my mental dictionary. ‘Holistic approaches,’ ‘scalable solutions,’ ‘robust frameworks.’ I crafted a response so dense it could probably stop a speeding bullet. Did it communicate effectively? Absolutely not. Did it buy me another 29 days before I had to admit I needed more clarity? You bet it did. It was a moment of weakness, a compromise I still cringe at when I think about it, a testament to the perceived ‘safety’ of these linguistic bunkers when you’re feeling exposed. We hide behind them, hoping nobody notices we’re nakedly unsure. It’s not a point of pride, but it is a painful, valuable piece of experience.

The Human and Systemic Cost

This linguistic fog doesn’t just make our eyes glaze over, it does something far more damaging. It corrodes the very fabric of an organization. When clarity is sacrificed on the altar of corporate-speak, hard truths become impossible to confront. Decisions, when they eventually happen, are often based on fuzzy interpretations, leading to missteps that cost far more than just wasted time and an employee’s dwindling patience.

Consider the human cost: the countless hours wasted in meetings where nothing is truly decided, the re-work because initial instructions were purposefully vague, the silent frustration of teams trying to hit targets that were never clearly defined. It’s why institutions that must communicate with absolute precision, like those in complex medical or scientific fields, demand a different kind of linguistic rigor. Consider the meticulous clarity required in places like Paley institute, where a single misspoken word or ambiguous phrase could have profound, immediate consequences for a patient’s well-being or a research outcome. They don’t have the luxury of “leveraging synergies”; they have the absolute necessity of saying exactly what they mean, because lives, quite literally, depend on it.

When you can’t speak in plain terms, you can’t confront hard truths. You can’t make clear decisions that move the needle. This isn’t just about sounding sophisticated; it’s about hiding. Hiding incompetence, hiding uncertainty, hiding the simple fact that sometimes, there isn’t a strategy, just a hope and a prayer dressed up in a nine-syllable word. The true tragedy isn’t just the annoyance of decoding these messages; it’s the systemic erosion of critical thinking, of trust, and ultimately, of an organization’s soul. If we can’t articulate a problem clearly, how can we possibly solve it? If we can’t describe an objective without resorting to abstract metaphors, how can we ever achieve it? The intellectual debt incurred by constantly speaking in code is immense, a silent tax on productivity and innovation.

The Culture of Candor (or Lack Thereof)

But here’s the thing that really gets under my skin, the twist you rarely consider. Sometimes, even when the words are clear, the intent isn’t. The jargon is a symptom, yes, but the underlying disease is a culture that fears candor, a system that rewards ambiguity, and a leadership that mistakes grandiloquence for genuine vision. It’s not just what we say, but why we say it, and the unspoken agreement we all enter into.

The worst part is, we’ve all become complicit, in varying degrees. We expect it, we tolerate it, and sometimes, even emulate it, thinking it makes us sound more ‘professional’ or ‘strategic.’ It’s a vicious cycle that, if left unchecked, can turn vibrant, dynamic organizations into echo chambers of meaningless noise, leaving everyone feeling hollowed out, their efforts diluted by a constant stream of empty promises and rephrased platitudes. It’s a slow death by a thousand meaningless phrases.

Harper’s Solution: The “Translation Workshop”

Harper, bless her methodical mind, found a way around this, at least within her direct sphere of influence. She started demanding “translation workshops” for her teams. Not to teach them more corporate-speak, but to strip it away, layer by painful layer. To get to the underlying data, the actual decisions, the tangible actions.

She’d put up a slide with a paragraph of impenetrable corporate prose-think “optimizing resource allocation paradigms to maximize stakeholder ROI”-and challenge everyone to rewrite it in 19 words or less, explaining it to a 9-year-old. The initial resistance was palpable, a mix of awkward laughter and genuine discomfort. People were so used to the safety of the fog that stepping into the brutal light of clarity felt like a terrifying vulnerability. It felt unsafe to be direct. But then, something shifted. The initial 149 minutes of excruciating silence in the first workshop gave way to genuine, if initially clumsy, attempts at plain language. They started to see the beauty, and the power, in saying what they meant.

It’s almost a physical sensation, isn’t it? That weary sigh escaping your lips as you scroll through another email that says nothing in 909 words.

It’s not just boring; it’s profoundly disrespectful. It tells you your time isn’t valued, your intelligence isn’t trusted, and your input isn’t truly sought. It’s a quiet scream of frustration, a slow burn of exasperation that builds with every “synergistic paradigm shift,” every “future-proofed value proposition,” and every “leveraged core competency” you encounter. This relentless assault on clear communication leaves us feeling drained, demoralized, and ultimately, disengaged. It’s a communication style that alienates rather than connects, builds walls rather than bridges. For an organization aiming to foster collaboration and innovation, this is a self-inflicted wound, a slow poison. We talk about psychological safety, but what about linguistic safety? The safety to speak and be understood, to write and be clear, without fear of judgment for not using the ‘right’ corporate incantations.

The Revolutionary Act of Speaking Truth

Perhaps the first step towards truly extraordinary communication isn’t about learning new words, but unlearning old habits. It’s about remembering that courage isn’t found in hiding behind sophisticated, hollow phrases, but in the brave, vulnerable act of speaking plainly. In admitting what you don’t know, and asking for what you need, without an ounce of pretense.

It’s about understanding that leadership isn’t about appearing omniscient, but about fostering an environment where truth, however inconvenient, can be spoken and acted upon. Can we, as professionals, collectively decide to tear down these linguistic walls? To demand clarity from ourselves and others, even when it exposes inconvenient truths about our strategies or our capabilities? To value substance over style, truth over artifice, and genuine connection over rhetorical flourish? Because until we do, we’ll continue to wander through the corporate fog, bumping into each other in the dark, achieving nothing of real consequence, and wondering why everything feels so… perpetually unclear.

What if the most revolutionary act in business today wasn’t a new product or strategy, but simply, just speaking the truth?