Your Internal Language Is Costing You More Than You Think

A Flicker of Embarrassment

We've lived this one. When we were leading at our previous company, there was always a moment in new employee onboarding that nobody looked forward to: the part where we'd pull out the acronym document. The internal dictionary we'd built so new people could actually follow a meeting. Every time, there was a quiet flicker of embarrassment, because handing someone a glossary on their first week was a tacit admission that we'd been building our own language for so long that outsiders needed a translation key just to keep up.

For weeks after that, you'd see the new people cock their heads sideways mid-conversation, write something down, and go back to the dictionary later. The organization had gotten so comfortable inside its own vocabulary that it had stopped noticing what it cost everyone else to keep up.

Acronyms Seriously Suck

Elon Musk spotted the same pattern at SpaceX and responded in characteristic fashion: with a company-wide memo. The subject line was blunt: Acronyms Seriously Suck. The relevant passage:

"There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping new employees from understanding what is going on. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot be defended, it should be eliminated."

Musk was describing, with unusual precision, a real organizational failure mode: language that begins as shorthand and ends as a wall.

There is a real cost to the complexity Musk was addressing in his memo. A 2025 report by Kickresume found that poor communication driven by jargon and internal complexity costs a small business of around 100 employees approximately $546,000 per year in lost productivity. Complexity wasn’t causing a single visible failure, but the accumulated friction of people spending time seeking clarification, misaligning on tasks, and hesitating before they speak because they're not sure they're using the right terms. For a mid-size company of around 1,000 employees, that figure climbs to roughly $6 million annually. This complexity tax doesn’t show up as a line item on the balance sheet. It reveals itself as slowness, rework, and the kind of disengagement that's hard to diagnose from a dashboard.

Accumulating Complexity Clutter

Most of the complexity that accumulates in organizations doesn't arrive as a deliberate decision. It infects as a series of reasonable-sounding proposals and decisions built up over time. A team coins an acronym to save time in recurring conversations. A department builds a process that made sense when there were twelve people and still exists now that there are sixty. A leader introduces a framework that became part of the internal vocabulary but was never explained to anyone hired after that year. Individually, each of these things seems like a small efficiency. Collectively, they become an invisible tax on everyone who wasn't there when they were created, and a genuine barrier for anyone new, external, or not already fluent in the culture.

Leaders need to challenge whether any of this complexity is actually doing useful work. Some internal language is real shorthand for concepts that would otherwise take a paragraph to explain. That's worth keeping. But a lot of what accumulates isn't about clarity, it's about identity. Jargon that makes people feel like insiders. Processes that have survived long past their useful life because removing them would require someone to own that decision. Acronyms that exist because someone stamped their tenure on the organization and the stamp just never came off.

Eliminate Complexity, Increase Your Value

This is the heart of what Eliminate Complexity, the second principle in the BrandTruth Alignment™ System, is asking leaders to audit. Not just the strategic question of how many initiatives are in flight, but the operational one: how much of the way this organization communicates, documents, and structures its work is making us faster, and how much of it is just complexity we've learned to live with?

If you're a business owner thinking about value - whether that means scaling, bringing in a partner, or eventually transitioning the business - this matters beyond the cultural inconvenience. Operational complexity that is embedded in informal knowledge, undocumented processes, and internal language that only longtime employees understand is a risk flag for any external party evaluating the business. It signals a system that is harder to transfer, harder to scale, and more fragile than it looks on a financials report. 

Simplicity, on the other hand - clear processes, plain language, decisions that don't require a decoder ring - is a signal that the business is genuinely transferable. That it can run without the people who built it having to explain everything from scratch.

A useful starting test: give your last all-staff communication to someone who doesn't work in your industry and ask them to read it. Count the words they'd have to look up. That number is a measure of the distance between where your organization lives and where everyone else does, and every unit of that distance is costing you something.

If you want to take a closer look at where complexity might be hiding in your organization, and what it's costing you in ways that don't show up obviously, reach out to us at contact@leadershipinfocus.ca.