“Everyone's aligned.”
You've said it. Your boss has said it. The consultant put it in the deck.
And then nothing happened.
Here's what I've come to understand about the words transformation leaders use most confidently: the confidence is part of the problem.
“Alignment.” “Adoption.” “Transformation.” “Capability." “Change management.” These words travel across organizations at the speed of a leadership all-hands and arrive at every desk meaning something slightly different to everyone who hears them. Nobody flags the discrepancy. The words sound like shared understanding. They're actually a kind of definitional fog.
And that fog is itself a capability problem. You cannot build what you cannot precisely name.
Let me show you what this looks like in practice.
“Alignment” gets used as a complete sentence: We have alignment. As if alignment is a state you reach and then keep. As if agreeing in a room on Tuesday is the same thing as doing something different on Thursday.
It isn't. Real alignment shows up in behavior, not in the meeting. The test I've started using: Who on your team has done something differently this week because of this initiative — not because they were asked to, but because they're actually moving? If you can't name them, you don't have alignment. You have agreement, which is a completely different thing.
"Adoption" gets measured by usage metrics: logins, completions, attendance. Those measure exposure. They don't measure whether a single behavior has changed. An organization can have 94% adoption of a new platform and zero change in how decisions get made. The number looks like progress. The organization hasn't moved.
"Transformation" means everything — therefore means nothing. I've sat in rooms where one person meant "we're digitizing our processes," another meant "we're changing our business model," and a third meant "we're updating our culture." All three were using the word "transformation" with complete confidence. None of them were working on the same problem.
"Capability" gets heard as an HR term, a technology term, or a training intervention. In how I use it — and this distinction is the whole argument — capability is the combination of mindsets, skillsets, and operating conditions that determine whether an organization can actually do what it's being asked to do. Not whether it has the software. Whether it has the human and organizational architecture to absorb and act on something genuinely new.
That is a completely different conversation than the one most organizations are having when they say "we need to build capability."
The problem with definitional fog isn't that people are careless. It's that the words sound right. They have the shape of shared understanding. They travel well in presentations and get used in strategy documents without anyone stopping to say: wait, what do we actually mean by that?
And then the initiative launches. The words that sounded like alignment — that felt like shared purpose — turn out to have been covering up three different strategies, two different theories of change, and a set of expectations nobody had actually surfaced.
The measurement system shows red. The post-mortem blames execution.
This newsletter is, in part, an attempt to build a more precise vocabulary for this work.
Not jargon. Not a proprietary framework with a trademark. A working vocabulary — words that have earned their definitions through repeated confrontation with what actually happens in organizations when strategic change is asked of them.
Over the coming issues, I'll take some of these words apart. Not to be pedantic about language. To surface what's actually being covered up when we use the confident version without doing the definitional work.
Because here's the thing: the gap between what a word sounds like and what it actually means — in your organization, in your context, with your people and your operating conditions — is often exactly where the initiative is stalling.
Getting that precise is not a vocabulary exercise. It is a leadership act.
A quick check, for your own context:
Pick one word your leadership team uses most confidently right now. “Alignment.” “Transformation.” “Adoption.” Whatever it is.
Now ask: if you asked five people in a key meeting to write down, right now, what that word means in practice for this initiative — would the answers match?
If you're not sure — that's probably worth knowing before the next phase launches.
Amy Radin is a strategic advisor, keynote speaker, and Columbia University lecturer focused on why transformation succeeds or stalls in large, complex organizations. Drawing on senior leadership roles at Citi, American Express, and AXA, including one of the world's first corporate Chief Innovation Officer roles, she helps leaders build the capabilities required to absorb, scale, and sustain change. Learn more at amyradin.com.