Plain language is a governance control.

Here is a sentence that has appeared, in some form, in a thousand steering committees: 'The initiative was deprioritized due to cross-functional dependency constraints impacting the transformation roadmap.' Nobody in the room can act on that sentence. That is not an accident of style. Functionally, it is a lock on a door — and leadership is on the wrong side of it.

We treat jargon as a cosmetic issue, something for the communications team to polish. It is not. It is a governance issue, because governance runs on understanding. Whatever the decision-maker cannot understand, the decision-maker cannot question, cannot measure, and cannot own. Every opaque sentence quietly transfers authority from the person accountable to the person fluent.

Fog is never neutral

Sometimes the transfer is innocent — specialists talking the way specialists talk. Sometimes it is not. Vague language is where weak plans hide. 'Leveraging synergies' survives scrutiny that 'we will merge two teams and cut one system' would never survive. A risk described as 'potential exposure in the identity domain' feels manageable; 'anyone who leaves the company keeps their access for a week' gets fixed by Friday. The fog is doing work. It is just not working for you.

This is why the rewrite rule matters: if a sentence needs a glossary, the sentence gets rewritten — not the reader trained. The burden of clarity belongs to the writer, because the writer is asking for a decision, and decisions belong to people who understand what they are deciding.

A control you can actually enforce

The beautiful thing about plain language as a control is that enforcement costs nothing. You do not need a tool or a committee. You need one question, asked kindly and relentlessly: 'Say that again, so that anyone at this table could repeat it.' Ask it every time. Within a quarter, proposals arrive clearer, risks arrive named, and the fog retreats to wherever fog goes.

Plain language will not make hard decisions easy. It will make them visible — which is the whole point of governing. A leader who insists on understanding is not slowing the organization down. They are the control that keeps everyone else honest.