The Hum of Incoherence

I am staring at the 115th slide of the deck, and my vision is starting to double. The fluorescent bulb in the ceiling of Conference Room B is humming at a frequency that feels like it’s trying to communicate something urgent, something more coherent than what is currently coming out of the mouth of our VP of Strategy. He is mid-sentence, his hands performing a series of intricate gestures that suggest he is weaving a tapestry out of thin air.

‘We need to leverage our core competencies to synergize our value-added workflows,’ he says. He looks around the room, waiting for the impact. There are 15 people in this room, and 15 heads nod in a synchronicity that would be impressive if it weren’t so tragic. I look down at my notebook. I’ve written the word ‘Why?’ in the margin 5 times.

I’ve spent the better part of the last 45 minutes trying to translate this into a language that humans actually use to get things done. In my head, I’m translating ‘leveraging core competencies’ to ‘using what we are good at.’ I’m translating ‘synergize’ to ‘work together.’ But the moment I do that, the sentence collapses. If he had said, ‘We should use our skills to help each other work better,’ he would have sounded like a third-grade teacher. And in the high-stakes world of corporate survival, sounding like a third-grade teacher is the fastest way to have your budget slashed by 35 percent.

The Ground Truth: Oscar’s World

This brings me to Oscar T., a man who lives in a world where words actually have to mean things. Oscar is a wildlife corridor planner. He doesn’t spend his days in temperature-controlled rooms talking about ‘frictionless transitions.’ He spends his days in the mud, tracking the 25 distinct species of mammals that need to cross a specific 15-mile stretch of highway without being flattened by a semi-truck.

Oscar once told me about a meeting he had with a group of developers who wanted to build a gated community right in the middle of a critical migration path. They kept using words like ‘sustainable lifestyle ecosystem’ and ‘integrated green-space optimization.’ Oscar listened for 45 minutes before he pulled out a map and a red marker. He didn’t talk about ecosystems. He drew a line and said, ‘If you put the fence here, the deer die. If you put the fence 235 yards to the left, the deer live.’ He broke the spell of the jargon by introducing the one thing corporate language is designed to avoid: a consequence.

When we stop using precise language, we stop being able to see the fences we are building. We start to believe our own ‘synergy’ and ‘optimization’ and ‘pivoting.’ We use these words as a shield against accountability. If a project fails, but we followed the ‘strategic roadmap for holistic integration,’ then it wasn’t our fault-it was a ‘market misalignment.’ It’s a culture of bluffing. We spend 65 percent of our time trying to look like we know what we’re doing, and only 35 percent actually doing it. We’ve become obsessed with the map and have completely forgotten what the actual ground looks like.

Commodifying Complexity

I suspect we do this because the truth is often too simple to feel valuable. If I tell a client, ‘I’m going to make your website easier to read,’ I can’t charge them $555 an hour for that. But if I tell them I’m going to ‘re-engineer the user-centric interface to maximize cognitive flow and brand resonance,’ I’ve suddenly become an expert. We’ve commodified complexity. We’ve decided that if something is easy to understand, it must be shallow. We’ve ignored the fact that the hardest thing in the world is to be clear.

In the digital world, this epidemic is even more dangerous. Every second a user spends trying to figure out what a ‘dynamic value proposition’ actually is, is a second they aren’t engaging with the product. Clarity is the ultimate user experience. In environments like ems89, clarity isn’t just a virtue; it’s the engine of the experience. When you remove the barriers between the user and the information, you aren’t just being nice; you’re being effective. You’re building a corridor, much like Oscar does, that allows the user to get from Point A to Point B without getting lost in the weeds of unnecessary complexity.

The Deer Bridge: Getting to the Other Side

I remember Oscar T. telling me about a specific bridge they built over a highway in the Pacific Northwest. It cost a lot of money-roughly $155,000 to get the initial land survey done. The planners wanted to call it a ‘Multi-Modal Faunal Connectivity Structure.’ Oscar just called it ‘The Deer Bridge.’ During the first year, they caught 85 different animals on camera using it. The animals didn’t care about the ‘multi-modal’ aspect. They just wanted to get to the other side.

We talk about ‘disrupting industries’ while we’re actually just rearranging the furniture in a burning house. We talk about ‘human-centric design’ while treating actual humans like data points to be harvested. There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being right and being ignored. It’s a heavy, leaden feeling in the chest. When I lost that argument last week, I didn’t just lose a technical debate; I felt like I lost a piece of reality. I was standing there with the smoking gun-the data-and they told me the smoke was just ‘atmospheric brand expansion.’

The Daily Struggle for Clarity

I’m trying to find that place. I’m trying to be more like Oscar and less like the VP with the vest. I want to build bridges, not ‘connectivity structures.’ I want to solve problems, not ‘mitigate pain points.’ It’s a daily struggle. Every time I write an email, I catch myself. I’ll type ‘we should leverage’ and then I’ll delete it and type ‘we should use.’ It feels vulnerable. It feels like I’m standing there without my armor on. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe we need to be a little more vulnerable and a little less ‘leveraged.’

At the end of the meeting, the VP asks if there are any questions. I look at my notebook. I look at the 5 ‘Why?’s I wrote. I look at my 14 colleagues, all of whom are carefully avoiding eye contact, probably thinking about their 5:15 PM gym sessions or what they’re going to have for dinner. I could speak up. I could ask him to define ‘ecosystemic alignment’ in a way that doesn’t involve the word ‘alignment.’ I could point out that we still haven’t decided who is actually going to do the work.

But I don’t. I just nod. I fold my notebook, put my pen in my pocket, and walk out. I’ve become part of the epidemic. I’ve prioritized the path of least resistance over the path of clarity. And as I walk back to my desk, I realize that until we are willing to sound a little bit stupid, we are never going to be truly smart. If we want to save the work, we have to save the words first.

Otherwise, we’re just building corridors to nowhere, and eventually, the deer are going to stop coming.