“Is it integración or implementación this time?”
“Last week it was puesta en marcha, Ingrid.”
“Great. So we are starting over. Again.”
Ingrid stares at the transcript of the call, watching the third variant of ‘onboarding’ flicker across the screen like a bad omen. She can see the client’s face through the webcam-a subtle narrowing of the eyes, a slight tilt of the head. It is the universal sign of a person who has lost the thread.
They were talking about the software setup. Now, they are talking about what they are talking about. The next will be spent recalibrating the vocabulary of the room, a task that has already been performed twice this month.
It is rarely the smooth bridge we are promised in brochures; more often, it is a series of toll booths where the currency is time and the tax is confusion. We operate under the polite fiction that language is a stable container for meaning. In reality, language in a business context is a leaky vessel that requires constant patching.
The Anatomy of Communication Failure
The glossary is a cemetery of intentions.
It is a document created with great fanfare during the “onboarding” (or integración, or puesta en marcha) and then immediately interred in a subfolder where it is never seen again.