There's a meeting that happens in every organization. It's the one where smart, committed people sit in the same room, discuss the same problem, and leave with completely different understandings of what was decided.
Not because they disagree. Because they're using the same words to mean different things.
"Capability" means one thing to the strategy team, another to IT, and a third to HR. "Service" means something different in operations than it does in marketing. "Customer" means the person who pays in one department and the person who receives in another. The words are shared. The meanings aren't.
Nobody notices, because the meeting feels productive. Heads nod. Action items are assigned. People leave with the impression of alignment. Then execution begins, and the different interpretations collide. The integration project stalls because two teams defined "customer data" differently. The capability assessment shows green because one department measured maturity as "we have people doing this" while another measured it as "we have a repeatable, measurable process." The strategy sounds clear at the executive level and incoherent at the front line.
This is not a failure of intelligence or effort. It's a failure of infrastructure. Your organization is missing a shared vocabulary — and it's paying for that absence on every conversation, every initiative, every decision.
The Reinvention Tax
Every time your organization starts something new — a strategic initiative, a transformation project, a cross-functional improvement effort — the first weeks are consumed by the same invisible work: building shared understanding from scratch.
What do we mean by "capability"? What do we mean by "value"? What do we mean by "stakeholder"? What counts as a "process" versus a "service"? These aren't philosophical questions. They're operational prerequisites. No team can design, build, or improve something until everyone agrees on what they're talking about.
This is the reinvention tax: the cost of rebuilding a common vocabulary every time the organization needs to collaborate across boundaries.
It shows up in four specific ways:
Duplicated effort. Multiple teams solving the same definitional problems independently. One project team spends weeks defining "customer experience" for their context. Down the hall, another team finished the same exercise six months ago and arrived at a different definition. Neither knows about the other's work. Both are doing it well. Both are doing it redundantly.
Inconsistent language. The same terms meaning different things across the organization. This isn't a minor annoyance. It means that when leaders compare initiatives, they're comparing apples to concepts that might be oranges or might be a different variety of apple — and nobody can tell which.
Lost knowledge. Insights from one initiative failing to transfer to the next because they were encoded in project-specific vocabulary that nobody else uses. The team disbands. The knowledge evaporates. The next team starts from zero.
Slow alignment. Every cross-functional conversation beginning with "What do we mean by...?" before any substantive work can happen. The alignment work doesn't appear on any project plan. It doesn't have a budget line. It consumes weeks of calendar time and nobody is accountable for reducing it.
The reinvention tax is invisible because it's embedded in how work happens. Nobody tracks the hours spent re-establishing common ground. Nobody measures the cost of inconsistent definitions. But the tax is real, and it compounds. The larger and more complex the organization, the higher the tax.
The Chasm Between What's Said and What's Heard
When the organization is stable, the reinvention tax is a nuisance. When the organization needs to change, it becomes a crisis.
Complex change requires collaboration. Collaboration requires communication. Communication requires a common language. Without it, there's a chasm between what one group means and what another group hears.
You've seen this chasm. It's the strategy document that means one thing to the team that wrote it and something else to the team implementing it. It's the governance question that can't be answered because the people being asked are measuring different things under the same label. It's the meeting where everyone agrees to a plan and then executes differently because they interpreted the key terms differently.
The chasm isn't dramatic. It doesn't announce itself. It's persistent, grinding, and cumulative. And its cost far exceeds the cost of the occasional visible failure.
Consider what happens when the stakes are high. In 1983, an Air Canada flight ran out of fuel mid-flight because the ground crew calculated fuel in pounds while the aircraft's systems used kilograms. In 1999, NASA lost a Mars orbiter because one engineering team used metric units and another used imperial. Hundreds of millions of dollars and human lives put at risk — not by incompetence, but by the absence of a common standard applied consistently.
Your organization probably isn't putting spacecraft at risk. But the principle is identical. When one part of the organization defines "mature capability" as "we have people doing this" and another defines it as "we have a repeatable, measured process," the capability assessment that results will show green while hiding serious gaps. When one team's "customer data" is another team's "client records," the integration project that depends on them will fail. The failures are less dramatic than a spacecraft crashing. They're no less real.
