Why does clarity come with so much jargon?

If you spend any time around strategy, brand, marketing or culture work, you quickly run into a wall of terminology.

Purpose. Vision. Mission. Positioning. Values. Behaviours. Narrative. Strategy. Brand. Proposition.

Individually, all these words are useful. But together, they can make something that should be simple feel unnecessarily complicated.

I often meet leadership teams who feel slightly embarrassed that they can’t clearly explain the difference between purpose and positioning, or vision and mission. They assume they’ve missed a memo somewhere.

The truth is, as an industry, we haven’t made this easy. Different disciplines have developed their own language over time, often describing very similar ideas from different angles. Strategy people use one set of terms, brand people another, HR another, marketing another. Businesses end up with a long list of words, but not always a clear way to connect them. Or an aligned way of thinking about them.

Most of this work comes down to answering a small number of very simple questions:

·      Why do we exist?

·      Where are we going?

·      Who do we serve and with what?

·      What makes us different?

·      How do we behave?

We’ve given these questions names - purpose, vision, mission, positioning, behaviours - but the labels are less important than the answers.

When a leadership team can answer those questions clearly and consistently, a lot of other things become easier. Strategy becomes clearer. Messaging becomes more consistent. Hiring becomes easier. Decisions get made faster. Customers understand your value. And people understand what they’re working towards and why.

When I work with leadership teams and founders, I often say that the terminology matters much less than the clarity it creates.

The goal isn’t to produce a set of nicely labelled statements. The goal is to reach a point where the leadership team can clearly articulate why the business exists, where it’s going and what makes it different.

And once that becomes clear, a lot of other things start to fall into place.