8 Comments
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Mark S. Carroll ✅'s avatar

This is one of those pieces that starts as a glossary and quietly becomes a map of how power, work, and accountability are shifting. The sass makes it readable, but the real value is how it surfaces what’s actually changing underneath the language.

Once you see terms like “judgment atrophy,” “governance theater,” and “strategic reservation” sitting next to each other, it’s hard to unsee the patterns. Fun on the surface, deeply useful in practice.

Jurgen Appelo's avatar

Indeed, that’s exactly what I found useful as well.

I had never heard of polycorporate professionals and portfolio careers, but they make so much sense in context.

Rainbow Roxy's avatar

This piece really made me think, seriously. The way you leveraged multiple AIs is so smart! I'm curious about that 'accountability gap' term. How do you even begin to regulte that legal vacuum when a chatbot messes up? It feels like a massive challenge for future legislation.

Ralf Berninger's avatar

That is Buzzword Bingo on a next level. :-)

But it also shows how fast vocabulary can explode without increasing clarity. I found it most valuable to re-engineer the terms with AI again, cluster them, and extract the core questions about work and organization underneath (autonomy vs. accountability, augmentation vs. deskilling, orchestration vs. execution).

So thank you very much for the raw data. :-)

Jurgen Appelo's avatar

Indeed, many consultants could die on this mountain of corporate jargon.

Happy it's useful, though. 🙂

Miles Hack's avatar

Deeply enjoyed many of the terms and will come back to them:)

It’s likely that these will be common-speak at some point in time. Our systems are so over-the-edge taxed that sentient silica is taking over the job & we’re left in the back row of the church still trying to learn Latin so we can be a part of the sermon lol

Jurgen Appelo's avatar

It's a reflection of the crazy world we live in, I suppose.