The Hidden Power of Jargon at Work
In many workplaces, jargon is treated as a nuisance — an opaque layer of language that excludes outsiders and obscures meaning. But what if jargon is not a flaw of communication, but one of its most powerful features?
A recent study by Ronald S. Burt (Bocconi University), together with Ray E. Reagans (MIT) and Donald D. Liu, turns this assumption on its head. Published in Sociological Science, the paper explores how teams develop their own linguistic shortcuts and how these accelerate both learning and performance.
From Coordination Problem to Linguistic Solution
The starting point is a familiar challenge: when individuals come together in a team, they must align not only their actions, but also their understanding. Language becomes the key infrastructure for this coordination.
Over time, however, that language changes. As the authors note, “team jargon naturally emerges through learning by doing.” Repeated interaction leads team members to replace long explanations with compact expressions — words that carry shared, implicit meaning. Jargon, in this sense, is not just shorthand. It is a repository of collective experience.
The Experiment: How Language Evolves Under Pressure
To test their ideas, the researchers conducted a large-scale online experiment involving 465 participants organized into 93 teams of five people. Each team was tasked with identifying a shared abstract symbol — known as a tangram — across individual sets. The catch: participants could only communicate via chat, and each round was time-constrained. Success depended entirely on how effectively teams could describe and agree on labels for the symbols.
The experiment lasted up to 15 rounds, allowing researchers to observe how communication evolved with experience. Teams were also placed in different communication structures (some more centralized, others more distributed), enabling the authors to isolate the role of language from that of network design.
In the early stages, communication was verbose and often inefficient. Participants used full sentences, mixing descriptive elements with clarifications. But over time, messages became shorter, more consistent and increasingly composed of content words — nouns, verbs and adjectives carrying direct meaning.
As the authors explain, “content words convey meaning, whereas function words… clarify relationships among them.” With experience, teams relied less on grammatical scaffolding and more on shared understanding.
By later stages, communication often resembled a list of labels — minimalist, but highly effective.
Why Jargon Improves Results
This transformation is captured by the concept of jargonization, defined as the proportion of content words in team communication. The experiments show a steady increase in jargonization over time, alongside a reduction in message length, frequency and duration. In other words, teams don’t just talk less — they talk better. More importantly, this linguistic evolution has measurable effects on performance.
The core mechanism is clarity. Jargon works because it is both explicit and mutually understood, which reduces ambiguity in communication. As the authors put it, it is “explicit and collectively understood among team members, reducing ambiguity.”
This reduction in ambiguity has two key consequences. First, it accelerates the development of a shared language. Teams converge more quickly on stable meanings and labels. Second, it improves performance. With fewer misunderstandings, coordination becomes smoother and decisions more accurate.
Jargon then strengthens both effects at once: teams that use more jargon learn faster and perform better.
A Different Kind of Coordination and the Limits of Shared Language
Jargon operates differently from other coordination mechanisms. Communication networks, for example, involve trade-offs. Highly connected teams develop shared language quickly but gain less from it in terms of performance. Less connected teams show the opposite pattern. Jargon breaks this trade-off. It enhances both the speed of language development and its effectiveness, making it a uniquely powerful tool for coordination.
Yet the story does not end there. Jargon also has a darker side. Because it encodes tacit knowledge, it can create barriers for outsiders and newcomers. It can signal belonging — but also exclusion. In some contexts, it may even reinforce power dynamics, giving those fluent in the language an advantage over others. The same mechanism that enables fast coordination within teams can therefore hinder communication across them.
Rethinking How Teams Communicate
Language is not just a medium of communication — it is a central component of how teams learn and perform. Jargon, often dismissed as unnecessary complexity, is in fact a sign that a team is functioning at a high level of alignment. It reflects shared experience, mutual understanding and efficient coordination. The challenge for organizations is not to eliminate jargon, but to manage it, leveraging its benefits while preventing it from becoming a barrier.
