There is a strange ritual performed inside institutions.

Before naming a problem, we must soften it.

We begin by acknowledging how busy everyone is. We recognise the complexity of the environment. We thank people for their considerable efforts. We carefully establish that nobody is individually at fault.

Only then can we approach the small matter that the system is not working.

The failed process becomes an “opportunity for improvement.”

The missing decision becomes a need for “further clarification.”

The work nobody has completed becomes something we are “progressing collaboratively.”

A meeting is arranged to discuss how the next meeting should be structured. An email is drafted, softened, circulated and softened again. By the time the original problem is finally described, most of the available energy has already been consumed.

This is wasted entropy.

Not simply wasted time, but energy dispersed through a system until too little remains to produce meaningful change.

The work itself may be straightforward. A decision is required. A responsibility needs an owner. A process is failing and must be redesigned.

But the activation energy required to say this plainly can be enormous.

The people who identify problems are often expected to perform the additional labour of making those problems emotionally acceptable. They must be accurate, but not confronting. Urgent, but not demanding. Honest, but sufficiently reassuring that nobody feels implicated in the thing being described.

This emotional management is treated as professionalism.

Sometimes it is. Careful language can protect relationships, create psychological safety and prevent unnecessary blame. Not every failure requires accusation, and not every difficult conversation benefits from blunt force.

But softening can become its own form of institutional protection.

When every problem must be translated into language that produces no discomfort, the language begins to conceal the problem. The person raising it becomes responsible for both identifying the dysfunction and protecting everyone else from the emotional consequences of recognising it.

Eventually, more energy is spent managing the appearance of collaboration than collaborating.

The system remains unchanged, but everyone has been thanked for their contribution.

Good institutional communication should make action easier. It should clarify the issue, identify responsibility and allow the next decision to occur. If communication absorbs energy without producing movement, it is not reducing friction. It has become part of the friction.

Perhaps professionalism does not require us to remove every sharp edge from the truth.

Perhaps respect can include clarity.

A process can be failing without every person inside it being a failure. Naming that distinction should allow us to examine systems honestly, without collapsing into either blame or denial.

The purpose of language should not be to make dysfunction sound polite.

It should help us change it.