by Serguey Shinder
The word was uplift. It appeared in nearly every commercial meeting I sat in during my first half year at that company, in sentences like whether the uplift applies to this client, or we can absorb the uplift this year. I nodded along, built a working definition out of context, and got on with my job.
My definition was that it meant the annual price increase. That is close enough to be usable and wrong in one specific place, because in that business the uplift was a margin added to a partner's cost before it reached the customer, and the annual increase was something else with its own name. I spent six months holding a model that was approximately right, which is far more dangerous than one that is obviously wrong, because approximately right never produces the moment of confusion that would make you ask.
There is a clock on this kind of thing and it runs against you. In week one, asking what a word means is free, and people rather enjoy explaining. By week nine, asking means admitting that you have been nodding for nine weeks, in meetings where decisions were made. By month six the admission has grown large enough that it feels easier to keep going, and so the cost of asking rises every day while the cost of not asking also rises every day. Both curves go the same way, which is why these things last for years.
When I finally asked, I did it carefully, and the careful framing turned out to matter more than I expected. I did not say I do not know what this means. I said can we check that we are all using this word the same way, because I want to make sure I am reading these figures correctly.
Two things came back. A colleague who had been there four years said quietly that she had never been completely sure either. And then two other people gave definitions that did not match each other, which meant that six months of decisions had been taken across a gap that nobody in the room knew was there.
The uncomfortable conclusion is about seniority. The more experienced you are, the more expensive your ignorance feels, so the longer you carry it, and the more it costs while you carry it, because you have become one of the people others calibrate against. Juniors ask constantly and are accurate within a month. That is not because they are braver. It is because asking is still free for them.
So I ask in the first week now, in writing, where it is on the record. And I have kept the phrasing, because it removes the confession and keeps the question, and about a third of the time it turns out I was not the only one in the room guessing.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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