Executive Essay
An executive essay on what undefined terms cost, with four checks to run before the next decision
A leadership offsite ends well. After two days, the room agrees on three words for the year ahead: accountability, customer focus and speed. They go on the first slide of the strategy. Nobody objects, because nobody disagrees with any of them.
Six months later, three parts of the organization are pulling in three directions, each convinced it is doing exactly what was agreed. One has read accountability as owning results, another as tracing faults, a third as reporting more often. Speed has meant shipping sooner in one place and deciding sooner in another. The words were agreed. What they meant never was.
This is not a failure of information. Everyone received the strategy, read it and could repeat it. It is a failure of definition, and it is one of the most expensive failures an organization can have, because it does not look like one. It looks like agreement.
What follows is a working model of how it plays out at four scales, with one check at each that can be run before the next decision is taken on a word.
The individual: the private measure
Start with the person, because every word passes through someone who is sure what it means.
Most people use the vocabulary of their work with complete confidence and have never been asked to define it. They learned risk, quality or engagement somewhere: in a degree, a previous employer, a course, a book. The meaning they carry is a real one. It is simply theirs, and they cannot see that it is theirs, because nobody has ever laid it next to someone else’s.
A request for a quick review arrives on two desks. One person spends ten minutes on it, the other two days. Both did exactly what was asked.
The research on the curse of knowledge describes the trap precisely: once you know what you mean, it becomes very hard to imagine not knowing it. The person is sure they were clear, and by their own measure they were.
There is a second gap. Even when the meaning is shared, the origin usually is not. People repeat terms and figures whose source they could not name, and so they cannot tell where the term stops applying. A concept used beyond its limit is not a mistake anyone can see. It sounds like expertise.
Audit implication: take the three words that carry your next decision and ask the person proposing it to write down, for each, what it means, how you would recognize it, and where it comes from. If they cannot do it in a few lines, the decision is resting on a private measure.
The group: agreement on a sound
Move up one scale. A group can agree on a word and leave with as many meanings as it has members.
It happens because agreement on a word is cheap and agreement on a meaning is not. The first takes a nod. The second takes the slow, awkward question that nobody wants to ask in front of others: what exactly do we mean by that? Asking it can look like obstruction, or like not having understood. So the group moves on, and each member assumes the others meant what they did.
In most groups the question is left to whoever has the least to lose, which is rarely the person with the most at stake in the meaning. Making it routine, part of how a decision is closed rather than an act of courage, takes the cost off whoever asks it.
Researchers of organizational information have a name for this kind of confusion: equivocality. It is not missing information, which more information would cure. It is several interpretations competing, and more information often feeds all of them. The usual remedy, another update or another meeting, is a remedy for the wrong problem.
The cost shows up later and elsewhere. The group does not experience the disagreement; it experiences the result, and reads it as someone failing to deliver.
Audit implication: after the next decision your group takes, ask three members separately to write one sentence on what the key term in it means. Compare the three sentences before anyone acts. If they differ, the decision has not been taken yet.
The organization: words with budgets attached
At the next scale, words stop being only words. They are written into targets, policies, contracts and dashboards, and from there they move money.
Take done, incident, escalation, on time. Each unit fills them with its own length. One counts an incident when a customer is affected; another when a system fails; a third when a report is filed. The figures are then compared across units as if they measured the same thing. They do not, and the comparison decides who is praised, who is funded and who is restructured.
The same happens with the vocabulary the organization buys. A survey asks about psychological safety, a program teaches feedback, a consultant installs alignment. Each arrives with a meaning, and the meaning rarely survives the first internal presentation. What remains is the word, now attached to a budget line.
Organizations often notice the problem and respond with glossaries, one per function. Each is precise and none is shared. Two glossaries that disagree on risk are two measures with labels, and the work still breaks at the border between them.
A definition fixed at the right level does more than describe. It is operant: once it is in use, it changes the work. Define done as accepted by the person who receives the work rather than delivered by the person who made it, and handovers change before a single new instruction is issued. Define escalation by who must be told and within what time, and the argument over whether something should have been escalated becomes a check anyone can run.
Audit implication: list the five terms your main dashboard runs on. For each, obtain the working definition actually used in three different units. Where they differ, the numbers on the dashboard cannot be compared, however clean they look.
Society: the borrowed vocabulary
The widest scale is the least visible, and what follows should be read with that in mind. Its mechanisms can be described. How much each one weighs is not known.
A society hands its organizations a vocabulary before anyone inside has looked at a single case. Management fashions arrive with their words already attached and leave the words behind when they go. Figures circulate with their origin worn off. The claim that most of communication is nonverbal is repeated in training rooms everywhere; it came from narrow experiments on how people judged feelings when words, tone and face contradicted each other, and it was never a measure of communication as a whole. The word groupthink was a journalist’s before it was a psychologist’s theory, and most people who use it know neither.
None of this is anyone’s bad faith. Borrowed words are convenient, and checking their origin takes time that nobody is given. But a term whose origin is lost cannot be checked, and a term that cannot be checked cannot be corrected. It simply spreads.
Audit implication: for the last program or framework your organization adopted, take its central term and ask three questions. Who formulated it, and when? What did it originally describe? Where does it stop applying? If nobody can answer, the organization bought a word, not a concept.
The four at once
These are not four stages. They are present together in one ordinary moment.
A review is closing. Someone asks whether the project is on track. Heads nod. The minutes record that it is.
The person who answered meant that the milestones were met. The group heard that the outcome was secure. The organization’s dashboard turns green, because its definition of on track counts milestones and nothing else. And everyone in the room took the phrase as self-explanatory, because that is how the phrase is used everywhere.
Remove any one of these and the green would mean something different. When the outcome fails, the review will find that the information was there, sent and acknowledged. It will not find that the word was never defined.
What is left in your hands
None of this is an argument for more words. It is an argument for fewer, defined.
For the individual: before you use a term to decide, be able to say what it means, how you would recognize it, and where it comes from.
For the group: when the room agrees on a word, ask what it means before you leave the room. The awkward question is cheaper now than later.
For the organization: choose the few terms that decisions and budgets run on, and fix one definition for each: operative, so it can be checked, and public, so everyone checks against the same one.
For society: treat every borrowed word as a hypothesis until you know where it comes from and where it stops.
Defining is work, but it does not have to start from nothing. For most of the terms an organization uses about communication, the meaning, the origin and the limit already exist, scattered across disciplines and decades. A reference that brings them together, fixed, traceable and stating where each term stops, is the cheapest common measure an organization can adopt. It does not decide anything. It makes sure the next decision is taken on the same word.
A shared vocabulary is not a matter of style. It is the common measure that lets people who were trained in different places, by different people, work on the same thing and know it. Defined terms do not end disagreement. They make sure that, when people disagree, they are disagreeing about the work and not about the word.