Understanding the Risks of Vague Language

I often come across resumes and LinkedIn headlines that use the word “seasoned”, such as: “Seasoned executive with over 20 years of experience in the manufacturing space.” On the surface, it might sound strong. In reality, it raises several concerns. First, this statement is not a clear differentiator. Experience alone does not make someone unique. What matters most is how that experience has been applied, what has been learned, and the results achieved. Next, the term seasoned is vague. It does not communicate specific skills, achievements, or expertise. It has also become an overused cliché in resumes, which makes it less impactful. Finally, trust me when I say that employers and recruiters are not searching for the word seasoned when evaluating candidates. They are scanning for evidence of capability, examples of impact, and quantifiable results. Instead of describing yourself as seasoned, show the details that prove your value. For example: Rather than “seasoned operations director,” consider: “Director of operations who drives operational excellence across global manufacturing organizations, overseeing multi-site production valued at $500M+. Generated over $75M in efficiency gains." That paints a far stronger picture of what you bring to the table. Lastly, there is a risk that the word seasoned can invite age bias. Whether intentional or not, highlighting age or lengthy years of experience can trigger assumptions. Eliminating terms that are vague or loaded can help reduce this risk. In your career materials, focus on what sets you apart. Share the skills, insights, and measurable outcomes that showcase why you are the right fit. Food can be seasoned. Careers should be defined by value.

Clarity scares founders more than risk. Founders don’t even fear bad terms. Bad terms can be rationalized. Clarity can’t. I see it all the time with SaaS & Fintech founders and uptime SLAs. The moment numbers hit the page, the room changes. Suddenly, everyone wants things “flexible.” I remember a fintech founder with their first big enterprise deal. The kind of win that changes how you see your startup. When we got to the SLA, I proposed something simple: • 99.5% uptime per month • Two breaches, and the customer could terminate • No cure period It was honest. It reflected real operational risk. The founder paused. Then said: “This feels too rigid. They’ll walk if we give them an easy exit. Let’s keep it reasonable and figure it out as we go.” We can't argue with founders here. So we replaced it with: “Commercially reasonable efforts.” • No numbers • No thresholds It felt safe. Ambiguity feels safe. It avoids hard conversations. It lets you pretend goodwill will carry the day. For a year, nothing happened. Growth hid the cracks. Then downtime crept up. The customer asked what “commercially reasonable” actually meant. The founder explained. Then lawyers got involved. The contract didn’t break. Trust did. Two years later, during renewal, the customer walked. They didn’t need a breach threshold. Ambiguity gave them room when patience ran out. Clarity arrived anyway. Just not on the founder’s terms. Founders avoid clarity because it forces them to confront hard truths: • Infrastructure gaps • Operational risk • The possibility of failure Vague terms feel safe. Clear terms feel dangerous. But the truth is simple: • Vague terms hand customers free exits • Clear terms give you predictable risk Clarity always shows up. The question is when and whether you’ll still have leverage. If a clause feels scary because it’s clear, understand why. And also, clarity doesn’t even create exits. But the ambiguity does. — Akhil --- ✍ What’s 1 clause you’ve kept vague because the clear version felt uncomfortable? Share below! 

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein Most bad decisions start with lazy language. In business, we use words that are socially safe because they don’t trigger a strong opposition: “value.” “community.” “growth.” Everyone nods. Then we leave the room and build different realities. That’s the real cost of vague language: it doesn’t create alignment, it creates interpretive drift. And drift is expensive. It becomes rework, competing priorities, and the slow decay of trust - gets masked as “miscommunication.” This is why I started learning Sanskrit. Not because Sanskrit has magical clarity. Any language can be used precisely. But Sanskrit is a useful constraint because it doesn’t let me hide behind aimless conversations. When you translate, you can’t write “kind of” ideas. You have to commit to structure: what is doing what, what modifies what, what depends on what. If your meaning is vague, the sentence feels unstable. Business culture rewards people who can sound convincing without being specific. Sanskrit forces me to make decisions at the sentence level. And once you see how often teams talk in words that could mean five different things, you stop being impressed by “good discussions.” You start respecting only one thing: clear claims. A clear claim has two properties: -It can be wrong. -It can be tested. It’s the same instinct behind people who obsessed over language because they knew it controls thinking. Orwell warned that bad language makes bad thinking feel normal. Wittgenstein kept circling the same idea: unclear language produces unclear problems. And Bezos popularized a version of it inside companies: writing forces precision because vague ideas collapse on the page. The point is: if you want better decisions, start defining. Because the most dangerous words in business are the ones that nobody argues with. #kamalkisoch