The Four Gaps Get Worse Without a Shared Language
If you've thought about the strategy-execution gap — the persistent disconnect between what organizations intend and what they deliver — the common language problem amplifies every dimension of it.
The gap between purpose and strategy widens when leaders can't express purpose in terms that translate into choices. "We exist to serve our community" means something different to every person in the room. Without shared vocabulary for describing what value the organization creates and for whom, purpose stays aspirational and strategy stays political.
The gap between strategy and capability widens when strategic commitments are made in language that doesn't map to organizational reality. The strategy says "customer intimacy." The capability model (if one exists) says "transactional processing." But nobody sees the disconnect because the two conversations happen in different vocabularies.
The gap between capability and operations widens when capabilities are described in architectural language that operations teams don't use, or when operations use terms that don't appear in any capability map. The capabilities exist on paper. The operations work around them. Two parallel vocabularies, two parallel realities.
The gap between operations and purpose widens when the metrics used to govern operations can't be traced back to the outcomes that define purpose. The dashboards are green because they measure processing speed. Nobody can answer whether the people being served are actually better off, because "outcomes" means something different at every level.
Every one of these gaps is exacerbated — often caused — by the absence of a common vocabulary that connects the conversation at each level to the conversations at every other level.
What Organizations Actually Need
The solution isn't a glossary. A glossary is a list of definitions. It sits in a document that nobody opens. It doesn't change how people think or talk.
What organizations need is a shared model — a structured representation of the business that everyone can point to, debate, and use as the starting point for decisions.
Not a model built from scratch by each project team. A reference model: a pre-built, community-validated starting point that captures what organizations like yours typically look like, what capabilities they typically need, and how value typically flows. Think of it as a map drawn by people who've navigated similar territory. You still have to chart your own route, but you don't start with a blank page.
The power of a reference model isn't precision. It's shared understanding. When everyone in the room is looking at the same structured representation of the business — the same named capabilities, the same value flows, the same building blocks — the conversation shifts from "What are we talking about?" to "What do we need to change?"
That shift is worth more than any strategy document. It's the difference between a room full of parallel monologues and a room having genuine dialogue.
The Conversation Tool, Not the Compliance Instrument
There's a critical distinction that determines whether shared vocabulary actually works in an organization or becomes another ignored artifact.
Reference models succeed when they're treated as conversation tools — frameworks that people use in strategy workshops, capability assessments, governance discussions, and project kickoffs. When a leader pulls up the capability model in a meeting and says "Where are we strong? Where are we weak?" — that's a reference model earning its keep.
Reference models fail when they're treated as compliance instruments — technical deliverables that sit in a repository, maintained by a team nobody talks to, referenced in checklists nobody reads. The model can be technically perfect. If nobody uses it to have a conversation, it's expensive wallpaper.
The difference isn't in the model. It's in how the organization positions it. Two organizations can have the same reference model. In one, it's a living part of how decisions get made. In the other, it's a document that architecture teams cite and everyone else ignores.
The organizations that get this right treat their shared vocabulary the way they treat their financial reporting: as a foundational infrastructure that everyone uses, not a specialist tool that one team maintains.
Start With the Vocabulary You're Missing
You don't need a major initiative to start closing the vocabulary gap. You need one honest observation.
In your next cross-functional meeting, pay attention to the moment when the conversation stalls — not because people disagree, but because they're using the same words differently. Note the term. Note the different interpretations. Note how long it takes to resolve (if it ever does).
That gap is your reinvention tax in action. And the question it raises is simple: does your organization have a shared vocabulary for its business architecture? Can your leaders describe the business model, the capabilities, and the value flows in terms that mean the same thing to everyone in the room?
If the answer is no, you've found the reason your strategies take longer to execute, your integrations take longer to integrate, and your alignment conversations feel like they're starting from scratch every time.
The vocabulary isn't the strategy. But without it, every strategy conversation is harder, slower, and more prone to misalignment than it needs to be.
This post is drawn from Building the Common Language, a self-paced course that shows how shared vocabulary transforms the quality of strategic conversations — and why the organizations that invest in it execute faster than those that don't.