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Somewhere right now, in a conference room with bad lighting and worse coffee, someone is saying the phrase “let us leverage our synergies to move the needle on our core competencies.” And somewhere in that same room, someone else is nodding along while having absolutely no idea what was just said.
This is not a communication problem. It is a philosophy problem. And a dead Austrian philosopher figured it out about a hundred years ago.
Ludwig Wittgenstein spent most of his intellectual life obsessed with a single question: what does it actually mean for words to mean something? He did not care about grammar rules or dictionary definitions. He wanted to know how language works in the wild, when real people use it in real situations. And if he could sit in on your Monday morning standup meeting, he would probably have a lot to say. None of it would be flattering.
The Philosopher Who Broke Language Twice
Wittgenstein is one of the few thinkers in history who built an entire philosophical framework, convinced the academic world it was brilliant, and then turned around and said he was wrong. He did this not out of modesty but out of genuine intellectual restlessness, which makes him far more interesting than most philosophers who simply pick a hill and die on it.
In his early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he argued that language is essentially a picture of reality. Words map onto facts the way a photograph maps onto a scene. If a sentence does not correspond to some arrangement of things in the world, it is, strictly speaking, meaningless. Not wrong. Not debatable. Meaningless. Under this framework, saying “we need to ideate around our value proposition” would not be a bad sentence. It would be no sentence at all.
But Wittgenstein eventually realized this picture theory was too rigid. Language is not a camera. It is more like a toolbox. A hammer and a screwdriver look nothing alike, and you would not use them for the same job, but they are both perfectly legitimate tools. Words work the same way. The word “game” does not have one fixed meaning that covers chess, football, and solitaire. Instead, these uses share what Wittgenstein called family resemblances. They overlap in messy, informal, perfectly functional ways.
This is where his later work, Philosophical Investigations, becomes genuinely useful for anyone who has ever sat through a strategy presentation and felt their brain gently detach from their skull.
Language Games and the Ones Nobody Wins
Wittgenstein introduced the concept of “language games” to describe how words get their meaning not from some cosmic dictionary but from the specific activities and contexts in which people use them. Ordering a coffee is a language game. Telling a joke is a language game. Filing a tax return is a deeply unpleasant language game. Each one has its own rules, and those rules are understood by the participants.
The problem with corporate jargon is not that the words are complicated. Plenty of specialized fields use complicated words perfectly well. A surgeon saying “we need to perform a laparoscopic cholecystectomy” is using technical language that points to a very specific, very real procedure. Everyone in the operating room knows exactly what that means.
But when a middle manager says “we need to operationalize our go to market strategy to capture mindshare in the B2B space,” something different is happening. The words are not pointing to anything specific. They are performing a social function instead. They signal belonging. They communicate status. They fill the air with the sound of competence without the substance of it.
Wittgenstein would say these words have become detached from any language game that does actual work. They are spinning freely, like a gear that is not connected to the machine. It looks like it is doing something. It is not.
When Words Go on Vacation
One of Wittgenstein’s most memorable lines is that philosophical problems arise “when language goes on holiday.” He meant that confusion happens when we take words out of the contexts where they function and try to use them somewhere they do not belong.
Corporate jargon is language on a permanent vacation. It has checked into a resort, ordered a drink with an umbrella in it, and has no plans to return to work.
Consider the word “alignment.” In physics, it refers to objects arranged along a line. In medicine, it can refer to the positioning of bones. In both cases, you could, if pressed, point to something and say “that is what alignment looks like.” But in a corporate setting, “alignment” floats free of any concrete referent. Are we aligned? What does that look like? If two departments disagree on a budget, are they misaligned, or are they simply disagreeing? The word “alignment” makes the disagreement sound like a mechanical failure rather than what it actually is: two groups of people who want different things.
This is not innocent. When you replace “we disagree” with “we are not aligned,” you have subtly changed the nature of the problem. Disagreements require negotiation, compromise, sometimes even admitting someone is wrong. Misalignment just requires a quick adjustment. A tune up. The language has smuggled in an assumption about the solution by disguising the problem.
Wittgenstein would have found this fascinating. And also probably infuriating.
The Beetle in the Box
There is a famous thought experiment in the Philosophical Investigations known as the beetle in the box. Imagine everyone has a small box, and everyone calls whatever is inside their box a “beetle.” But no one can look inside anyone else’s box. For all you know, everyone has something different in there. Some boxes might even be empty.
Wittgenstein’s point was about private experience, but the analogy maps onto corporate language with uncomfortable precision. When someone in a meeting says “innovation,” what is in their box? For the engineer, it might mean building something technically novel. For the marketing lead, it might mean repackaging an existing product with a new color scheme. For the CEO, it might mean whatever will impress investors at the next earnings call.
