Speaking vaguely is not courtesy; it is the polite packaging of dumping the labour of understanding onto the other side — and out of that packaging the same thing always emerges: time paid for by someone else.
Corporate life rewards vagueness. The open-ended sentence carries no risk; it offends no one, promises no one anything, binds no one. “Let’s evaluate,” “we’ll take a look,” “positive in principle” — none of these sentences can be proven wrong, because none of them says anything. The speaker relaxes; the listener takes up the job of guessing what was left unsaid. The meeting ends, and the work begins now: everyone interprets what they heard in their own favour, and three weeks later, at the same table, with the same agenda, another lap is run.
The Bill for Vagueness
To mistake this for a matter of style is to underestimate the problem. Vagueness is a cost transfer: it shifts the labour of thinking from speaker to listener, the burden of deciding from top to bottom, today’s tension into tomorrow’s crisis. The unclear brief is the unlimited revision written at the agency’s expense. The unclear goal is the directionless marathon the team is made to run. The unclear feedback is the decision made behind someone’s back, minus the courage to say it to their face. And what all of these share is that the bill is issued not to the speaker but to the listener.
Clarity, on the other hand, is expensive — for the speaker. To build a clear sentence you must first think clearly; if you cannot reduce your request to a single sentence, the problem is not in the sentence but in the request. The clear sentence binds you, makes you falsifiable, opens you to objection. Which is precisely why it is respectful: it leaves the other person not a guessing game but ground on which they can answer.
The clear sentence is expensive for the speaker and cheap for the listener; the vague sentence is the reverse. Courtesy is keeping the cost on your own side.
Three Reductions
My practice rests on three reductions. Entering a conversation, a brief, a decision, I require myself to reduce three things to a single sentence each:
- The request: What exactly do I want from the other side — as a verb and a date?
- The criterion: What will we look at to know this work is good?
- The price: If we say no, or postpone, what do we lose?
If all three reduce to single sentences, the conversation is short and the work is long — which is how it should be. If they do not, the conversation grows long and the work grows short. This is the most neglected link in the chain of thought, structure, solution: thought that cannot be put into language cannot be put into structure either. Language is thought’s first prototype.
Politeness versus Courtesy
I separate politeness from courtesy. Politeness is form; courtesy is practical respect for the other person’s time and mind. With the most polite sentence a person can be stalled; with the clearest sentence a person is given a road. Whoever does not know the difference between being harsh and being clear believes that by avoiding clarity he is avoiding rudeness — when what he is avoiding is responsibility. Clarity does not require harshness; it requires courage. The courage to stand behind what you have said.
To measure an organisation’s culture of communication I do not look at its meetings; I look at whether, after the meeting, people know who will do what. If they know, the people in that organisation are showing each other courtesy — of the most expensive kind: by taking the trouble to be clear.