Matt’s thinking about jargon — the contagion of it. He traces his own history with it, from picking up the language of every industry he passed through to the intoxicating first year of law school, when a whole new vocabulary of Latin phrases made him feel like an insider. The problem is that insider language has an exclusionary effect, and it’s everywhere: he ran a quick search and pulled up the military-derived terms business swims in (war room, battle plan, boots on the ground, beachhead, kill switch) and the industrial-engineering ones (bottlenecks, throughput, feedback loop, stress test). Useful in their place — but even when everyone in the room shares the jargon, people glaze over.
The antidote comes from an Inc. piece on Reed Hastings, analyzed by communication expert Carmine Gallo: Hastings repeatedly converts complicated leadership and AI ideas into simple, named metaphors. “Team, not family.” “Farming for dissent” — because a farm is something you never stop tending, always working the seasons and cycles, actively cultivating disagreement rather than passively waiting for it. The principle is to connect an unfamiliar idea to something the audience already knows, and to give important behaviors language people can remember and repeat. Matt is an unabashed devotee of the farm metaphor himself (a farm is simple to picture yet endlessly complex — soil, timing, seasons, one plant affecting another), and he widens the lesson: because we think in pictures, a vivid metaphor paints one, and even a spoken “imagine…” can lift people out of their jargon walls. His favorite frame for it is the field trip — that childhood jolt of wonder when the ordinary day cracks open into an adventure, a feeling we never outgrow. He notes this will be central to his upcoming “Iconic Introduction” program for established experts and executives leaving corporate. The prompt for the week: what jargon could you replace today with a metaphor or short story that takes people somewhere?
