Culture eats strategy for breakfast, the line goes. I’ll take it a step further: The language we use eats culture first.

We’re familiar with all sorts of jargon and buzzwords that tend to make the world more cluttered and opaque than it needs to be: Teams are commanded to synergize, organizations pursue paradigm shifts, leaders claim to champion disrupting. The eyerolls that these terms inspire relate to their hollowness—most people who hear them see them as cover for not doing much.

But this kind of weasel-wording can be actively destructive. Writing at Harvard Business Review, author and consultant Andrea Belk Olson argues that the kinds of allegedly inspirational terminology leaders use can tend to sow confusion and erode productivity. The term customer-first, for instance, is ripe for misinterpretation. Does it mean improved website UX, faster responses, personalization? “Without a common anchor, each department runs in parallel,” she writes.

So the problem isn’t so much with the terms themselves, but the lack of specificity that leaders attach to them. If a leader says an association is going to be data-driven, how will that play out, exactly? Does that mean it will use member data to deliver more bespoke marketing messages? Gathering engagement information to decide which products to keep or sunset? Use web traffic to determine international expansion plans? Without clarity about what the term means, everybody is free to conclude that it’s somebody else’s problem. 

And this issue gets particularly sticky when it comes to the high-level business of strategy-setting in boards. Practically by definition, a lot of strategic plans and mission statements are vague; operational activities should be off the table during those conversations. But CEOs play a role in providing context around all the things the organization intends to operationalize and the agility they plan to execute. 

Olson doesn’t suggest avoiding those words so much as making sure there’s a consensus around what they mean. “Agile could be illustrated as testing concepts with real customers before full rollout to ensure features solve actual problems and avoid wasted development effort,” she writes. “Customer-first might be illustrated as simplifying policies and approval processes to enable faster resolutions and reduce frustration on both sides.” Implementation still falls to the CEO and staff, but everybody agrees on what problem they’re trying to solve. 

Recently, Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld pointed to a few examples of how jargon doesn’t just misalign organizations but actively harms them. He points to the example of a JP Morgan trader who imperiled the firm after selling higher-ups on gibberish like belly tranch. People are generally uncomfortable admitting they don’t understand something, so bad ideas metastasize. “High-level executives and board directors are afraid to appear unsophisticated before peers,” he writes. “This obfuscation with jargon hides their confusion.”

So, Sonnenfeld makes a radical proposal: Don’t be scared of looking foolish in the name of clarity. “You can only clarify the intentional opaqueness behind cliquish jargon by having the courage to ask the dumb-seeming question,” he writes. The reason why there are no stupid questions, as the line goes, is because failing to ask them often has serious negative consequences.