We've all played jargon bingo in a meeting. Here's the question nobody asks: what happens if you win?
Everyone has a version of the game. Someone starts a grid. Synergy, leverage, holistic, circle back, north star. You tick them off while a colleague sails past three of them in a single sentence. It's a good laugh. It's also one of the more honest things that happens in a lot of businesses, because the joke only works if everyone in the room quietly agrees the words don't mean much.
I'm not going to pretend this is an original observation. People have rolled their eyes at corporate language for as long as there's been corporate language. But most of them stop at the eye-roll and treat the jargon as a harmless tic. A bit of shorthand between people who already understand each other.
I don't think it's harmless. More often than anyone wants to admit, the jargon is doing a job. It's covering for the fact that nobody in the room could say the plain version if you asked them to.
Here's the test I've started using with the businesses I work with. Ask someone to explain what the company sells, and whya customer would pick it, without using a single term the customer wouldn't use themselves. No category vocabulary. No acronyms. No architecture. Just the plain reason it matters, in words a smart person outside the industry could follow.
It is remarkable how often that stops a senior, capable person cold.
Not because they're not clever. They're usually the cleverest people in the building. But somewhere along the way the plain answer got replaced by the fluent one, and nobody noticed the swap, because the fluent one sounds more impressive in a room full of people who all speak the same dialect.
The reflex is to call this a communications problem. Tidy up the messaging, run a workshop, get everyone on the same page.I don't think it's that simple. When a team can only describe what they sell in the industry's own vocabulary, it's usually a sign the meaning underneath was never pinned down in the first place. You reach for the jargon because the plain version would expose that you're not entirely sure. The complexity in the language is hiding a gap in the thinking.
And that gap has a cost that stops being funny quickly. Salespeople who can list features fluently and describe value clumsily. Marketing copy that's been approved by so many people all the human got polished out. Buyers who leave a conversation unable to explain to their own boss why they'd choose you, so they don't. Deals that should have closed drifting quietly to whoever was cheaper.
None of that shows up as "we have a jargon problem." It shows up as a pipeline that looks healthy and won't convert. Which is a much harder thing to laugh about.
So by all means keep the bingo grid. But it's worth asking what the game is really telling you. If your teams can't say whatyou sell in language a human being can actually feel, the comfortable answer is that they just need better words.
The less comfortable one is that the plain version was never pinned down, and the jargon has been doing the job of hidingit. Not from your customers. From yourselves.
The buyer on the other side of the table is running the same test without meaning to. If your own people can't tell them,simply, why it matters, they'll assume the answer is that it doesn't.
Though there's a harder version of this problem, and it's the one that catches the businesses who think they've already fixed it. Sometimes the plain words are there, the proposition is clear, everyone can recite it, and it still doesn't land. I've written separately about why clarity isn't the finish line, and why a team can understand exactly what they're selling and still not carry it into the room.
