The Elastic Edge of Ambiguity
I am currently losing a physical and spiritual battle with a piece of light blue cotton. It is a fitted sheet, and it has successfully resisted 23 attempts to be folded into anything resembling a rectangle. I am standing in my laundry room, sweat beginning to bead on my forehead, realizing that the elastic edges of this sheet are exactly like the ‘strategic pillars’ of the modern corporation.
You tuck one corner, and the other three rebel. It is a mess of tension and misplaced hope, much like the quarterly planning deck I was forced to review yesterday. That deck was 83 slides of linguistic gymnastics. It spoke of ‘leveraging synergistic paradigms to activate disruptive innovation in the phygital space.’ I read that sentence 13 times, and each time, the meaning drifted further away, like a balloon released into a storm.
Hans would look at a word like ‘alignment’ and sigh. To Hans, alignment is a physical state-a spine, a row of ducks, a set of gears. In the corporate world, ‘alignment’ is just a way to say, ‘I need you to agree with me so I don’t feel alone in this bad decision.’
CONCEPTUAL BUCKET
The Terror of Plain Language
Strategy without plain language is the same [as the sheet]. It’s all elastic and no bone. We use these terms because they are safe. If I tell you our strategy is to ‘optimize the customer journey through a holistic omnichannel approach,’ and we fail, I can blame the ‘omnichannel’ or the ‘journey.’
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Plain language is terrifying because it is measurable. Jargon is a warm, fuzzy blanket of ambiguity that protects us from the harsh light of reality.
Accountability vs. Ambiguity
But if I say, ‘We are going to answer every phone call on the first ring,’ and we don’t do it, I am accountable.
[Complexity is the graveyard of execution.]
Semantic Satiation and the Ritual Chant
Our strategy sessions have become exercises in mass semantic satiation. We sit in glass-walled rooms and chant the sacred words-‘growth hacking,’ ‘thought leadership,’ ‘ecosystem orchestration’-until we are all collectively hypnotized. We walk out of the room feeling like we’ve accomplished something, but we’ve really just performed a linguistic ritual.
Consultant Cost Visualization
I remember a specific digression in a meeting three months ago. A consultant, who was likely being paid $333 an hour, used the word ‘phygital’ with a straight face. ‘Phygital’ isn’t a word; it’s a cry for help.
‘Holistic Optimization’
‘Show Up & Deliver’
The Opposite of Jargon
This is why I find the approach of Built Phoenix Strong so fascinating. They don’t have 13 pillars of wellness or a 43-page manual on ‘biological optimization.’ They talk about fitness. They talk about nutrition. They talk about accountability. That’s it.
Focus
Find the seams.
Clarity
If you fail, you know why.
Action
Do the thing.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, because you have to actually understand something deeply to describe it simply.
The Crutch of Jargon
When I’m struggling with this fitted sheet, my instinct is to just roll it into a ball and shove it in the back of the linen closet. That’s what most companies do with their strategy. They make it so complicated that everyone gives up on understanding it, so they just ball it up and hide it.
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I was using the language of the ‘professional’ to hide the fact that I wasn’t sure if my idea was actually good. I was using jargon as a crutch.
Personal Confession
Since then, I’ve tried to follow the Hans M.-L. rule: if the sentence feels like it’s trying to impress me, it’s probably lying to me. ‘Strategy’ is just a fancy word for ‘what we are going to do and what we are not going to do.’
The Courage to Be Basic
There is a peculiar kind of bravery required to be simple. In a world that rewards ‘sophistication,’ saying ‘we just need to sell more of the red ones’ feels dangerously basic. But that’s where the power is.
POWER IN SIMPLICITY
Actionable Strategy
Finding the Seams
I’ve finally managed to get the sheet into a somewhat flat shape. It’s not perfect-one corner is still suspiciously lumpy-but it’s better than the ball of fabric I started with. I realized that the trick wasn’t more complex folding; it was finding the seams.
Business is the same. Underneath all the ‘disruptive’ nonsense and ‘iterative’ fluff, there are seams. There are real people with real problems, and there are real solutions that either work or they don’t.
What would happen if tomorrow, we all just stopped? What if we refused to use a word we couldn’t define for a 3rd grader? […] We might even find that when we speak clearly, we start to think clearly.