The rubber sole of my sneaker hit the floor with a sound that was far too loud for a Monday morning. I had just finished dealing with a spider in the corner of my home office-a calculated strike with a size 46 shoe-and the adrenaline was still humming in my ears when I hopped onto the quarterly all-hands call. The transition from the visceral reality of pest control to the abstract fog of the corporate boardroom was jarring. Within 6 minutes of the meeting starting, a senior vice president, whose background looked suspiciously like a high-resolution stock photo of ‘Success,’ began talking about how we needed to ‘synergize our internal KPIs to unlock dormant value streams across the vertical.’

I looked at the smudge on my shoe. At least that smudge represented a clear outcome. The sentence I just heard, however, was a linguistic smoke grenade. As a fire cause investigator, my entire life is spent looking for the point of origin. I look for the frayed wire, the 6-cent resistor that overheated, the exact moment a spark met a fuel source. In a fire, you can’t hide the truth behind adjectives. If the house burned down because of a faulty toaster, the toaster is the culprit. But in the modern corporate landscape, we’ve built an entire industrial complex designed specifically to ensure that nobody ever has to point at the toaster.

There was a new hire on the call-let’s call her Sarah. I could see her face in one of the tiny digital tiles. She was 26 years old, bright-eyed, and currently wearing the expression of someone trying to solve a Rubik’s cube in a dark room while wearing oven mitts. She was nodding, because that’s what you do when you want to keep your job, but her eyes were darting around, looking for a translation that wasn’t coming. She was hearing the words, but the meaning was staying just out of reach, like a ghost in the machinery. I felt a pang of sympathy. She probably thought she was the problem. She likely assumed that if she just studied the internal wiki long enough, she’d finally understand what a ‘value stream’ actually looks like in the wild.

Language is a map, but jargon is a mirage.

The Hierarchy of Obfuscation

It’s a shell game played with vowels and consonants. In my 16 years of investigating arson and accidental fires, I’ve learned that people only hide things when they are afraid of the consequences of the truth. Corporate jargon is the ultimate hiding place. It creates an in-group-a priesthood of people who can speak ‘Business’-and it effectively silences anyone who values clarity. If you raise your hand and ask, ‘What does that actually mean?’ you aren’t just asking for a definition. You are challenging the hierarchy. You are pointing out that the emperor is not only naked but is also speaking in tongues.

I remember a case about 86 weeks ago involving a warehouse fire. The official report from the company’s safety officer was a masterpiece of obfuscation. It talked about ‘thermal runaway events’ and ‘sub-optimal storage configurations.’ When I got on site and started digging through the charred remains, I found that someone had literally stacked a bunch of oily rags next to a space heater. It wasn’t a ‘thermal runaway event.’ It was a ‘moron with a space heater’ event. But the jargon allowed the company to avoid liability in the court of public opinion for a few extra weeks. It bought them time. That is the primary function of the Corporate Jargon Industrial Complex: it buys time for the incompetent and cover for the directionless.

The Incipient Stage of Collapse

This detachment from reality has a compounding effect. When the language becomes disconnected from the work, the work itself starts to suffer. People stop looking at the actual product and start looking at the slides. They stop talking to customers and start talking to ‘personas.’ It’s a slow-motion disaster. In fire science, we call it the ‘incipient stage.’ It’s the moment before the flames break out, where everything is just getting very, very hot. You can smell it if you know what to look for. The smell of a company in trouble isn’t the smell of red ink; it’s the smell of a 46-page slide deck that contains zero concrete nouns.

I’ve always admired companies that refuse to play this game. There is a certain kind of bravery in being simple. It’s the same bravery it takes to admit you don’t know why a fire started until you’ve actually sifted through the ash. Places like

Push Store

seem to understand this inherently. They don’t wrap their identity in layers of ‘synergistic’ nonsense. They just do the thing they say they’re going to do. It’s refreshing, like a breath of oxygen in a room full of carbon monoxide. When communication is transparent, you don’t need a translator to figure out if you’re doing a good job. You just look at the results.

The Violence of Wasted Time

But most of the world isn’t like that. Most of the world is a series of nested boxes filled with ‘deliverables’ and ‘actionable insights.’ I once spent 106 minutes in a meeting where the word ‘impactful’ was used 36 times, and by the end, I still didn’t know if we were launching a product or firing the janitor. It’s a form of violence, really. It’s the violence of wasting someone’s life-force by forcing them to decode nonsense. We only have a limited number of heartbeats, and using 506 of them to discuss ‘pivoting toward a holistic paradigm’ feels like a crime that should be punishable by something more than just a boring afternoon.

I think we do it because we’re scared of being simple. Simple feels vulnerable. If I tell you exactly what I think, you can disagree with me. You can point out the flaws in my logic. You can see my mistakes. But if I wrap my thoughts in a thick blanket of jargon, I am safe. I am protected by the ambiguity. I can pretend that if you don’t understand me, it’s because you aren’t sophisticated enough to grasp the ‘nuance’ of my ‘strategic vision.’ It’s a classic bully tactic, repackaged for the Zoom era.

Learning from Failure

Let’s go back to Nova B.K.-that’s me, in case you forgot. My job is to be the person who says, ‘The fire started here.’ I don’t get to use jargon because if I’m wrong, people die or insurance companies lose millions of dollars. There is a high cost to being vague in my world.

I’ve made mistakes, of course. I once misidentified the source of a basement fire because I was too focused on the electrical panel and ignored the fact that the homeowner had been brewing illegal kombucha in the corner. I was embarrassed, but I had to admit it. I had to write a report that said, ‘I was wrong. It was the fermented tea.’ If I had been a corporate executive, I could have just said that the ‘liquid-state biological assets underwent an unscheduled pressure-release event.’ I would have been promoted. Instead, I had to take the hit. But taking the hit meant I learned. It meant the next time I walked into a basement, I looked at everything, not just the stuff that fit my narrative.

Truth is the only fire-retardant that actually works.

Jargon prevents that kind of learning. It creates a feedback loop where the only thing that matters is the consensus of the in-group. If everyone agrees that the ‘value streams are being unlocked,’ then they are, regardless of what the bank account says. It’s a collective hallucination. And like all hallucinations, it eventually runs into the brick wall of reality. Usually, that reality looks like a mass layoff or a bankrupt brand. By the time the smoke clears, the people who generated the jargon have already moved on to ‘disrupt’ another industry, leaving the Sarahs of the world to wander through the ruins, wondering what happened.

Paying Down the Debt

I’m tired of the smoke. I’m tired of the way we use language to distance ourselves from the consequences of our actions. We need more people who are willing to be ‘unpolished.’ We need more people who are willing to say, ‘I don’t know what that word means, and I suspect you don’t either.’ We need to treat jargon like the technical debt it is-something to be paid down, aggressively, until the language we use actually matches the world we live in.