Vague language doesn't protect people from bad news. It protects the person delivering it. When someone is already scared, ambiguity doesn't soften the moment. It hands their fear the microphone. I learned this during my husband's ICU stay after his cardiac arrest. Because of COVID restrictions, I wasn't allowed in the hospital. Every update came by phone. He was unconscious the entire time, heavily sedated while doctors cooled his body to limit brain and organ damage. I couldn't talk to him. I couldn't see him. Everything I knew about whether my husband would live or die came through doctors and nurses on the other end of a call. I remember one call where a doctor opened with, "We have some concerns." Then she paused. In that silence, my brain filled in everything she hadn't said. His heart? His brain? His lungs? Something new? Is he going to die after all? My nervous system had been running on fumes for 36 hours. By the time she got to the specifics, I'd already lived through several worst-case outcomes. This is what uncertainty does under stress. It fills the gaps. And it doesn't do so kindly. This isn't just true in medicine. It's true anywhere authority meets vulnerability. For anyone delivering difficult or uncertain news, speed to specificity is a kindness. "We're monitoring his kidneys, which took a hit during the arrest" lands very differently than "we have some concerns" followed by silence. Even "we don't know yet" gives the mind somewhere to land. Vagueness isn't neutral. It's avoidance. Authority requires the courage to be clear.

Most people don’t have a thinking problem. They have a language problem. Listen closely in meetings and you will hear it everywhere: “Kind of” “Maybe” “We should probably” “Let’s try” And then leaders wonder why nothing moves. Because vague words create vague results. Language is not just how you communicate. It is how you think. When your language is imprecise, your thinking is imprecise. And when your thinking is imprecise, execution breaks down. Precision in speech does something powerful. It forces clarity. When you say exactly what you mean, you expose gaps in your thinking. You remove misinterpretation. You create alignment instantly. Clear operators speak differently. They don’t say: “We should improve performance” They say: “We need to increase patient retention by 15 percent in the next 90 days” Now everyone knows what matters. Now everyone knows what success looks like. Now everyone knows what to do next. This is where most leaders miss it. They refine strategy. They build decks. They plan. But they ignore the language delivering it. And language is the strategy. Because no matter how strong your plan is, if it is communicated vaguely, it will be executed vaguely. If your team is confused, look at how you are communicating. Clarity is not a personality trait. It is a discipline. It shows up in every sentence you choose. So here is the real question: If someone listened to your last five conversations, would they hear precision or approximation?

This is where language really bites people, insurance policies. Exclusions. Exceptions. Limitations. Endorsements. Carve-outs to carve-outs. Most folks assume insurance works like this: loss happens → claim paid. In reality, it works like this: loss happens → policy language is dissected word by word. I’ve seen claims denied not because coverage didn’t exist, but because of how something was written, or how a term was defined, or worse, how it wasn’t defined at all. A single sentence can change the entire outcome: • “Arising out of” • “Related to” • “In the course of” • “Intentional” • “Reasonable care” Those are legal landmines. This doesn’t just live in insurance. It shows up in policies, procedures, training docs, handbooks, and contracts. Which brings me to the video we’re sharing. A man asks a mounted police officer, “Can I pet?” The officer says, “Sure.” The man then rubs the officer’s leg, not the horse. Absurd? Yes. But technically… the question wasn’t specific, and the permission wasn’t either. That’s the point. When language is vague, someone else fills in the blanks, and not always the way you intended. In insurance, those blanks usually get filled in by: • Adjusters • Attorneys • Courts They don’t care what you meant. They care what the policy actually says. In commercial claims data analyses, insurers have denied around 15 % of claims. In Texas, 47 % of homeowner claims were closed without payment in recent years, a higher rate than the national average, because coverage conditions, deductibles, exclusions, or interpretations prevented a payout. If your coverage, policies, or procedures rely on assumptions instead of clarity, you’re betting outcomes on hope. Hope is not a risk management strategy. Words matter. Specificity matters. Ambiguity is expensive. #riskmitigation #exposuremanagement

Words Matter On talent, succession and the tragic poetry of HR vocabulary We assume, far too generously, that we understand each other. Especially in HR, where language flows freely—glossy, professional, well-intentioned—and yet rarely lands with shared clarity. We talk about talent, potential, succession, engagement. But do we mean the same things? Or are we building castles in the air, brick by semantic brick? Take “talent”. In theory, a universal good. In practice, a Rorschach test. For one manager, talent means ‘the top 5%’. For another, ‘anyone who shows up with energy’. And for a third ‘the best presenters’. Some define it by potential, others by performance. Still others include only those with MBAs and an assertive handshake. The result? Strategy drift, favouritism disguised as insight, and development programmes that look fair but aren’t. Or consider “succession”. It sounds noble—preparing the next generation. But is it about readiness? Loyalty? Seniority? Visibility? In one firm, it means a PowerPoint slide with colour-coded boxes. In another, it’s a guarded secret passed between executives like a sacred scroll. A 2022 Harvard Business Review article notes that “one executive’s ‘high potential’ is another’s ‘fast talker with confidence’.” The consequences? Talent reviews become theatre. Succession planning becomes storytelling. Even “performance” is surprisingly porous. Are we measuring output, effort, results, attitude? According to McKinsey (2021), labels like “high performer” or “future leader” are often politically loaded and lack consistent, agreed-upon definitions. Vague language, they argue, leads organisations to overlook capable candidates and make misjudged promotion calls. The 2023 Deloitte Human Capital Trends report goes further: “Language is not just a tool of communication; it’s a mechanism of trust.” In hybrid and global workplaces, imprecise terminology doesn’t just confuse—it corrodes. It fuels misaligned expectations, undermines feedback, and injects friction into every people decision. This is not a philosophical quibble. Words in HR are not innocent. They are decisions, disguised. The moment we say someone has “high potential”, we change their access, their opportunities, their narrative. If that label is built on a shaky foundation, we institutionalise bias and decorate it with strategy slides. So what’s the answer? Not more jargon. And certainly not another HR glossary. We need courage. The courage to pause and ask, before we assess, promote, or plan: “What exactly do we mean?” Not in a cynical way, but in search of truth. Subtlety. Specificity. Because in HR, words don’t just describe the world. They shape it. (Opinions are my own)

