When Everyone Saying the Same Word Means Something Different
Executive insight
Using the same word does not automatically create strategic alignment. Alignment emerges when leaders translate meaning across the different contexts in which people make decisions.
The skill of translation is not simplification; it’s about preserving meaning while changing context.
Shared vocabulary is not shared understanding.
Several years ago, I worked with the City of Raleigh on resilience planning.
At first glance, resilience seemed like a word everyone could support. Who would argue against building a more resilient city?
But as we facilitated conversations across departments, disciplines, and stakeholder groups, it became clear that people were using the same word to describe very different things.
For some, resilience meant infrastructure hardening: wider roads, stronger stormwater systems, expanded utility capacity, or facilities better able to withstand disruption. For others, it meant economic diversity, emergency preparedness, food security, public trust, neighborhood relationships, or residents’ ability to recover when formal systems were overwhelmed.
None of those interpretations were wrong. But they were incomplete.
That is where many strategies begin to weaken: not because people disagree with the goal, but because they understand the goal through different contexts, constraints, and responsibilities.
A shared word is not the same thing as shared understanding.
Translation preserves meaning while changing context
Leaders often respond to misalignment by communicating more: They repeat the strategy. Clarify the message. Simplify the language. Cascade priorities through meetings, memos, dashboards, and operating reviews.
Communication matters, but communication alone is not always enough. Sometimes the problem is not that the message is unclear; the problem is that it has not been translated.
Leadership research has long recognized the importance of people who work across boundaries, connect information, and help knowledge move between groups.[1] Research on framing also shows that leaders shape meaning through language, not merely through the decisions they announce.[2]
In practice, that work is not just coordination. It is translation.
Translation is the leadership discipline of carrying meaning across boundaries without losing the intent. It helps people understand what a strategy means in the context of their own decisions, risks, incentives, and responsibilities.
Translation is not simplification. Simplification can strip away nuance.
Translation preserves meaning while changing context.
That distinction matters because the most important strategic conversations often happen across disciplines, not within them.
Resilience was never just an engineering problem
In municipal planning, it is natural to begin with physical infrastructure. Roads, water systems, wastewater facilities, emergency services, power systems, and public buildings are visible, measurable, and essential to daily life.
But resilience is larger than infrastructure.
It is also economic, social, psychological, environmental, operational, and civic.
The City’s resilience work included planning for low-probability, high-impact events, including a solar storm or electromagnetic pulse that disabled the electric grid and a global pandemic requiring significant quarantining. It also included examining changing risk patterns, such as the increasing likelihood of temperature extremes and high-precipitation events.
Each conversation required translation.
Engineers, planners, emergency managers, elected officials, public servants, private citizens, and community stakeholders brought different perspectives on risk, value, responsibility, and acceptable tradeoffs.
The work was not simply to choose a definition of resilience; the work was to help people understand how their different definitions fit together.
The right frame changed the solution
One workshop created a particularly important shift.
As participants examined the City’s vulnerabilities, they realized Raleigh itself was in a relatively strong position. The larger risk was that some planned actions for sewage and stormwater management could create downstream consequences for much smaller communities.
That insight changed the frame.
The question was no longer only: “How do we make Raleigh’s infrastructure more resilient?”
It became: “How do we improve resilience without shifting risk onto others?”
That reframing led to a different solution.
The City redesigned its primary wastewater treatment facility, moving from open aerobic digestion to closed anaerobic digestion. The change reduced vulnerability during high-precipitation events, improved effluent quality, lowered the facility’s carbon footprint, and created useful byproducts, including sanitary manure and renewable natural gas.
It also changed the economics of the facility.
Because the new process reduced the need for thousands of acres of land used for spraying Class B manure, that land could be considered for solar leasing. What began as a wastewater resilience conversation expanded into a broader opportunity involving environmental performance, renewable energy, operational risk reduction, and new revenue streams.
That is what translation makes possible: When leaders translate across disciplines, they help people see more of the system. When people see more of the system, they make better decisions.
Strategy becomes real across boundaries
Strategy is often developed in one language and executed in many others.
Executives may describe direction in terms of growth, resilience, transformation, efficiency, innovation, or customer value. But those words do not become operational until people across the organization understand what they mean for the choices they make every day.
For technology and engineering teams, a strategy may translate into technical requirements, design constraints, infrastructure priorities, or operational risk.
For commercial operations, it may translate into customer value, cost recovery, adoption, workforce capability, service delivery, or sustainable revenue.
For governance, it may translate into decision rights, policies, incentives, public commitments, accountability, or organizational priorities.
The same strategy moves through each of those contexts. Without translation, each group may act on a partial understanding of the goal. With translation, those perspectives can become complementary rather than competing.
This is why cross-functional leadership matters. The leader’s role is not to flatten complexity until every audience hears the same simplified message. The leader’s role is to preserve meaning as the strategy moves across disciplines.
The most important strategic conversations often happen across disciplines, not within them.
That is where assumptions surface.
That is where tradeoffs become visible.
That is where a shared word becomes shared understanding.
And that is where strategy becomes possible to execute.
References
[1] Michael L. Tushman, “Special Boundary Roles in the Innovation Process,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 4, 1977, pp. 587–605. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/2392402
[2] Gail T. Fairhurst, The Power of Framing: Creating the Language of Leadership, Jossey-Bass, 2011.
[3] Christopher Ernst and Donna Chrobot-Mason, Boundary Spanning Leadership: Six Practices for Solving Problems, Driving Innovation, and Transforming Organizations, McGraw-Hill, 2010.
