Gregory is leaning so far over the mahogany table that I can actually see the individual fibers of his Italian-wool suit, and he is currently ‘architecting a robust framework for cross-functional alignment.’ There are 17 people in this room. Every single one of them is nodding with a rhythmic, hypnotic precision that suggests they either understand exactly what he means or, more likely, they are terrified that they don’t. We are 47 minutes into a meeting that was scheduled for 37, and the air in the conference room has taken on that peculiar, recycled smell of oxygen that has been filtered through too many lungs and too much anxiety. I am sitting in the third chair from the door, trying to maintain eye contact while simultaneously realizing, with a cold spike of adrenaline, that my fly has been completely open since I walked into the building at 8:07 this morning.

A Broken Game: Difficulty vs. Deception

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the mechanics of confusion lately. My friend Carlos M., an escape room designer with 7 years of experience in the industry, once told me that the hardest part of his job isn’t making a puzzle difficult-it’s making it fair. He says that if a player fails a room because a clue was intentionally vague, they don’t leave feeling challenged; they leave feeling cheated. In an escape room, you have maybe 57 minutes to win. If the instructions say ‘turn the dial to the right,’ and you turn it but nothing happens because the designer actually meant ‘turn it slightly to the right while jumping on one foot,’ the game is broken.

Business, according to Carlos M., is currently a series of broken games. We issue 127-page manuals filled with instructions that are so ‘high-level’ they don’t actually tell anyone what to do.

The Smoke Bomb of Ambiguity

We use these words because we are afraid of being wrong. If I tell you to ‘increase sales by 17 percent by Tuesday,’ and you don’t do it, I have failed as a leader and you have failed as an employee. The failure is sharp, visible, and falsifiable.

But if I tell you to ‘optimize our go-to-market posture to ensure maximum penetration of our core verticals,’ and the numbers go down, I can simply argue that the ‘market posture’ was sound but the ‘verticals’ shifted. It’s a linguistic smoke bomb. We throw it on the ground, the room fills with grey fog, and we slip out the back door before anyone can ask why the $777 we spent on social media ads didn’t result in a single lead.

Erosion of Trust: Rightsizing Humanity

This isn’t just about being annoying at sticktail parties. It’s a systemic erosion of trust. When a company announces ‘workforce rightsizing’ instead of firing 1007 people, they aren’t just being polite. They are signaling to the remaining employees that the leadership is unwilling to look the reality of their decisions in the face. It creates a culture where everyone starts talking like a robot because being a human is too dangerous.

I caught myself doing it yesterday. Someone asked me why a project was behind schedule, and instead of saying, ‘I forgot to call the vendor,’ I said, ‘We are experiencing a temporary bandwidth constraint regarding third-party logistical coordination.’ It felt safer. It felt professional. It was a lie.

I think about the way we describe things we actually care about. Nobody sits down with a glass of something special and starts talking about ‘flavor-profile optimization.’

Honesty: The 17-Year-Old Standard

When you explore Weller 12 Years, the language changes. You talk about peat, smoke, the char of the barrel, the 27 different notes of vanilla and spice that hit your tongue. It’s specific. It’s sensory. It’s honest. You don’t ‘synergize’ a 17-year-old single malt; you drink it. You experience it.

If it’s bad, you say it’s bad. If it’s brilliant, you don’t need a slide deck to prove it. We need more people who are willing to say, ‘I don’t know what that means,’ even when the VP is staring them down.

The Trap of Complexity

Carlos M. once designed a room where the final clue was just a plain white piece of paper that said, ‘Tell the truth.’ Most people spent 27 minutes looking for a hidden UV light or a secret compartment. They couldn’t believe it was that simple. They wanted it to be complicated because complexity feels like value. We equate ‘sophisticated’ with ‘incomprehensible.’

I looked around the room today and saw 17 people who were all pretending to be sophisticated, and I realized that my open fly was actually the most honest thing in the building. At least it was a real fact. It was a clear, observable state of being.

We call it ‘brand alignment.’ I call it a tragedy of wasted time. The tragedy is that beneath the jargon, there are usually good ideas. There are people who want to do great work. But they are trapped in a linguistic panic room, afraid that if they speak clearly, they will be seen as simple.

The Return to Action

The Graveyard of Courage

When he finally stopped for a breath, I didn’t nod. I didn’t say ‘great insights.’ I asked, ‘What specifically do you want me to do by Friday?’ The room went silent. It was a 7-second pause that felt like an hour. Gregory blinked. He looked at his notes… For a moment, the mask slipped. He looked like a man who had been caught with his own fly open. He didn’t have an answer, not a real one anyway.

We spent the next 57 minutes actually talking. No buzzwords. No ‘deep dives.’ Just humans trying to figure out how to solve a problem. It was uncomfortable. It was messy. It was the most productive hour I’ve had in 107 days. We should be terrified of jargon, not because it’s boring, but because it’s a graveyard for courage. Every time we use a word like ‘disruptive’ without explaining what is actually being broken, a little bit of our professional integrity dies. We are better than our vocabularies. We are more capable than our ‘core competencies.’