Take Them on a Field Trip
About this episode
Matt discusses the impact of jargon in communication and the importance of using metaphors to convey complex ideas simply.
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…
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