If You Haven't Agreed On What You Mean, No Clever Headline Will Save You

I hated physics at secondary school.

To be fair, I had bigger things on my mind.

Metallica.

Iron Maiden.

Nirvana.

Definitely not thermodynamics.

Yet somehow one thing stuck.

The second law of thermodynamics.

I can't believe I just wrote those five words.

Anyway, in plain English, the law says that left alone, systems tend to drift towards disorder unless energy is put into maintaining them.

Twenty-five years later, I finally found a use for it.

Not in physics.

In business.

Imagine you're the buyer now.

Open a company website.

Give it ten seconds.

Close it.

Now tell me what the hell that company actually does.

We aim to optimise operational efficiency across the organisation.

What?

Accounts Payable Automation: AI-driven automation and touchless technology trusted by leading global organisations across industries.

Sorry, what do you actually do?

The paradox is that nobody sat in a meeting room and said: “Guys, let's make this harder to understand.”

Quite the opposite.

Every word probably made perfect sense when it was added.

That's what makes the problem so dangerous.

We keep adding.

One new product.

One more feature.

One more campaign.

A new slogan.

Another presentation.

A fresh strategy.

A different agency.

A revised value proposition.

Every leader telling the same story slightly differently.

Year after year, the words pile up.

Until one day no one can explain what the business actually does without reaching for twenty-nine slides and a dozen buzzwords.

My physics teacher had a fancy word for this — entropy.

But let's leave physics in the classroom.

There's a much more human way to think about what happens to all those words.

Language Debt.

Language Debt builds when meaning starts to drift as words move through a business.

Some words are never defined.

Some mean three different things to three different teams.

Some made sense five years ago and somehow survived.

And some make perfect sense inside the building while leaving the buyer scratching her head outside it.

“Everyone thinks they agree. Until they have to build something, sell something or decide something. Then everyone wonders why the thing they built isn't the thing anyone wanted. “

There’s an old Chinese phrase, “death by a thousand cuts.”

No single cut does the damage.

It's the thousand that get you.

The way your business communicates can suffer the same fate.

Word by word.

A thousand tiny shifts in meaning.

Death by a thousand words.

Just like technical debt, Language Debt creeps up on you.

And for a while, you can get away with it.

Five people around a table know what everyone means.

Context fills the gaps.

A raised eyebrow fills the gaps.

“You know what I mean” fills the gaps.

Then five becomes fifty.

The founder can't be in every meeting anymore.

The table becomes Teams.

And that raised eyebrow becomes a Slack message someone reads three hours later.

Leadership hands the story to the next layer down.

Marketing hands the story to sales.

Sales hands it to the buyer.

Now the words have to do something they never had to do before.

Leave the room without you.

And suddenly those tiny gaps aren't so tiny.

That's when you start paying interest.

The same strategy means two different things to two different teams.

The same product gets sold three different ways.

The same promise gets rewritten every time someone opens PowerPoint.

Everyone thinks they're saying the same thing.

They're not.

Meetings get longer.

Decisions get slower.

Sales improvises.

Marketing rewrites.

The poor buyer gets confused.

And leadership wonders why a great product feels so hard to sell.

Just when you think the mess couldn't spread any faster, you hand it to AI.

Perfect.

What could possibly go wrong?

AI can make a hell of a lot of pretty words.

Fast.

But it cannot magically fix meaning you never made clear in the first place.

“AI doesn't create the debt. It puts compound interest on it. Give AI muddy thinking and you get muddy thinking at machine speed.”

So how do you pay the debt down?

Not with another slogan.

Not with another three-hour creative meeting with a cross-functional team and a wall full of Post-it notes.

And definitely not by asking ChatGPT to “make this sound more strategic.”

You go back upstream.

See where meaning has drifted.

Decide what you actually mean.

Then put it into words that can survive the trip from the boardroom to sales, from sales to the website, and from the website to the buyer.

See clearly.

Think clearly.

Speak clearly.

Because clarity has to start before the words.

And it has to survive when you're no longer in the room.

Turns out my physics teacher was right.

Left alone, things drift.

Your language will too.

Funny.

It only took me twenty-five years to see it.

PS. If you don’t know jewellery, know your jeweller. That’s Buffett’s rule. It’s the same with messaging. Smart ideas die in boring words. If you don’t know the game, find a partner who does, because your reputation is on the line. I help thinkers, rebels, and disruptors say what they mean and make it stick.  Step up. Bring your message. I’ll bring the punch. You’ve got one shot to say it right. I’ll help you take it.