The High Cost of Confusion: Good Strategy Starts with Shared Language
Good Strategy Starts with Shared Language
Have you ever been in a meeting that went completely off the rails?
You’re there to make a critical decision about a new offering. But instead of discussing strategy, the team spends thirty minutes arguing about what is being offered to customers and the difference between a 'product,' a 'service,' and a 'solution.' The stakeholders that are market-facing can't agree with the stakeholders focused on more internal teams. The energy drains from the room, progress stalls, and everyone leaves feeling frustrated.
This isn't just a hypothetical scenario; it's a daily reality in many growing businesses. We often dismiss these moments as simple miscommunications, but they point to a much deeper and more costly problem: a lack of a shared language.
The Hidden Costs of Ambiguity
When your teams don't have a common vocabulary for your business, the consequences are more than just annoying. This ambiguity creates friction that slows everything down and directly impacts your bottom line.
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Slowed Innovation: Decision-making grinds to a halt when stakeholders are talking past each other. This slow or ineffective change means opportunities are missed while you’re stuck debating semantics.
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Wasted Resources: Teams pursue goals based on their own interpretation of a strategy. This leads to misalignment in action, redundant work, and projects that have to be reworked or abandoned entirely.
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Team Frustration: Nothing burns out a talented team faster than feeling like they're not on the same page. When communication is a constant struggle, morale drops and collaboration suffers.
The Solution: Proactively Align on Language
The solution isn't to create a massive, bureaucratic dictionary. It's to proactively align on the concepts that are difficult, lengthy, or contentious.
A shared portfolio terminology is a set of common definitions for the core components of your business. The goal is to pack meaning, nuance, and implication into words that can be culturally re-used. When a term like 'offering' means the same thing to your sales, marketing, and operations teams, you eliminate confusion and accelerate every conversation that follows.
This shared understanding is the foundation for aligning your market engagement with your capability to provide.
Where to Start
Building a shared language doesn't have to be a massive undertaking. You can start with terminology that is either very common or very difficult. To show you what this looks like in practice, here are a few core definitions we establish first with clients in our Root to Reach™ framework:
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'Output': "A direct and verifiable result of relatively certain inputs; what is produced from a pursuit."
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'Outcome': "An intended effect possibly resulting from both certain and uncertain inputs; the purpose of a pursuit."
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'(the) Market': "An audience characterized by the need to achieve similar outcomes and an ability to exchange something with an organization that can facilitate those outcomes."
Another common struggle we see is the debate over what defines a 'product' versus a 'service.' Our framework solves this by breaking down what the organization sees as complex products or services into their simple, core components. This allows us to clearly define crucial, connected terms like an ‘offering,’ ensuring every team is aligned on what you're actually bringing to market.
From Confusion to Clarity
A shared language is an underrated asset. It’s a simple concept, but it's one of the most powerful tools you have available to align your teams, navigate complexity, and accelerate meaningful innovation. By investing the time to define your terms, you’re not just creating a glossary; you’re building the foundation for a more cohesive and effective organization.
The Root to Reach™ framework provides a simple, visual approach to help your organization build this alignment from the ground up. If you're ready to move past confusion and unite your teams with a shared purpose, let's have a conversation.