Polish isn’t thinking

Take your organisation’s latest strategy statement, cover up the logo and read it again. Could it belong to a bank? A hospital? A moderately ambitious cereal brand?

If so, you don’t have a strategy statement. You have a very well-dressed placeholder.

The badly written document is rarely the dangerous one. People frown at it, scribble in the margins and ask what on earth it means. The beautifully written document gets waved through, even when nobody in the room could explain it to their partner over dinner.

There was a time when writing well took effort, and that effort usually involved some thinking. If a document read clearly, somebody had probably wrestled with what they meant, often late at night and with less coffee than the job deserved. That connection has gone. Templates, comms teams, slide libraries and now AI will turn out fluent, confident, on-message copy faster than you can say “key strategic pillar”. Polish costs next to nothing, so it no longer tells you whether anyone did the thinking.

Our brains haven’t caught up. A smooth sentence still feels like a settled idea, and a slick deck still feels like a decision. Nothing snags, so everyone nods, and the nodding gets mistaken for agreement.

Most of this isn’t deliberate. Nobody wakes up planning to produce eleven slides of elegant nothing. It happens because communication gets treated as the final step. Somebody decides something, it gets “packaged up”, and it has to be out by Friday because the CEO is off to Noosa on Monday.

So the words are chosen because they sound right rather than because they are right. Take this one, which I’d bet has appeared in some form in half the strategy documents in the country:

“We will drive alignment across the business to unlock value.”

It’s grammatical and confident, and it would look terrific on a banner in the foyer. It’s also impossible to argue with, and that should worry you. If nobody could possibly disagree with a sentence, it probably hasn’t committed to anything yet. Who is meant to agree with whom, and about what? Which value, for whom, and how would anyone know it had been unlocked? I’ve never once seen the key.

Words like “alignment” and “value” are what linguists call nominalisations, verbs that have been turned into nouns. They’re useful, but they quietly remove the people and the actions from a sentence, which is exactly why corporate writing is so fond of them. You can describe a change without anybody having to change anything.

Harry Frankfurt, the philosopher, defined bullshit as talk produced without any real concern for whether it’s true. Most corporate polish isn’t that cynical. The trouble is usually timing: the words got written before anyone had worked out what was true.

That’s the part people miss about language. We tend to think of words as the packaging for ideas that are already finished, but they’re also how we finish them. When you try to say something plainly and can’t, the problem usually isn’t your writing. The idea isn’t ready. Jargon is the Polyfilla of unfinished thinking, and hiring a better writer to smooth it over is like hiring a better florist for a building that hasn’t got any foundations.

So before something important goes out, I’d suggest a few uncomfortable checks.

First, try explaining it to a neighbour at a barbecue. If you can’t do it in a couple of sentences without them drifting off towards the sausages, you’re relying on the jargon to carry it.

Then ask who will actually do something differently on Monday morning if this works. Name a real role and a real action. “Leverage synergies” doesn’t count, however good it looks in a bullet point.

And ask what it rules out. A strategy that excludes nothing is really a wish list with a logo on it. If nobody has to stop doing anything, nothing much has been decided.

You don’t need a consultant or a two-day offsite with lanyards to do any of this. You need one person prepared to ask the slightly awkward question, preferably before the banner goes to the printer.

I’m not against polish. Clear, well-made writing matters, and I’ll happily spend twenty minutes on a single sentence. But polish belongs at the end of the job. It’s what you do once you know what you mean, and it’s a poor substitute for finding out.