When someone lands on your site, they're making dozens of micro-decisions. "Is this relevant? Can I trust this? What do I do next?" Every vague phrase, every abstract concept, every pause. That's friction. Friction kills momentum. The pattern shows up every time companies launch campaigns that flatline. They blame targeting, creative, timing. But the real issue is simpler: Everyone *internally* understood the strategy. Customers did not. The internal message was clear because teams had context. The external message wasn’t because customers do NOT have that context. Teams ask customers to guess what "premium quality" or "innovative design" actually means - is it fluff or do you actually have an edge there? Nobody knows. Every time someone interprets your message, you're gambling. Here’s why you do it (even if you don’t realize): Clarity is scarier than complexity. It's easy to say "premium fitness tracking." It's hard to say "tracks your steps and calories burned." It's easy to say "innovative brewing technology." It's hard to say "makes your coffee in 30 seconds." It's easy to say "fast, convenient shopping." It's hard to say "delivers in 2 days with free returns." The first version sounds safe in internal reviews and with the public. Nobody can say vague fluff is wrong. Being clear actually converts because it’s accountable. "Premium quality" can't be challenged. "Tracks your steps and calories burned" can be tested, measured, and proven to be insufficient. Specificity creates accountability. Vagueness protects boring companies with risk-intolerant cultures. But customers don't care about what YOU think is defensible. They care about understanding what you bring to the table (or they’ll sure as hell find someone who can explain it better). When your copy forces interpretation, you're paying for traffic that won't convert. Your team spends time explaining what the marketing should have made obvious. You can't measure what's working because vague messaging creates vague results. Clear copy does the opposite. Customers arrive educated. They explain your product to friends in one sentence. You know exactly which value props resonate. The teams that align internally and convert externally aren't doing two different things. They're doing one thing well: communicating so clearly that interpretation becomes unnecessary. This isn't a marketing problem. It's a leadership problem. Most teams will keep optimizing for defensible copy because it's safer. They'll keep using "premium quality" and "innovative design" because those phrases can't be wrong. They'll keep blaming targeting when campaigns flatline. Because clarity isn't an optimization. It's the difference between copy that protects careers and copy that converts. Make your value impossible to misunderstand.

The Silent Collapse of Corporate Language I’ve worked across Europe, China, India, and the United States, and the same pattern appears everywhere: before an organization changes, its language decays. Words that once carried meaning - efficiency, best practice, synergy - turn into empty placeholders. We repeat them until they sound safe again. But safety is the opposite of clarity. AI doesn’t tolerate vague language. It understands only what is explicit, structured, and contextual. That makes it an unforgiving listener. I remember sitting in a European boardroom discussing “digital readiness.” Everyone nodded gravely, yet no one could define it. It was a ritual of agreement, not a conversation. That was the moment I realized that transformation doesn’t fail because of technology. It fails because language becomes theatre. Every organization runs on two codes: the formal code of its software, and the informal code of its speech. When the latter becomes outdated, even the best systems can’t fix it. AI reveals this gap mercilessly. When you feed an algorithm contradictory inputs, it doesn’t argue, it simply breaks. Humans, on the other hand, keep talking. Leadership today must therefore include linguistic repair. We need to build vocabularies that match our reality. Instead of “alignment,” we should speak about understanding. Instead of “efficiency,” about learning speed. Instead of “compliance,” about trust. Language shapes perception long before behavior follows. If our words are tired, our thinking soon follows. I’ve learned that a strategy expressed in clear, living language creates movement; one hidden in jargon creates paralysis. AI may be our first true test of clarity. It exposes every ambiguity we hide behind. Perhaps that’s the uncomfortable gift it brings, it forces us to mean what we say. Transformation doesn’t start with systems; it starts with sentences. And leadership, at its core, is the discipline of saying precisely what we mean, and then acting like we believe it. #LeadershipCommunication #CorporateCulture #LanguageMatters #AIEra #Transformation #Clarity