The consultant, beaming with practiced corporate cheer, slid past a diagram that looked like a tangled bowl of spaghetti labeled ‘synergistic core competencies.’ He then declared, with an air of profound wisdom, that we needed to “actionize our learnings to optimally leverage cross-functional bandwidth going forward.” Around the conference table, 7 executives nodded, sagely. Their faces, carefully composed, masked a deep and terrifying void – the collective understanding of precisely nothing. I sat there, mentally scrubbing the inside of my own mind, much like I’d just cleaned my phone screen obsessively, hoping to wipe away the smudges of meaninglessness that had just been projected.

It’s not just a harmless quirk of corporate life, this constant barrage of abstract, meaningless terminology. We trick ourselves into believing it’s efficient shorthand, a way to compress complex ideas into digestible nuggets. But that’s a lie, a comfortable delusion we tell ourselves so we don’t have to admit the uncomfortable truth. Jargon isn’t a shortcut; it’s a barrier. It’s a tool – sometimes wielded unconsciously, sometimes quite deliberately – to obscure a lack of clear thought, to create an artificial in-group, and to camouflage the fact that, often, there’s simply nothing of substance beneath the impressive-sounding words. I should know; I’ve fallen into that trap myself, particularly during a particularly intense period around 2017 when I felt the pressure to sound more ‘strategic.’ It took me a good 47 uncomfortable conversations to unlearn that particular habit.

Think about it: when the language we use to describe our work becomes detached from concrete reality, so does the work itself. We stop building things, serving customers, or solving tangible problems. Instead, we begin managing abstractions. We ‘optimize workflows’ without understanding the human friction points, we ‘drive engagement’ without ever talking to a single person about their actual experience, and we ‘architect solutions’ that exist only on a PowerPoint slide. The distance between the word and the deed stretches further and further, until the deed becomes irrelevant, lost in a fog of conceptual grandeur. It’s like trying to navigate a dense forest by reading a grocery list. You have a list of things, but no map, no compass, and certainly no idea which way is north.

A Real-World Contrast

I remember Antonio T., a thread tension calibrator I once knew. Antonio was a quiet man, deeply meticulous. His entire world revolved around ensuring that threads in massive textile machines had precisely the right tension – not too much, not too little. If the tension was off by even a tiny fraction, the fabric would fray, or snap, or simply not be fit for purpose. He’d never say he was ‘optimizing tensile integrity for enhanced material efficacy.’ He’d say, “The thread’s too loose, the fabric will tear.” Or, “Tighten it by 7 clicks, or we’ll have a mess.” His language was always tied to a physical reality, a precise action, a clear consequence. He dealt with the exact, measurable, and observable. And his machines rarely broke down, a testament to his clarity.

Compare that to the meeting I just endured. The ‘strategic framework’ presented involved 7 distinct pillars, each supported by 47 sub-initiatives, all designed to ‘create a synergistic ecosystem for future-proof growth.’ Try explaining that to Antonio. He’d likely squint, ask a direct question about *what* exactly would be tighter or looser, and when met with more jargon, he’d probably just walk away, baffled by the lack of concrete reality.

This detachment has real costs. Misaligned projects, wasted resources, confused employees who spend more time deciphering directives than executing them. We lose efficiency, sure, but more tragically, we lose trust and genuine progress. When you need to understand what was *actually* said in a meeting where everyone spoke in circles, a reliable way to get to the bottom of it is to use a good speech to text service. Seeing the absurdities in plain text, devoid of the speaker’s confident tone, reveals the emperor’s new clothes in all their stark, unadorned truth.

The Root: Fear and Fog

The deeper issue often lies in fear. The fear of being wrong, the fear of not knowing, the fear of not sounding smart enough in a room full of other people trying desperately to sound smart. So we hide behind the big words, the complex sentences, the conceptual smoke screens. If no one can precisely define what ‘holistic ideation’ means, then no one can really challenge it, can they? It allows us to manage perceptions rather than performance. We create a fog of importance, where vagueness can be mistaken for profundity.

It offers a convenient escape hatch from accountability, because how can you hold someone accountable for ‘maximizing value creation’ if no one ever defined what ‘value’ truly is in the first place, or what ‘maximizing’ actually looks like beyond 7% growth projections?

Precision vs. Obfuscation

This isn’t to say that all technical language is jargon. Every field has its specific terms that convey precise meanings to experts. A medical doctor uses specific terms, as does a software engineer. But those terms are usually born out of necessity, out of a need for precision within a defined context. The problem arises when this specialized language metastasizes, bleeding into general communication, becoming an all-purpose crutch for any vaguely strategic conversation. When ‘leverage’ stops being about mechanical advantage and starts being about ‘leveraging synergies,’ we’ve crossed into the realm of the absurd.

There’s a crucial difference between clarity gained through precision and obfuscation achieved through complexity. Antonio knew that distinction intimately, working with machines that operated within tolerances of 7 thousandths of an inch.

My phone screen, after I wipe it down, doesn’t try to impress me with its sophisticated molecular structure; it just shows me what I need to see, clearly. Our communication should aspire to the same elegant simplicity. We have an opportunity to strip away the unnecessary, to demand clarity, to ask ‘What does that *mean* in practical terms?’ not just 7 times, but every single time the jargon fog descends. We owe it to ourselves, to our teams, and to the actual work we are supposed to be doing. Because if we keep talking in circles, we’ll eventually find ourselves exactly where we started, having expended immense energy to move precisely 0 feet, and everyone around us will be just as confused as they were around 2007.

What tangible reality does your language touch?