CONTAGION: The Tyranny of Corporate Waffle

29 January 2026

In the latest edition of the Column we’re now calling Contagion, Dr Leandro Herrero argues that corporate waffle isn’t harmless. It’s a power tactic: it avoids accountability, protects hierarchy, and simulates action. It’s time we stop tolerating it. It’s not ‘annoying’, it’s toxic.

I know, I know. I’ve written about corporate jargon before. More than once. Yet here we are at the beginning of a new year, and corporate waffle isn’t just alive, it’s breeding.

And yes, AI hasn’t helped. It has industrialised it.

We now have a new content category: plausible-sounding verbal foam. The kind of language that looks like leadership from a distance and turns into nothing the moment you try to act on it. Merriam-Webster chose “slop” as the 2025 Word of the Year, referring to low-quality AI output. Fair enough. But in corporate life, “slop” has been around for decades — only now it has a turbocharger.

What’s changed recently is this: people have had enough. Not just the usual cynics in the cafeteria. I mean everyone. Frontline staff. Middle managers. Senior leaders. And especially in the UK, you can feel the mood: stop talking at us. Stop “aligning”, “leveraging”, “optimising”, “unlocking”, “accelerating”, “embedding”, “transforming”. Either say what you mean — or admit you don’t know what you mean.

Because when your New Year message promises to “synchronise strategy, operations and talent to accelerate performance, fuel growth and inspire a legacy of change”, nobody feels inspired. They feel anaesthetised.

Let me offer five recent examples, not because they are rare, but because they are painfully normal.

1) “Synchronising strategy, operations and talent to accelerate performance, fuel growth and inspire a legacy of change”

This beauty came from a major consultancy CEO’s address.

Let’s translate it: “We’re going to try to get our act together.” That’s it. That’s the whole message. But wrapped in verbal bubble wrap, it sounds strategic while saying nothing. And that is the point. Waffle is not accidental. It is protective.

What does “inspire a legacy of change” actually look like on a Tuesday morning? Nobody knows. And precisely because nobody knows, nobody can be held accountable.

2) “Leveraging synergistic solutions to drive transformational outcomes”

The phrase that launched a thousand eye-rolls. Yet it persists in corporate communications like a particularly stubborn stain. What people hear: “We’re going to do… something… with… other things?” As with the previous example, this vagueness is protecting the messenger. You can’t be held accountable for delivering “synergistic solutions” because no one actually knows what they are.

3) “Creating sustainable talent liquidity across key funnel segments”

This appeared in a Big Recruiting strategy document. Translation: “We want more candidates.” But “we want more candidates” is human language. Human language implies responsibility. It invites questions. It can be challenged. So instead, we get “talent liquidity”. As if people were oil.

This is not just bad writing. It reveals something deeper: leaders are increasingly talking about humans as a resource flow problem. And then they wonder why trust collapses.

4) “Moving from touchpoints to end-to-end customer journey optimisation”

This one became fashionable, and therefore inevitable. But it’s a Rorschach test. Ask ten people what it means and you’ll get ten different answers: faster service, better web journey, more empathy, fewer complaints, better training, a new CRM.

That is not strategy. It is a container. People pour into it whatever they want. And then we call the resulting confusion “misalignment”, “complexity”, “resistance”, or “execution failure” when, in reality, the failure started at the language level.

5) “Becoming an agile organisation to unlock innovation excellence”

This is the holy trinity of modern corporate religiosity: Agile. Innovation. Excellence. All sacred words. None operational.

I once asked a senior team what “becoming agile” meant in practice. Their answers ranged from: “faster decisions” to “sprints” to “new org design” to “culture change” to “a new IT platform”. They spent months chasing a phantom — and called it transformation. Let’s be honest: in many organisations, the purpose of “agile” is not agility. It is movement without clarity. My rule of thumb is that the more Agility the company professes, the less gazelle-like they are.

Why this matters (it’s not just annoying)

This is not a language problem. It is a behaviour problem. Corporate waffle is not simply a bad habit. It is a mechanism. It does three things extremely well:

1) It avoids accountability: If nothing is clear, nobody can be wrong.

2) It protects hierarchy: Only insiders are fluent in it. It becomes status.

3) It simulates action: You can produce a hundred slides of “transformation language” without changing a single behaviour.

And people sense this. Instinctively. The pandemic accelerated it. When your CEO speaks to you via Zoom from their kitchen, the stiff mahogany-boardroom voice sounds absurd. Younger professionals aren’t just bored by corporate language — they are suspicious of it. They read it as an intent to manage perception rather than reality. And that suspicion is often correct.

We must do better

This isn’t a call to dumb things down. Technical precision has its place. Medical teams need precise terminology. Engineers, pilots, lawyers — they all use specialised language that saves time and prevents errors because everyone knows exactly what terms mean.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about leaders who promise to “leverage core competencies to maximize stakeholder value” when they mean “we’ll use our strengths to keep customers happy.” We’re talking about HR announcements about “rightsizing” instead of honest conversations about redundancies.

The solution isn’t complex: say what you mean. If you’re making changes, explain what they are and why. If you’re setting direction, describe it concretely. If you’re asking for support, be clear about what you need.

I dislike definitions of ‘authenticity’, but I’ll make an exception here.  As one Cambridge academic put it recently: authentic leadership means “being the same person at work and at home, saying what you think, avoiding corporate jargon and impersonal mission statements.”

Could we make that our standard? Not because jargon is impolite, but because it’s ineffective. It slows teams down. It breeds cynicism. And in an age where trust is currency, it’s a luxury we can no longer afford.

PS1: If you can’t explain your strategy in human language, you probably don’t have one. The age of corporate waffle must end.

PS2: I am writing a new book: ‘Silent Tyrannies, Squatters in the Mind’. You won’t be surprised one of the tyrannies in the list is related to ‘language’.

PS3: Next time you have a relationship problem, here is the solution: “leverage synergistic emotional realignment to unlock relational excellence”.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is Chief Organizational Architect at The Chalfont Project, psychiatrist, author, and international speaker. For over 25 years, he and his team have transformed organizational cultures worldwide through his pioneering Viral Change™ methodology – where a social movement approach creates lasting change. Follow Dr Herrero on LinkedIn for his latest updates.