Everyone nods when someone says “we need more innovation” because disagreeing with innovation is like disagreeing with sunshine. But the nodding is an illusion of agreement. Each person walks away with a different beetle in their box, planning to do entirely different things, all under the shared banner of a word that has quietly meant nothing to anyone.
This is, by the way, exactly how projects go off the rails. Not because people disagree. Because they think they agree when they do not.
A Detour Through Orwell (Because He Was Right Too)
Wittgenstein was not the only one who noticed that fuzzy language creates fuzzy thinking. George Orwell made a strikingly similar argument in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” though he came at it from a political rather than philosophical angle. Orwell argued that vague language is not just a symptom of unclear thinking. It is a cause of it. When you reach for a prefabricated phrase instead of constructing a precise one, you are letting the language think for you. And it will not think well.
The overlap between Orwell and Wittgenstein is not accidental. Both understood that language is not a neutral container for ideas. It shapes the ideas it carries. If your organization communicates primarily in buzzwords, your organization will eventually think in buzzwords.
The Counterintuitive Part: Some Jargon Is Fine
Here is where things get interesting. A strict reading of Wittgenstein does not lead to the conclusion that all specialized language is bad. Quite the opposite. Wittgenstein was deeply respectful of language that works within its proper game. Mathematicians, plumbers, chess players, and jazz musicians all use insider vocabulary that would baffle outsiders. That is not a problem. That is language doing its job within a community of practice.
The issue is not specialization. The issue is when language pretends to be specialized but is actually hollow. A software engineer saying “we need to refactor the authentication module” is using jargon that points to a real task. A consultant saying “we need to reimagine our authentication paradigm” is using jargon that points to a fog.
The test is surprisingly simple, and it is basically Wittgenstein’s test: can you cash out the words in terms of specific actions? If someone says “we need to boost engagement,” can they tell you what that means in practice? More comments? Longer session times? Fewer people closing the tab in disgust? If the answer is “well, all of that, sort of, in general,” then the words are not doing any work. They are wearing a hard hat and standing near the construction site, but they are not lifting anything.
What Would Wittgenstein Do (In Your Next Meeting)?
Applying Wittgenstein to the workplace does not require a philosophy degree. It requires something much harder: the willingness to ask “what do you mean by that?” in a room full of people who would rather not say.
This is uncomfortable because vague language serves a social purpose. It lets everyone feel like they are on the same page without the awkward process of actually getting on the same page. Asking someone to define their terms can feel confrontational, even rude. But Wittgenstein would argue that the alternative is worse. The alternative is an organization where people communicate in elaborate rituals of meaninglessness, where meetings produce action items that no one can act on because no one knows what they mean, and where the gap between what is said and what is done grows wider every quarter.
Here is a practical framework, inspired by Wittgenstein but translated for people who have deadlines:
First, when you hear a piece of jargon, ask yourself whether it could be replaced with simpler words without losing meaning. If “let us leverage our existing assets” just means “let us use what we have,” say that instead. You have not lost anything. You have gained clarity, which is the one thing no organization has ever complained about having too much of.
Second, watch for words that generate agreement without generating understanding. “Customer centricity” is a perfect example. No one in the history of business has ever said “I think we should care less about our customers.” The phrase adds no information. It is applause dressed up as strategy.
Third, pay attention to the moment when language stops describing reality and starts replacing it. This is the most dangerous move in the corporate playbook. When a company says “we are pivoting” instead of “our original plan failed,” the language is not just being imprecise. It is actively distorting the situation. Pivots sound graceful. Failures do not. But you can only learn from the thing you are willing to name honestly.
The Silence at the End
The Tractatus ends with one of the most famous lines in philosophy: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wittgenstein meant this as a statement about the limits of language itself. There are things that cannot be expressed in words, and the honest response to those things is silence rather than hand waving.
Corporate culture has taken the opposite approach. Where there is nothing meaningful to say, it has invented an entire vocabulary to say it anyway. The result is a world where people talk more and communicate less, where presentations get longer and meaning gets thinner, where every quarter brings a new set of buzzwords that will be quietly abandoned and replaced by next year.
Wittgenstein would suggest a radical alternative: if you do not have something clear to say, do not say anything. Not every silence needs to be filled. Not every strategy needs a slogan. Not every meeting needs to produce a deck full of words that will never be read again.
This is not about dumbing things down. It is about the opposite. It is about respecting language enough to use it precisely, respecting your colleagues enough to speak to them clearly, and respecting your own thinking enough to notice when you are hiding behind comfortable abstractions instead of doing the harder work of saying what you actually mean.
Wittgenstein spent his whole life trying to understand the relationship between language and the world. The least we can do is spend five minutes in our next meeting trying to make sure our words are actually connected to something real.
The beetles in our boxes deserve at least that much.
