Twelve Seconds Too Late
The bus 42 is a smudge of red in the distance, a retreating tail light that mocks my outstretched arm, and the realization that I am exactly 12 seconds too late hits with the physical weight of a closing vault. My lungs are burning, the cold morning air tasting like iron and diesel. It is a specific kind of failure, the kind where you are close enough to see the goal but far enough to be irrelevant. I stand there, checking my phone-62 minutes until the next one-and I realize this feeling of being stranded in a vacuum of progress is exactly how I felt in the boardroom this morning.
[The silence of a nodding room.] There were 22 people in that room. The Vice President, a man whose 122-dollar haircut seemed to vibrate with its own self-importance, stood at a whiteboard that was already covered in 222 jagged arrows and boxes. He was speaking, but the sounds coming out of his mouth weren’t quite language. They were linguistic placeholders. He said we needed to “leverage our core competencies to actionize a paradigm shift in our go-to-market strategy.” I watched the room. I watched 21 other humans nod in unison, a rhythmic, oceanic motion of collective pretense.
No one asked what we were actually doing. No one asked if “actionizing a paradigm” meant firing the 32 people in the shipping department or just changing the color of the logo to a slightly more aggressive shade of blue.
Dirt Under the Fingernails
I think about Aisha K.L. often in moments like these. Aisha is a cemetery groundskeeper I met a few months ago while I was wandering through the older section of the city’s east-side burial plots. She’s been doing that work for 12 years, and she has a way of speaking that feels like a cold glass of water after a day of eating sand. When Aisha speaks, the words have dirt under their fingernails. She doesn’t talk about “optimizing the finality of the human experience.” She says the ground is too wet for the backhoe. She says the 22-inch deep frost is going to make the morning hard. She deals in the ultimate clarity-the physical reality of a hole in the ground and the 52-year-old oak tree that keeps dropping branches on the headstones.
“
Aisha once told me that the dead don’t have time for metaphors, and neither do the people who bury them. If she were in that boardroom, she would have asked the Vice President if he was planning to dig a hole or fill one.
– The Groundskeeper
But we weren’t in a cemetery. We were in a high-rise where the air is filtered 32 times a day and the truth is filtered even more than that. I realized, standing there by the whiteboard, that corporate jargon isn’t actually a failure of communication. It’s a highly evolved defense mechanism. We think it’s just annoying business-speak, but it’s actually a shield. If you use words like “synergy,” “ecosystem,” and “omnichannel,” you are building a fog. And in that fog, you are safe.
Accountability vs. The Fog
You see, if I say, “I think this product is garbage and we are going to lose 102 million dollars,” I am accountable. I have made a statement that can be proven wrong. I have stepped out into the clearing where the snipers of the corporate hierarchy can see me. But if I say, “We are currently experiencing a misalignment of value propositions in the current fiscal landscape,” I haven’t actually said anything. I’ve just hummed a tune that everyone else recognizes. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a shrug that looks like a salute. A culture’s reliance on jargon is inversely proportional to its level of psychological safety. When it’s unsafe to be clear, simple, and wrong, people retreat into the thickets of complex, meaningless language. It’s a survival strategy for the 22nd century.
The Cost of Ambiguity (Illustrative Data)
Accountability risk
Safety achieved
I’ve spent 12 hours this week looking at 322 emails that could have been summarized in 2 sentences. Instead, they were “deep-dives” into “strategic frameworks.” It is exhausting to translate reality into bullshit and then back again. It makes the brain feel like it’s being rubbed with sandpaper. I found myself thinking about the logistics of it all. How does anything actually get done? How does a physical object move from a factory to a doorstep when the people in charge are talking about “disrupting the space” instead of moving the boxes? It is the same logic that governs the efficiency of a logistics chain, like someone waiting for a delivery from Auspost Vape, where the clarity of the tracking number is the only thing that keeps the anxiety of the unknown at bay. Without that clarity, everything is just a guess wrapped in a spreadsheet.
Replacing Verbs with Beaten Nouns
There is a specific kind of cowardice in the word “leverage.” We use it because “use” feels too small, too mundane. We want to feel like we are using a giant mechanical arm to move the world, rather than just clicking a mouse 82 times a day. We have replaced verbs with nouns that have been beaten into the shape of verbs. We don’t “do” things anymore; we “orchestrate” them. We don’t “talk”; we “socialize the concept.” It’s a way of distancing ourselves from the messy, sweaty reality of work. Aisha K.L. doesn’t socialize the concept of a lawnmower. She starts the engine. She feels the vibration in her 2 hands.
I remember a project from 2 years ago. We spent 42 weeks developing a “holistic engagement suite.” It was supposed to be a “game-changer.” We had 12 meetings a week. We used 222 slides in the final presentation. When we finally launched it, the customers hated it because it didn’t actually do anything they needed. It was a beautiful, complex answer to a question no one had asked. If we had just said, “People want a button that works,” we could have saved 52 million dollars. But saying “a button that works” doesn’t get you a promotion. Creating a “unified interface for seamless user journeys” gets you a corner office.
The Turing Test of Business Speech
I find it funny, in a dark way, that we call it “professionalism.” As if being professional means removing every trace of humanity from our speech until we sound like a broken AI trying to pass a Turing test. I’ve caught myself doing it, too. I’ll be on a call, frustrated because I missed my 42 bus or because the coffee was cold, and I’ll hear myself say, “I’m not sure we have the bandwidth to tackle that right now.” Bandwidth? I’m not a router. I’m a person with a headache and a mortgage. But saying “I’m tired and I have too much work” feels like a confession of weakness. Jargon is the costume we wear to hide the fact that we are all just making it up as we go along.
“
There are 62 different ways to say “I don’t know” in business-speak, and none of them involve those three simple words. Instead, we say “Let’s circle back on that” or “I’ll take that offline.”
– The Information Hot Potato
I’ve seen 102-page reports that contained zero actionable data. They were just monuments to the ego of the department that produced them. It’s a graveyard of trees, a funeral for common sense. Aisha K.L. would probably find it efficient; she’s used to things being buried.
… Reality Returns …
The Arrival of Clarity
The 42 bus finally pulls up, 62 minutes late, and I climb aboard. The driver doesn’t say he’s “facing operational headwinds.” He just looks at me and says, “The heater’s broken.” I love him for it. I want to hug him. It is the most honest thing I’ve heard all day. I sit in the back, near the engine where it’s slightly warmer, and I think about the 22 people in that boardroom. They are probably still there, circling back to the synergy of their core competencies. They are probably 122 percent sure they are changing the world.
The World Changes Through Action, Not Abstraction.
The world doesn’t change because of a “paradigm shift.” It changes because someone digs a hole, or drives a bus, or writes a sentence that actually means something. We are drowning in a sea of empty words, and we are doing it to ourselves because we are afraid. We are afraid that if we speak clearly, people will see that we are just as confused and fragile as everyone else. We hide in the fog because the sun is too bright and the truth is too sharp.
But eventually, the fog has to lift. Eventually, you have to look at the 2 hands you have and realize that they are for doing, not for leveraging.
What If We Spoke Like Groundskeepers?
I wonder if we could ever have a meeting where everyone was required to speak like Aisha K.L. No metaphors. No buzzwords. Just nouns and verbs. “We have 222 dollars. We need 322 dollars. We are going to sell 102 widgets to get it.” It would be the shortest meeting in history. It would be terrifying. We would have to face the 12 mistakes we made last week. We would have to admit that the “omnichannel strategy” is just a fancy way of saying we don’t know where our customers are. We would have to be human. And maybe that’s the real reason for the jargon. It’s not just a defense against our bosses; it’s a defense against ourselves. It allows us to believe that the 62 minutes we spend in a meeting are actually productive, rather than just a way to kill time before the bus comes to take us back to our real lives.
Actions That Matter (Human Competencies)
Dig
(Start the engine.)
Drive
(Move the object.)
State
(Use 3 words.)
As the bus 42 rattles over the bridge, I look out the window at the city. There are 12 cranes on the horizon, 222 lights flickering in the office towers, and 2 million people trying to find a way to be understood. We are all just trying to bridge the gap between what we feel and what we can say. And if we have to use a little jargon to get through the day, maybe that’s okay. But I hope, tonight, when I get home, I can find the words that don’t need a dictionary. I hope I can just say, “I missed the bus and I’m cold,” and have that be enough. Because in the end, the dirt doesn’t care about your value proposition. It only cares about the weight of what you leave behind. Is the fog clearing yet, or are we just getting used to the dark?